I’ve been on a book-buying spree as I’ve been getting ready to leave Macedonia. On one of my bookhunts I got handed a pamphlet in defense of Cyrillic. I thought I would translate it and analyze it in service of the broader point of Macedonian identity and the somewhat problematic ways it is defended in the public sphere.
The pamphlet goes as follows
Го чувам своето - додека пишувам на кирилица постојам!
I protect what is mine - as long as I write in Cyrillic, I exist!
Македонски се пишува со кирилица
Macedonian is written with Cyrillic
Јзикот го зачувавме. Да ја зачуваме и кирилицата. Зашто, јазик без писмо нема. А писмото најдобро со употреба се чува. Иако е создадена пред повеќе од 10 века, токму тука на нашиве простори, во земјата на древни цивилизации, со прегорната работа на светите Кирил и Методиј и со посветеноста на Епископот Охридски Свети Климент, како и многубројните ученици и мисионери, кои нивното дело го продолжиле, се чини дека во временоското и просторното траење, кирилицата по малку неправедно како да се подзаборава. Поточно, сета нејзина убавина, инспиративност и сликовност, со се’ поретката употреба, како да потклекнува.
We protected our language. Let’s protect Cyrillic. Because a language does not exist without writing. And writing is best protected with practice. Even though it was created more than 10 centuries ago, right here on our territory, in a land of ancient civilizations, with the blazing work of Saints Cyril and Methodius and with the holiness of the St. Kliment of Ohrid Episcopy, as well as the numerous scholars and missionaries who continued their work, it seems, in its duration through time and space, as if Cyrillic is being somewhat unjustly forgotten. More precisely, it is as if, despite all of its beauty, inspiration and vividness, it is falling to its knees with ever rarer use.
Кирилицата е убава…
Cyrillic is beautiful
Еднакво убава, испишана со мајсторската рака врз пергаментот по кој се лизга перото, или со техниките на новите мајстори, сместени на тастатурите на компутерот. Со спојување и комбинирање на 31 буква од нашата азбука, можат да се изразат сите зборови на овој свет. Само со зачувување и со користење на кирилицата, може да се изрази сета нејзина убавина, но и да се зачуваат колективниот идентитет и индивидуалното определување на секој од нас. И затоа: додека пишуваме кирилица - постоиме. Се’ додека ја користиме кирилицата, сето она што е најблагодородно и највредно во нашето колетивно и индивидуално битие ќе биде зачувано. Зачувано од заборав и вредно за траење. А постои само она што трае.
Singularly beautiful, written by a master hand over a parchment with a gliding quill, or with the the techniques of the new masters, situated on the keyboards of a computer. With the coordination and combination of the 31 characters of our alphabet, all the words in the world can be expressed. Only by protecting and using Cyrillic can we express all of its beauty, but also only in that way can we protect our collective identity and the unique qualities of all of us. And thus, as long as we write in Cyrillic, we exist. As long as we use Cyrillic, all that which is noble and most precious in our collective and individual existence will be protected. Protected from loss and worthy for eternity. And only that which lasts exists.
Кирилицата постои и трае.
Cyrillic exists and lasts.
И затоа своето име пишуај го со кирилица… или името на својата земја… или името на својата мајка… на својата љубов… или имињата на своите желби и тајни. Обиди се да замислиш голема светлечка реклама испишана со кирилица како се “смешка” преплавена со светлоста на новиот ден и новото доба…Обиди се да погледнеш на табличките во улицата на твоето детство и ќе видиш убава, чиста и читка табла, испишана со убава, чиста и читка кирилица. Сети се на својата прва љубов, на првиот изговорен збор, на својата прва напишана буква, на своето прво писмо, на првата прочитана или напишана книга… и ќе видиш дека се’ е поврзано со твоето прво писмо.
And for that reason, write your name in Cyrillic… or the name of your country… or the name of your mother… of your love… or the names of your desires and secrets. Try to imagine a great luminous advertisement written in Cyrllic and how it would laugh awash in the light of a new day and a new age… Try to recall the signs on the street of your childhood and you will see a beautiful, clean, and readable sign, written in beautiful, clean, readable Cyrillic. Remember your first love, your first pronounced word, your first written character, your first letter, your first read or written book… and you will see that everything is connected with your first form of writing.
Богатството е во разновидноста. А кирилицата нуди толку многу разнолики можности за примена и за унапредување. Да ги откриваш сите нејзини волшепства и да бидеш уверен дека во рацете држиш силно и моќно оружје на модерното доба, кое го надахнува нашето постоење.
