Believe me, Boris, if we were inventing English now, we wouldn't do it the
way it is (although we would, of course, do it differently from American
English).
Bulgarian has the advantage of using an alphabet to suit the spoken language
which was custom-designed by Byzantine Greek missionaries. Until then there
was no Slav written language (whether Bulgarian, Polish, Russian etc), so
they were starting with a clean sheet (of parchment). The missionaries
needed a written language to translate the Bible, and started with their own
Greek alphabet as the basis, with characters added (invented or borrowed
from Hebrew) for sounds in Bulgarian which were not present in Greek.
That's why the alphabet contains characters to suit every sound.
And that is why Polish has so many 'sz' and 'cz' type combinations - because
the missionaries evangelising in that area were from Rome, not Byzantine,
and used the Latin alphabet as their starting point, adding a z to modify
the pronunciation of letters existing in Latin to suit sounds in Polish.
Worse, there was no 'v' in Latin, which results in some awful looking words
to a native English speaker - wszystko jest możliwe, for example (which
might even look awful to a native Bulgarian speaker). For this I blame the
Irish. Specifically St Virgil (Feargal) Bishop of Salzburg!
Piers
-----Original Message-----
From: Willie Wonka [mailto:alienspecimen@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 27 May 2011 01:48
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [OM] [OT] In depth SUV scientific based analysis (was TotallyOT
--snip
The Bulgarian alphabet, at times wrongly called Cyrillic, has enough letters
to reproduce all the sounds in the language and you never ever need to learn
spelling. Everything is spelled the way it is pronounced. Why dont you add
additional letters to the English alphabet (for example), make everything
easy, really
--snip
--
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