Up, Down and Sideways

[Richmond]

On 14/12/13 18:43, Dr. Hawkins wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am currently working on a project for some Professors who are having a
>> problem with Old Church Slavonic
>> (come to think of things, Old Church Slavonic is fairly problematic in its
>> own right).
> Nothing like the the problems there would be *without* Old Church Slavonic :)
>
>

Let's be rude, crude and direct:

Old Church Slavonic may have originated in 2 ways:

1. Derived from Bishop Ulfilas's Gothic alphabet.

2. Cooked up by a disciple of Cyril and Methodius.

Either way, this happened at the 'great schism' between the Western 
Christian Church
and the Eastern Christian Church; and anybody, with a bit of thought, 
can see that this was done
to divide the Catholics from the Orthodox still further.

Now, as a semi-Christian, I don't have a great deal of time for 
Christian Church heirarchies,
but the nastinesses that subsequently took place as a result of that 
split had got nothing to
do with anything Christianity's putative founder may or may not have 
said. The Crusades saw
Catholic knights slaughtering 'heretic' Orthodox people who they 
regarded as worse than Muslims.

Old Church Slavonic was largely used for writing down religious 
documents of various sorts
designed (like a very large number of religious documents the world 
over) to stop people
using the brains that God (?) had given them and follow, sheeplike, the 
anti-life, anti-joy
aescetic stuff peddled by Paul of Tarsus and a load of shrivelled types 
who sat on the tops of pillars.

As far as Old Church Slavonic is regarded as of linguistic interest, and 
how from it came all the Eastern Slavic languages and their systems of 
writing, that's OK; but when it comes for why the writing system was
designed (after Glagolitic turned out to be a complete turkey because it 
took donkey's ages to write),
it probably caused more problems than it solved.

Here's a question I kept hearing in Israel in 1980: "Why did the early 
Zionists" decide to use
the Aramaic alphabet to write modern Hebrew instead of a modified Latin one?

Here's another point: Mustapha Kemal knew very well what he was doing 
when he made the Turks give up the Arabic alphabet for a modified alphabet.

And, further to that: Lenin knew what he was doing when he made all the 
Turkic republics in the Soviet Union start using Latin writing systems, 
just as Stalin knew what he was doing when he forced them to switch from 
Latin to Cyrillic.

Notwithstanding that; history is irreversible, and loads of students and 
academics make their bread and cheese with Old Church Slavonic (well, 
there we are, it's doing some good at last) and need to type the blessed 
language comparatively easily; and, here's Richmond falling foul of his 
modifier keys.

I am tending towards using the CTRL key; but am still not completely 
sure if a rawKeyUp trapped by Livecode
will stop another sort of command happening in Windows or Linux: for 
instance, I don't want, when my end-user presses CTRL + P to get a 
"combining П" and ends up making his/her printer do something.

Richmond.

P.S. Pinot Noir 2011.