There is wealth in diversity. But Cyrillic offers all the various possibilities for use and progress. Discover all of her magic and be sure that in your hands you carry a strong and powerful weapon for the modern age, which defends our existence.
И се’ додека пишуваме кирилица, ќе постоиме!
As long as we write in Cyrillic, we will exist!
Писмото
Writing
Писмото е запишување на јазикот. Тоа е средство за просторна и временска комуникација. Писмото е припадност кон колективниот идентитет и индивидуалното определување. Вредноста на писмото се мери со систем на знаци, кои претставуваат елементи на говорниот јазик. А нашиот јазик - македонскиот, е јужнословенски јазик со една од најстарите книжевно-јазички традиции. И се пишува со кирилица.
Writing is the method of taking down a language. It is the means of spatial and temporal communication. Writing is belonging to a collective identity and individual quality. The value of writing is measured in a system of signs, which present elements of the spoken language. And our language, Macedonian, is a South Slavic language with one of the oldest written-language traditions. And it is written in Cyrillic.
Кирилицата е едно од најстарите и најубавите писма. Јазикот го зачувавме. Да ја зачуваме и кирилицата. Зашто јазик без писмо - нема. А писмото најдобро со употреба се чува. Македонски се пишува со кирилица.
Cyrillic is one of the oldest and most beautiful writing systems. We protected our language. Let us protect Cyrillic too. Because a language without writing doesn’t exist. And writing is best protected with use. Macedonian is written in Cyrillic.
It is not at all true that a language does not exist without a writing system. The vast majority of the world’s languages are unwritten. At a certain point in history, all of the ancestors of today’s spoken languages were unwritten. Languages have existed for thousands of years, changing but maintaining a core continuity, without the aid of a written norm to maintain them. Written language norms and the use of language in text are both well worth studying, but they do not make up the whole of linguistics and certainly not the whole of the phenomenon of language. The declaration that a language does not exist without a writing system is hyperbole that does not face up to scientific scrutiny.
It is true, however, that practice is the best protection for a writing system. Languages can lose writing systems. The use of Chinese characters in Korean, for example, is dying out even though they are taught in school, because people have grown accustomed to just writing using the Korean alphabet, which is sufficient (and actually quite well-designed) for expressing the standard language in text.
Old English itself lost its own varient of the Latin alphabet, which was quite different from what we use to write modern English today. With the Norman invasions, French became the language of the court and the aristocrats, Old English mostly ceased to be used for official purposes, and the Old English variant of the Latin alphabet faded out of use. By the time English began to be written again (traditionally dated from Chaucer, whose language falls into the Middle English period), it was using French orthographic norms due to the longterm dominance of French. So the brochure is right to point out that it is possible to lose a written form if it falls into disuse. This does not necessarily affect the language though. While English changed, it did not cease to be spoken, and when it returned into official use in England, the language’s new orthography did not obliterate its spoken continuity. English changed enormously under the influence of French, but it did not disappear.
Macedonian is nowhere near that point yet, though. People may not write their text messages or Facebook profiles in Cyrillic, but they still write their journals and classnotes in it. Macedonian books are published in Cyrillic—no exceptions. Vacillations occur over how to properly Romanize Macedonian, not how to properly Cyrillicize it.
All the words in the world certainly cannot be expressed with Macedonian Cyrillic. That is impossible to even say with a straight face. Macedonian Cyrillic letters are well designed to express the sounds of the Macedonian language and no other. You do not have to look far to see this—Macedonian newspapers writing articles about Albanian politicians or other public figures in this country write their names in Cyrillic along with the rest of the article. Albanian, however, is written in Latin, and the two alphabets do not easily convert between one another. The Albanian sounds th (like the English “th” as in “thick”), dh (like the English “th” as in “this”), l (like the British English “l” in “leutenant”), and y (does not exist in English, like German ü) lose their distinctiveness in Cyrillic and thus Albanian names are given an incorrect, approximate Macedonian pronunciation. I run into this same issue when I’m teaching students English: if I want to write the pronunciation of a new word for students in Cyrillic, I have to take into account the fact that I cannot easily write the difference between the vowels in bead and bid or the vowels in bad and bed in Cyrillic.
This is not a problem unique to Macedonian. I can’t easily approximate Macedonian pronunciation using English’s version of the Latin alphabet. Every language’s writing system is designed to represent that language and will face problems when applied to another. Sometimes you can make adjustments by reshuffling the phonetic values of the characters, by adding diacritics, or by allowing two characters combined together to represent one sound. This was how the Latin alphabet was adapted to all the languages of Western Europe. It is also how Cyrillic was adapted to many of the indigenous languages of Siberia by the Soviets. But if you want to write “all the words in the world,” you need a writing system designed to do that, one that has a character (or a way of modifying a character) to accommodate every possible sound a human language can utilize as distinctive.
