AHC: Have the English Language use the Cyrillic Alphabet

But English shifted from old Germanic runes to Anglo-Frisian runes, and then to Latin letters, and then to semi-
French spelling, so shifts in orthography have occurred from time to time. Perhaps all of them brought benefits to the state.

In this case, it is also easy to see some of the phonemic spelling reformers of the early 20th century use Cyrillic instead of Latin letters, since the Cyrillic letters could be seen as pure and untainted with current English-language peculiarities.
 
But English shifted from old Germanic runes to Anglo-Frisian runes, and then to Latin letters, and then to semi-
French spelling, so shifts in orthography have occurred from time to time. Perhaps all of them brought benefits to the state.

In this case, it is also easy to see some of the phonemic spelling reformers of the early 20th century use Cyrillic instead of Latin letters, since the Cyrillic letters could be seen as pure and untainted with current English-language peculiarities.
The longer a particular writing system is established the greater the need to change it will have to be. What benefit would using Cyrillic grant English that Latin doesn't? Bearing in mind the failed attempts to reform English spelling over the last 2 centuries.
 
The longer a particular writing system is established the greater the need to change it will have to be. What benefit would using Cyrillic grant English that Latin doesn't? Bearing in mind the failed attempts to reform English spelling over the last 2 centuries.
That's why the Tudor period is particularly opportune; printing is just coming into being in England as the latest thing. So there's a unique opportunity to impose an alphabet change, if someone wants to. There is as yet no big investment in Latin character type, and it is easy to tell a printed book from a hand-scribed one, so the enforcement of a strict rule, or even a lax one, is relatively easy--hand-copied books get a pass for being in Latin characters, but if printed you'd better be able to show your special permit, or point to the page in the volume showing the generic special license given this edition. A tax on Latin character books the Anglo-Cyrillic ones are exempt from is an alternative to simply banning Latin character print books; magic of the marketplace and all that. The King *James Bible is in Cyrillic; so is the *Book of Common Prayer.

The motive to do it is a stretch of course; a move like this has to come down to ideology. But there is precedent going even deeper than what alphabet to use--consider how Iran came to be majority-Shia. The place used to have the usual majority Sunni, Shia minority--maybe significantly more Shia due to holy centers of the Shia denomination being in nearby Iraq sometimes under the Iranian ruling regimes, but Shia was the minority still, albeit larger. Then a Shiite dynasty took over Iran and systematically persecuted Sunni and promoted Shiism--to be sure, Iranians remain subdivided as to exact sect of Shiism; presumably the dynasty wanted a particular one (as I understand it, they go by "number" names--"Fiver," "Sevener," maybe a few others, based on how many rightly guided Imams or whatever the proper title was following Ali each one counts as canonical). But Sunni populations became the small minority. I've even seen some Western historians (thinking of Toynbee here) assume very cynical motives having little to do with deep personal piety of the Padishah--that they anticipated, correctly, that establishing the sectarian difference would fix the boundaries of Iran versus the Ottomans and other neighboring contending powers to be firmer--Sunni powers would have a difficult time holding the Shiite communities, and they would tend to be relatively easy for the Iranian dynasty in power to take back, since they would be the protectors of Shiite Muslims. Vice versa it made it more difficult for Iranian dynasties to take and hold territories outside Iran, but perhaps if the thing was a cynical calculation, the dynasty responsible reasoned that there were natural limits to Iranian reach anyway and they had best consolidate that line and hold it, and forego ambitions beyond that point as too large a stretch for them to sustain. So--Iran is defined to a great degree by this historic and relatively modern (16th-18th century IIRC) move, whether believed to be divinely inspired or an act of Machiavellian statecraft, let better educated historians debate. One way or another, it happened. Similar things have happened elsewhere--Poland used to have quite a few sectarians divergent from Catholicism, but Poland as we know it today, like Ireland, is defined in part by stubborn Catholicism in the face of occupiers who penalized it pretty heavily. In fact I suspect both Polish and Irish Catholic piety have a lot to do with the very fact that adhering to that faith helped define themselves as resisters of the external powers' rule.

