AHC Russian with Latin Alphabet

Peter "Latinized" shapes of the letters in Russian alphabet but that's approximately as far as even he could realistically go.

On the subject of Peter and Russian language: he went other way by using Russian alphabet for the numerous Dutch and German words which were all over his writings. The results often need either professional translator from these languages or a lot of the guessing (add to this that Russian of the early XVIII was quite different from the modern and that Peter was not a well-educated person even by the standards of his time :)).
 
Ukrainian alphabet (AFAIK) is not Latin and neither is Belarussian. There are couple letters which look like Latin but they existed in the Russian alphabet until the communists removed them. But the answer to your question is "most probably no". Condition of Wladislaw's accession to the throne of Moscow was his conversion and if at some point he decided to "get back", he would be most probably killed, as happened to the false-Dmitri I: the main reason for his assassination was his attempt to establish what was considered "Latin habits". Outright "unconditional" conquest was pretty much impossible (King Sigismund tried it) and probably completely impossible as something sustainable.

No, I mean these alphabets here for Ukrainian and Belarusian, which are based on Polish orthography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_Latin_alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Latin_alphabet

A Russian version would look similar to those proposals.
 
A very easy was to achieve this is to make Russia catholic somehow, after all, scripts tend to follow faith. Bit of a generalization, but with the time of the POD we’d need, it is a good rule of thumb.
 
Which means we need to go back farther

Yes, as I said, the easiest POD would be the rule of St. Vladimir who, in this scenario converts into Catholicism. Of course, the big question is motivation: relations with Byzantine Empire had been well established and there were certain economic interests (trade across the Black Sea). OTOH, the Catholic neighbors were not complete strangers either, even if they had been lacking prestige of the Byzantine emperors.
 
No, I mean these alphabets here for Ukrainian and Belarusian, which are based on Polish orthography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_Latin_alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Latin_alphabet

A Russian version would look similar to those proposals.

But, as you can see from these articles, the attempts to introduce these alphabets had been politically and religiously motivated so, in all these cases a prerequisite is a mass conversion into Catholicism or at least a strong dominance of a Catholic state (as was the case in Galicia under A-H but even in that case the attempt was a failure).
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
All Slavic languages can be done without diacritics. Just use extra letters.

That's roughly what Cyrillic was about, starting from a Greek base of course.

Sorry for ambiguity - I did not mean adding extra letters to the set.
I meant using letter combinations. I will use Polish as an example as I know it best and I do not know how to write Cyrillic :)
Today "ć" and "ś" are used for nifty ways of pronouncing c and s respectively, but instead of using the accent above these just as well could be written ch and sh. I know that ch is used in parallel for h - but then this could be simplified :)
Thus the "grading would be e.g. "s" - "sh" - "sz". Same for c ch and cz. For the three z sounds - z, ż and ź - besides zh either zz or maybe zx. Or to use x - which is not used, as Polish uses "ks" - for ź. Portuguese uses "x" for "sh", so why not ...
The ł could be replaced with lh or ll.
The nasalised sounds - ą and ę - could be doubled aa and ee.
I there really, really must be two ways of writing the sound "u" - ó and u - then oo instead of ó.
The same can be used for Russian - and there it would be even simpler, with no ą ę ś ć to bother with.
S and sh, z and zh, l and lh, some letter to replace the "soft-" and "hard-mark" - anything more?
 
Sorry for ambiguity - I did not mean adding extra letters to the set.
I meant using letter combinations. I will use Polish as an example as I know it best and I do not know how to write Cyrillic :)
Today "ć" and "ś" are used for nifty ways of pronouncing c and s respectively, but instead of using the accent above these just as well could be written ch and sh. I know that ch is used in parallel for h - but then this could be simplified :)
Thus the "grading would be e.g. "s" - "sh" - "sz". Same for c ch and cz. For the three z sounds - z, ż and ź - besides zh either zz or maybe zx. Or to use x - which is not used, as Polish uses "ks" - for ź. Portuguese uses "x" for "sh", so why not ...
The ł could be replaced with lh or ll.
The nasalised sounds - ą and ę - could be doubled aa and ee.
I there really, really must be two ways of writing the sound "u" - ó and u - then oo instead of ó.
The same can be used for Russian - and there it would be even simpler, with no ą ę ś ć to bother with.
S and sh, z and zh, l and lh, some letter to replace the "soft-" and "hard-mark" - anything more?

Of course it can be done like this. After all, English manages without diacritics, and it has about eighty-something phonemes represented with 26 letters. Now, of course I wouldn't recommend English as a model for how to spell anything, but combinations of letters do work. A minor problem with your proposal is that some digrams may be ambiguous in Polish: the "sh" digram in particular might mean both the ś sound and the combination of plain s with h, which is possible in Polish.
However, there may be workarounds, as always.
 
Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People's Commissar of Education, favored the adoption of the Latin alphabet for all languages of the USSR--including Russian. He claimed that Lenin had backed the idea, recalling that "the founder of the Soviet state said that he did 'not doubt that the time will come for the Latinization of the Russian script' but for the time being, any 'rash' moves would generate resistance."
http://www.moldova.org/en/in-russia-debates-about-alphabets-are-about-more-than-letters-205540-eng/

I tend to think that Lenin was simply humoring Lunacharsky on this matter, but Lunarcharsky apparently took it seriously. He felt that the world revolution had to bring the "world alphabet"--the Latin one--to "liberated humankind." At the end of the 1920's a commission under his direction was formed to look into Latinization, and concluded in its final report of 14 January 1930 that "transition of the Russian people to a single general alphabet on the Latin base is unavoidable in the short run..." 'to recognize the transition of the Russian script and printing to the general alphabet common for all USSR peoples on the Latin base as the first stage to create the worldwide international alphabet."
http://books.google.com/books?id=HkXxXRukLRQC&pg=PA136

Not surprisingly, this was rejected by Stalin and the Politburo (although for a while the Latin alphabet was adopted for many of the non-Slavic peoples of the USSR, later to be replaced by Cyrillic). The practical objections are of course obvious--but what if Stalin for some reason had decided in favor of the project? After all, Kemal Ataturk showed that a nation under one-man authoritarian leadership could change from a non-Latin alphabet that had been used for centuries to a Latin one.
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
Of course it can be done like this. After all, English manages without diacritics, and it has about eighty-something phonemes represented with 26 letters. Now, of course I wouldn't recommend English as a model for how to spell anything, but combinations of letters do work. A minor problem with your proposal is that some digrams may be ambiguous in Polish: the "sh" digram in particular might mean both the ś sound and the combination of plain s with h, which is possible in Polish.
However, there may be workarounds, as always.
Dutch also manages to be diacritic-free.
Frankly I did not think about the possble "plain s with h" combination as it is not that common. So, I suppose it would be "learn by route" in this case.
 
Dutch also manages to be diacritic-free.
Frankly I did not think about the possble "plain s with h" combination as it is not that common. So, I suppose it would be "learn by route" in this case.

It is interesting how few languages use the Latin alphabet without any diacritics at all. Indonesian is another example (ok, technically there is é, but the diacritic is often not used IIRC) but I can't think of any other. Don't know about Pilipino.
 
Sorry for ambiguity - I did not mean adding extra letters to the set.
I meant using letter combinations. I will use Polish as an example as I know it best and I do not know how to write Cyrillic :)
Today "ć" and "ś" are used for nifty ways of pronouncing c and s respectively, but instead of using the accent above these just as well could be written ch and sh. I know that ch is used in parallel for h - but then this could be simplified :)
Thus the "grading would be e.g. "s" - "sh" - "sz". Same for c ch and cz. For the three z sounds - z, ż and ź - besides zh either zz or maybe zx. Or to use x - which is not used, as Polish uses "ks" - for ź. Portuguese uses "x" for "sh", so why not ...
The ł could be replaced with lh or ll.
The nasalised sounds - ą and ę - could be doubled aa and ee.
I there really, really must be two ways of writing the sound "u" - ó and u - then oo instead of ó.
The same can be used for Russian - and there it would be even simpler, with no ą ę ś ć to bother with.
S and sh, z and zh, l and lh, some letter to replace the "soft-" and "hard-mark" - anything more?
better use letter "x" instead of both ch/h, then you have letter "h" left to use as soft-sign, like in Portuguese, in digraphs. Also "y" could be used for both "j" and "y" without confusion ("j" must be followed by vowel or follow vowel, "y" must follow consonant, can't be followed by vowel, except for rare compounds, and combination "jy" is impossible in Polish, so there would not be confusion) so you can use "j" to replace "ż", instead of ą,ę just use om/on and em/en combination. And you have Polish without diacritics.
 
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Ukrainian alphabet (AFAIK) is not Latin and neither is Belarussian.

There was Łacinka though for Belarusian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_Latin_alphabet It could have become more widespread if Poland had survived and kept control of the Belarusian lands. Even in OTL it was used by some prominent Belarusian writers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstanty_Kalinowski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francišak_Bahuševič

Latynka for Ukrainian seems to have had an even feebler existence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Latin_alphabet

During the 1920's some Soviet Belarusian intellectuals advocated the Latin alphabet for Belarusian; I assume that they were all imprisoned or shot as "Polish agents" in the 1930's....
 
No surprise. Cyrillic script is best adapted to phonology of Slavic languages (palatalization, lots of frictative and affricate consonants), it was designed for it, many letters are useless in Turkic Kazakh language.
The change in Kazakhstan has nothing to do with linguistic reasons, since Cyrillic works better with the Kazakh language than the Latin alphabet. It's pure nationalism.
 
No surprise. Cyrillic script is best adapted to phonology of Slavic languages (palatalization, lots of frictative and affricate consonants), it was designed for it, many letters are useless in Turkic Kazakh language.

This might be true, but the challenge was for Russian. I don't really get why Russian Latinization would lead to something like Ukrainian going Latin. If anything Russian going from Cryllic script to a Latinized one would probably make those around Kiev stick to the old script for everyday use while using the official one for government purposes
 
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