As a matter of fact, such a writing system exists: it’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet and linguists use it to describe the sounds of languages in a way that can be universally understood. By my count, the IPA features about 75 letters for consonant sounds that are made with the lungs, another 5 letters for consonant sounds that are made by clicking your tongue (heavily featured in Southern African languages), 29 letters for vowel sounds, and 62 additional diacritics to modify all these letters.
It takes a lot of characters to write all the words in the world. English’s writing system isn’t up to it and neither is Macedonian’s. What I think they were intending to say is that there is no need to switch to Latin in the middle of a Cyrillic sentence to represent some borrowed word, which sometimes occurs in the writing of young Macedonians, especially when the word is a recent English or French borrowing. Indeed, these words can be approximated in Cyrillic without doing too much damange to the comprehension of an educated reader. But, again, it is hyperbole to say that Macedonian is suitable for the whole world’s vocabulary.
While the beauty of Cyrillic is realtive (I find it to be quite beautiful), it takes a real stretch to say that it is an old writing system. Cyrillic began to be used in the mid-900s. In comparison, Brahmi came into use 1200 years previous to that, Latin 1600 years previous, Olmec (in Mexico) roughly 1800 years previous, and Chinese 2100 years previous. Cyrillic is a young script. This is neither here nor there in terms of its effectiveness in conveying Macedonian (in fact, general Cyrillic is quite well suited to express the sounds of your average Slavic language), but if you base your entire rhetoric about the ‘worth’ of a language on the age of its writing system, you have very stiff competition for the top prize from all over the world.
In all, this pamphlet expresses genuine and understandable concern about the use of Cyrillic in the public space, with a deeper underlying concern about Macedonian identity and the threats against it originating mostly from Greece and Bulgaria. In trying to assuage the concern, however, the pamphlet swerves from and occasionally strays totally off the path of factual accuracy. This is a general problem in Macedonian public rhetoric about the language, where the very real and very legitimate feeling of distress in having someone from outside your own country tell you that you don’t exist, you don’t speak a real language, and you’re not allowed to use your own name for yourself is channeled into furious argument for easily disprovable positions, like that modern Slavic Macedonian is descendent from Ancient Macedonian. Ancient Macedonian’s alignment in the Indo-European tree of languages remains difficult to prove (Greeks claim it, but the evidence remains inconclusive). However, it is without a doubt that Ancient Macedonian was not Slavic. Sadly, the popularity of factual distortions like this among some ends up damaging the credibility of all. Macedonian scholars and politicians who are making legitimate arguments supported by evidence and scientific consensus find themselves tarred with the brush of irrational nationalism preemptively.
As I said in a previous post, I support the general aim of this pamphlet. I wish young Macedonians used Cyrillic more often. I think the Latin rendering of Macedonian, especially when you neglect to use diacritics, doesn’t do the language justice. Hyperbole is emotionally effective and thus may be said to serve the cause of greater respect for Macedonian Cyrillic. But as I hope I’ve illustrated, it is damaging in the long term both to the cause of Cyrillic and to the broader cause of defending Macedonian identity.
имало бранови и мирно море
а сега што?
Do you ever half-hear a song, think that you really dig it, and finally track it down only to find out that the real song is not nearly as good as the sketch of it you’d drawn in your head?
I’m not a big consumer of Top-40s pop music. It’s hard for me to identify anything consistent about my tastes—they’re all over the map. But the scattered centers make for fairly narrow little circles. I like furious melodic punk (like Small Brown Bike), complex and organic electronica (like Múm), political and underground hip-hop (like Immortal Technique), bombastic indie rock (like Wolf Parade), and apocalyptic post-rock (like 65daysofstatic).
Okay, so maybe we can generalize afterall. I like loud and agressive stuff. Top-40s usually doesn’t fit that bill. Which isn’t to say it never happens. I like it when Beyoncé gets pissed, for example. In any case, even if most pop music falls outside my tightly circumscribed preferences, I can tolerate it. I can get with the mood of a party. But I don’t seek the stuff out.
That was pretty much the end of the story when I was in college. I didn’t listen to the radio, the places I spent most of my time in only played stuff popular with the black-framed glasses crew, and my friends’ blowouts usually had weird playlists. I didn’t have a pop consciousness. I never bothered to read the charts.