A precociously early Reformation with England jumping onto the Protestant bandwagon early, under a Tudor (or if you like some other house emerging from the War of the Roses) monarch aspiring to absolutism (albeit with the support of suitably large and influential social sectors) might take the Machiavellian step of sundering his kingdom from the Continent by imposing a different alphabet; if restricted to print primarily at first (that is, to gain firmer control of the spread of printed ideology, which could be spammed as it were in much greater volume at a lower cost than hand-copied which would be more like samizdat in its restrictions) it could go over relatively easily. I believe the 16th century represented a period in which literacy rose significantly; jumping in early on that bandwagon might result in masses trained on the Bible to prefer Cyrillic. Very literate people of course would still read Latin and that will doubtless continue to be printed in Roman characters, but the point is the regime controls legitimate printhouses, having a laxer hand with Cyrillic because Russia is very far away and the language is quite alien, while the Latin text stuff, both in Latin language and in various Western European vernaculars is closely scrutinized when imported and regulated when printed in England. Also a preference for Cyrillic is a marker of loyalty and being a team player.

Even with these factors in play, with whoever is the expy for Henry VII being a more activist absolutist and ideologue, it seems likely that there would have to some direct linkage with Russia, a factor I admitted needs some background work to justify. If late Rurikid/Early Romanov, or better yet from my Romanov-despising POV some ATL Muscovite Tsarist dynasty (not necessarily one bit nicer than the Romanovs, so they might as well be precocious Romanovs I suppose) is more powerful on the Western European horizon circa the late 15th century, and England's earlier and more energetic Reformism puts her on a more vigorous stance in Continental matters, conceivably a strong alliance with the Russians might motivate an exchange of royal spouses and other forms of contact. I am backing off of claiming that the Orthodox Church will be a strong influence on emerging Anglican Protestantism, but claiming alliances on paper has been effective in sectarian empire-building before. The Roman Catholics set precedents in the Crusader states--they spurned cooperation with the Orthodox, whose doctrines were pretty close to Latin rite but who politically downplayed the status of the Pope, and set up political "communion" with various other eastern Christian rites that differed much more radically in doctrine and in forms of worship, but were willing to say that they deferred to the Bishop of Rome as the supreme pontiff. The eastern rite people were not expected to change their distinctive doctrines or rites, they were just recognized as more or less equivalently Christian by Roman Catholics, allies not to be persecuted for deviations no matter how hair-raising some doctrines might have seemed to a conventional Latin Catholic. Nor did Roman rites change unless it suited someone in the west to adopt innovations from the east, and surely that was a tightly regulated thing too--saying something was unacceptable in Flanders would not be deemed an insult of the same thing being normal in Tyre or Antioch!

So I suppose in such an ATL there ought to be a bit of Russian flavor to the *Tudors I credit or blame for pushing through this reform in printed writing, which, if persisted in long enough--a century should be enough--would tip the scales of normal literacy in English until people all over Europe just accepted it as part of English identity that they write in that peculiar alphabet, by a few generations from the initial reform, in all forms of writing, handwritten as well as print, because it becomes ubiquitous and normal. They might even take to writing the Latin language in a variant of Anglo-Cyrillic! Meanwhile England, soon to become part of an ATL UK, pursues an increasingly parallel course politically and culturally with OTL. There is a smattering of Russian influence in a few items of vocabulary and a few details of various creed doctrines (mostly in High Church Anglican of course, which is to say they carry over into Episcopalian in America) but some of the Dissenters will carry over a fraction of them too. But by and large a great gulf exists betweeen even Anglicanism and the Russian Orthodox faith--indeed to parallel England politically with OTL there must eventually be a rupture in the Anglo-Russian alliance and both countries go through a long period of mutual hostility. The variations in alphabet will be seized on then by both sides as proving the others are a bunch of barbaric lunatics! Not to mention how funny English sounds to Russian readers or Russian to English ones! Later the OTL cordiality between the Tsarist empire and the USA will seem the more natural, a little bit, because of the mostly shared alphabet, but that relationship will still be peripheral from the point of view of both. To Americans taking over a purchased Alaska, the strange phonetics of Russian monuments and documents will be quite as exotic and quaint as their illegibility to Latin-text-literate OTL Americans was.

I believe I already mentioned and will just mention in passing again various faint interconnections between England and Russia OTL, such as the proposed marriage of Elizabeth to Ivan. I've noticed in modern times a marked tendency for American Episcopalians or British Anglicans to adopt symbolism and perhaps among a substantial minority of the more pious of those denominations, even doctrine, from the Orthodox Church; I have often wondered why.

I am granting that this is quite a stretch, but I think the OP is not utterly frivolous, and furthermore that the period between late 15th and early 17th century, a "long 16th century" as it were, is a cusp where it would be easier to postulate happening than any time before or since. At any rate, if earlier opportunities existed they'd probably butterfly away any chance of parallelism with subsequent OTL developments involving England more firmly. With the *Tudor/Radical Reformation opportunity we can still pretty well slot an England writing in Cyrillic onto a similar trajectory as OTL anyway and get the OP's apparent desire the best. Doing it later would be a more disruptive event. ATL Tudors seem to be the window of best opportunity to me.
 
