demetrius

I'm not sure the quoted statement is true. Proofreading like "point to problems in the text", if you fix the problems yourself and don't copy-paste the solutions given to you, should still be safe, shouldn't it? So, human-written text should not be falsely flagged if you use LLM for proofreading.

And if you copy-paste the answers from LLM, I think it's only fair the end result gets flagged. You're not writing it yourself.

> Cyrillic scripts like Russian and Ukrainian are supported via GNU Unifont, along with Arabic and Hebrew.

So much for proper typography...

I guess it's still useful for an ocasional Cyrillic word inside an English text, but reading a book set in GNU Unifont is not going to be a pleasurable experience.

No, it's not.

You're confusing a language (the way people speak) and a literary tradition (the way people write).

When ancestors of Russians borrowed Church Slavonic writing, they were already speaking another Slavic language, Old East Slavic. For the time being, they were writing in one language (Church Slavonic) and speaking another language (Old East Slavic). Later, they dropped Church Slavonic and started writing what they spoke.

Modern Russian language is a continuation of Old East Slavic, not of Old Church Slavonic.

This is the scholarly consensus.

Our Belarusian teacher actually ш/т wrote it like that, I got it from her. It’s not very common in Belarus, either.

I think the real strongholds of this style are Serbia and [North] Macedonia. They even underline и and write a line over п (they can do this since they use ј instead of й).

I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.

Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.

So what? Old French Bretaigne referred both to Britain and Brittany, Old French Russie referred to both Russia (maybe, haven't done research on this) and Ruthenia.

But we're not speaking Old French, we're speaking 21-century English. In 21-century English, Russia ≠ Ruthenia, Brittany ≠ Britain.

The quote you've provided is irrelevant.

> But adopting Latin script would help Ukraine "move away" from Russia even more.

That might be true, but Latin script is not a neutral option. It has its own problematic history in Ukraine.

Historically, Latin script for Ukrainian (abecadło) was associated with polonisation. While Ukrainian-Polish relationships are quite good now, this history is not easy to discard. This history still affects politics (the recent debacle with the Order of the White Eagle is a good example).

So, I don’t see Ukrainian ditching Cyrillic anytime soon.

I do, however, expect Ukrainians to eventually develop their own style of Cyrillic. I totally expect Ukrainian fonts to drift away from Russian ones. There are already steps in that direction. E.g. the font e-Ukraine Head seen on many official websites introduces Latin-like к (curiously, that’s how my great grandmother used to write к — she went to a Polish school in Western Ukraine) and ȣ-like у. I expect to see more of that. There’s a enough of interest in a distinct visual identity for Ukrainian, and there are talented designers working on it.

> Ukraine is the Russia (882-1237)

Only in the world where Britain is in France.

Ukraine traces its lineage to Ruthenia (Русь), not to Russia (Росія). These words are related etymologically, but so are Brittany and Britain, or Cornouaille and Cornwall. You can’t just treat Ruthenia and Russia as the same thing — just like you can’t treat Brittany and Britain as the same thing.

Cyrillic didn't prevent Bulgaria from joining EU, why should it be a problem for Ukraine?

Oh come on, the term itself is political. It has always been political everywhere: same in Russia and Ukraine.

You can't "politically charge" a term that has always been political. The concept of "native language" is 100% political, always.

As for "mother tongue", it has the same problems and more. "Mother tongue" brings in an implicit idea of 'less prestigious ethnic language', "mother tongue" as opposed to "father tongue" (even in ex-USSR: e.g. you would say that Belarusian is "матчына мова", but you'd never say that Russian is someone's "матчына мова" even when speaking about ethnic Russians — because Russian carries higher prestige, so can't be "mother's" language)

We should not try to replace "native language" with a different term, we should avoid it in serious discussions. Instead, we can speak of proficiency, parents passing language to children, the role of education, the ethnic language, the national language, etc.

And if we do so, we see that there's nothing wrong or unusual about Ukrainian.

If anything, it's huge languages like Russian or English that are unusual. They're different from 99% languages of the world. After all, bilinguals are more common than monolinguals. It's Russian that is a weird outlier, not Ukrainian.

"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.)

These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once.

But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them.

So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.

The problem is, most of these bindings are out-of-date. Delphi from 2012, Basic from 2002, D from 2016. wxRuby is a dead link. wxAda was already dead in 2009, as the discussion I can google suggests.

So, if you use wxWidgets, you probably have to use either C++ or Python version, others are unlikely to be supported.

It kinda is? Most Classical Chinese and Egyptian words follow the principle "deficient phonetic + semantic part", it's just that Chinese characters are split into neat squares because most Classical Chinese words are exactly one syllable long. But the general principle is similar enough.

Rhyme dictionaries describe Middle Chinese, not Old Chinese. Old Chinese involves much more guesswork.