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.
> And if you copy-paste the answers from LLF, I think it's only fair the end result gets flagged. You're not writing it yourself.
I wonder if it would even get flagged in that case, because wouldn't the probability distribution of a token when the LLM is suggesting an edit to your writing be different than the distribution of that token once it is in the context of the text it's editing?
I don't even ask LLMs to go that far. Tell me if I've made a spelling, punctuation, or grammatical error, period. Don't rewrite a thing, because LLMs suck at that.
> 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.
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.
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.
>I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them
Having studied Russian in college, I assumed that all Cyrillic script included a line over the т, because otherwise readability goes to hell. Is my impression here based on (a) an opinion of my Russian prof expressed as a universal rule or (b) a thing that's universal in Russian specifically, but not Belarusian Cyrillic or other similar contexts, or... something else?
I'm inferring from your post that you are a native user of Cyrillic who has also learned English. I'm the reverse (well, at least I took Russian in college; I was never fluent then and remember almost nothing now). Something interesting happened to my cohort of Russian learners back then, and I wonder if it's common for folks going the other way.
After we got comfortable with writing Russian in cursive, we found that Cyrillic letters worked their way into our English script. Often, we wouldn't even notice, even when reviewing our notes later. I discovered I'd done this when I loaned some political science notes to a friend, and he couldn't read them because I'd unconsciously mixed Cyrillic and English script. I could read them fine, and so could my Russian-class friends.
We mentioned this to our Russian prof, and he laughed and said it happened to people every year, but he could never figure out who would be prone to it. Sometimes it was top students; sometimes it was people who were struggling.
(It was in this era that I ended up pretty much abandoning cursive, because Cyrillic never crept into my printed handwriting. 35 years later, my cursive is abysmal.)
Did you end up mixing script in your native handwriting inadvertently?
not op, but from my experience overlined ts are a thing from a bygone era I'm afraid. my parents sometimes do it, but I don't know anybody under 30 who would write it this way. on the other hand I do sometimes see it written like a print т.
what you said about mixing up cursives is really interesting! I think the only case where I mix up mine is when writing a p instead of an р (the russian version typically doesn't have a loop).
Interesting. I think this style completely died out in Russia, I wasn't taught it and never really seen it outside of some old letters and documents. Interesting to hear it survived in Belarus
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 always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them
I used to do it as well! But I gave up on it for the same reasons I described in the article: impaired working memory.
> лишили лилии
That’s a tough one, but I think it’s possible to make it legible with careful choice of spacing to indicate the groups: the distance between the strokes within a letter should be noticeably smaller than the distance between letters.
> I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.
I also like this variant of ∂, though I eventually switched to the version with a descender. It doesn’t annoy me because it introduces only a short pen lift.
> 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 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.
> During its existence, Kievan Rus' was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus'",[21] or the "Rus' land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus' being derived from the ethnonym Роусь, Rusĭ (Medieval Greek: Ῥῶς, romanized: Rhos; Arabic: الروس, romanized: ar-Rūs), in Greek as Ῥωσία, Rhosia, in Old French as Russie, Rossie, in Latin as Rusia or Russia (with local German spelling variants Ruscia and Ruzzia), and from the 12th century also as Ruthenia or Rutenia.[22][23]
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.
"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.
I grew up in southern Germany, speaking the local dialect. As a young adult, I thought I could speak accent free German. I couldn't have been more wrong. Many people in Hamburg and Berlin rightfully guessed that I'm from Bavaria. Closely related languages and dialects exist in a continuum ((Max Weinreich: "a language is a dialect with an army an a navy"). Many people in Ukraine spoke and speak "surzhyk", depending on the political climate, they could claim to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Then Russian and Ukrainian, together with Belarusian form a dialect continuum. You can easily understand you neighboring village, but it gets harder and harder, the further you are apart until there's very little mutual intelligibility.
I grew up in the east of lithuania, mostly hearing polish and russian in my early years, and then also lithuanian to a smaller degree.
I eventually managed to separate the languages proper but I clearly see how the languages are are not a discrete classification.
Like, lithuanian polish and lithuanian russian are similar, but polish polish is further away phonetically.
Lithuanian has weird phonetics but the underlying grammar is very close to slavic languages.
English is much further away on the spectrum but why are sentence intonations (irony
, question, etc) are still strangely compatible with languages from other branches of the language tree..?
Conclusion: strict language separation is a political construct not a natural thing.
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.
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.
LibreOffice Calc has an option to force English function names regardless of the current localization. I guess Excel should have something similar, too¹.
Fun fact: in European and Brazilian Portuguese, the same function names can refer to different things. European SUBSTITUIR² is REPLACE (Brazilian MUDAR), Brazilian SUBSTITUIR³ is SUBSTITUTE (European SUBST).
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.
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.