This is pretty much the opposite of Macedonians, who are hyperliterate about American pop music. They are voracious. Their knowledge of my own country’s musical exports not only makes mincemeat out of my own, but puts more pop-aware Americans to the test too. They know no boundaries when it comes to era, which results in bewildering setlists for the coverbands that play in bars all over Skopje. They don’t seem particularly interested in American rap, but that’s the only limitation. Otherwise, their radios play our songs.
Only a lot more often and everywhere. I have never felt so awash in the latest hits as I have in Macedonia. I’ve lived in two other foreign countries, but Germany’s music scene was more closely intergrated into continental Europe trends (lots of excruciatingly boring dance music) and Japan’s music scene was its own entity, dominated by interchangeable Idols singing wide-eyed innocent and neon-technicolor J-pop at an irritatingly high pitch. Macedonia’s radio stations take the current British and American hits, reshuffle the rankings, and then play those songs into a bloody pulp.
Or maybe it just seems that way because all of the stores and cafés are tuned into similar stations. You can’t go far on the streets of Skopje without hearing music, whether it’s native turbofolk or imported pop music. The turbofolk I have no sense for—I don’t know the canon, I don’t know the stars, and I can’t understand the lyrics unless I concentrate. But when it comes to American pop music, Macedonia has put me in much closer contact with it than I have had at home.
So this is how I caught myself really liking this song as it blared from the speakers at the gym. I’d been taking a break between sets for just long enough to hear the chorus, then I did another set and lost track of the song, only to have the chorus come back into focus again as I finished. I had just a skeletal impression of the song and the chorus to go by, but that was enough to hook me.
I listened for the station anouncement listing off the songs they’d just played, but it was in rapid Macedonian and I was a little confused. I thought I heard that it was a collaboration between Lady Gaga and Rihanna called “Paparazzi.”
Lady Gaga I hate. It’s like she took a trashy, drugged-up celebrity trainwreck scenario and made that her entire persona. The hipsters appear to appreciate the post-modernity of all of it, but… I mean, Jesus, woman, put some goddamn pants on.
Rihanna though, that was interesting. The chorus has this hurt, fake-cheerful desperation to it, with a sinister echo to the drumline and cold electronica backing it up. All I could hear was “something something would you love me? Papa-paparazzi.”
It made me wonder if this song had come out in the wake of her domestic assault, when she not only went through a severe beating at the hands of her boyfriend and fellow-star Chris Brown, but then had the police photos of her stomach-turning injuries leaked to the newspapers. So immediately after going through the physical violence of Brown’s assault, she had to endure the emotional violence of the whole American media obsessing over her response. As far as I know, she decided not to press charges and is back with Brown again.
I don’t know what to think about that. That is not a cop-out way of saying that I disapprove: I mean literally that I don’t know what I think about it. I’ve read articles arguing that condemning victims of domestic violence for returning to their abusive partners unfairly shifts the focus onto their actions, rather than the original violence of their abusers, and may even make it harder for them to pull themselves out. I’ve also read articles arguing that refusing to hold women responsible for ensuring their own physical and emotional safety by leaving abusive partners is a perverse sort of infantilization that ends up putting more women at risk. I do not know what to think.
I once, without intending to, caused a friend distress with my tone-deaf response when she confessed complex feelings about a previous relationship in which a man abused and raped her. I was trying to show that I had invested a lot of thought into the broader issues she was facing and that I took them seriously, but I neglected some basic empathy. Her boyfriend had to call me out on it in private. I have rarely felt so ashamed of myself. To this day I can’t really think about her without intense and painful feelings of embarrassment rushing up. That makes up part of my ambivalence.
Back to the song, I thought it was Rihanna singing this manic, menacing ballad about the paparazzi. From the few words I picked out, I guessed that the theme of the lyrics was that her love was compromised by this all-encircling prison of flashblubs and tabloid screeds. Paired with her real-life context, it struck me as beautiful and poignant. A private relationship twisted into a public spectacle, broken and rearranged as it was batted from the leaked photo to the op-ed. Or maybe it was already broken before the paparazzi even arrived, cracked by the pressure of merely anticipating them. Having Lady Gaga’s performed meta-celebraty there in the collaboration just added more layers of interesting complexity. I was hoping I’d stumbled on a piece of pop art.
As it turns out, the song is called “Paparazzi,” it’s by Lady Gaga only, and it sucks. The lyrics irritate me and the chorus is ruined now that I can hear what she’s actually talking about: she’s going to stalk her love interest like the paparazzi. And wear dumb clothes while she does it.
Oh, okay. Never mind then.
If I listen to just the chorus and let my attention wander, kind of like letting your vision go soft by looking into a distance that isn’t there, I can hear the emotional contours of the song I wish this was.
i’m your biggest fan
i’ll follow you until you love me, paparazzi