Oh I agree that the Tudor period is the best time for it to happen I just think it needs a bit more long term incentive. Afterall there's nothing to stop a via media Elizabeth type monarch relaxing the rules on printing to stop/prevent religious warfare which is bound to be worse in England TTL due to the complete sundering of TTL Anglicanism - now being a more radical heresy than mere schismatic Catholicism.
 
Bearing in mind the failed attempts to reform English spelling over the last 2 centuries.
Has there been an actual implemented attempt to change the spelling, other than just a few words? The only new complete spellings that I have seen (and they are many, since I like that topic) have only been suggestions for change, such that you could muse over during the weekend, but no actual usage, such as printing whole books and newspapers in it, and having it everywhere.

Besides, most suggested new spellings are worse than the current orthography, so avoiding change may be a good thing here.

Oh I agree that the Tudor period is the best time for it to happen I just think it needs a bit more long term incentive.
Salvation might be an appropriate incentive in that period: "If you use popish pagan Latin writing your soul will burn in Hell! Instead we use these Greek letters that the holy gospels were made of."
 
OTL there was no large scale religious warfare in England until the reign of Charles I, second after Elizabeth. I suspect a sweeping and energetic enough earlier Reformation might in principle suppress the possibility entirely, though for the sake of my personal take on the OP intentions, which has England converging back to its OTL history as much as possible with the alphabet change conserved, there would need to be an ATL Civil War and a Commonwealth analog. The idea is though that the victorious social factions in the various tumults would be those aligned with the alphabetic reform as part of the package of defiance of "Popery." I also think that if the resolve of the regime to enforce the shift is unbroken for half a century or so the momentum starts to favor continuing it and any attempt to reverse it would be the difficult thing to accomplish, becoming ever more so as the generations pass.

Thus if the 16th century included the *Tudors intriguing with the royal families of Spain and Portugal as OTL, the introduction of Queen Catherine and the reign of Mary, the program would be messed up I suppose; I have to assume it was all more one sided, starting earlier than Henry VIII's OTL accession to the throne and lasting at least as long as most of Elizabeth's reign. The personalities of that century are thus quite different, as are their policies and the general state of Western European affairs especially early in the century. Yet another opportunistic thing with some OTL grounding I did not touch on was England's tendency to be out of step with the Continental preoccupations of Papal politics, and the tendency of English people to have a proto-Reformation attitude. Now I gather the various monarchs of England were sometimes in tune with the regime in Rome, indeed there was once, one time, an English Pope, Adrian something or other. And on the whole the English, before and after the Conquest, were pretty devoutly Catholic--but strong reformist opinions were also frequently widespread. Not majority exactly, but not extremely rare either. Sincemy education in European history focuses mainly through an English lens, it is hard for me to judge whether England was any different from other parts of western Europe in this respect or not, but we know of plenty of immediate precursors to various aspects of Reformation movements in England the century before. The idea that England might jump onto the Reformation bandwagon early and hard has some pragmatic arguments against it, relating to the nature of the English economy (trade in wool being a major thing, with the commercial connection to markets in Flanders, itself Catholic though obviously OTL that was in some doubt for a time a century later) and of course the vulnerability of a small kingdom among big powers, when their island isolation was imperfect due to the possibility of enemies landing either in Scotland or on sympathetic dissident shores within the kingdom itself, not to mention the vulnerability of English trade to a united front of hostility on the Continent. Probably to get England on the Reformation bandwagon as early as 1500 we'd need for Flanders at least to go Protestant too, and God knows how many other nerfings of Catholic power.

But I think if it is possible to get the ball rolling early enough and to persist 50-60 years after that, then we can converge back toward OTL parallels more and more without eroding the position of the new alphabet in England and having it spread through the entire world influenced by Britain to this day.

I'm just having fun with it, OK? It does seem strange and unlikely to me, but the 16th century does have some fascinating convergences of incentives and opportunities to consider for this wacky project!
 
I'm just having fun with it, OK? It does seem strange and unlikely to me, but the 16th century does have some fascinating convergences of incentives and opportunities to consider for this wacky project!
Oh I quite understand. It's playing things out that highlights how difficult it is to get the change. All the ducks have to line up. So not impossible, just very very difficult!
 
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