PC and WI: Latin Alphabet replaces Greek in Eastern Europe

Is it possible to get the Latin alphabet to become dominant in Greece, Asia Minor, and the Balkans, and then eventually Ukraine and Russia? If so, what would be the cultural effects of the replacement of Greek and the lack of Cyrillic in this world? A Europe, including the Byzantines and Russia, that uses one writing form, could lead to Russia being closer to the west culturally.
 
Is it possible to get the Latin alphabet to become dominant in Greece, Asia Minor, and the Balkans, and then eventually Ukraine and Russia? If so, what would be the cultural effects of the replacement of Greek and the lack of Cyrillic in this world? A Europe, including the Byzantines and Russia, that uses one writing form, could lead to Russia being closer to the west culturally.

Off hand, keystone POD would be Kievian Rus in the 10th century for the latter. Seemingly a cart ahead of the horse, but Greek and other Balkan countries should "easiest" change by a horrible and bloody destruction of the Turkish Ottoman's hold over the region, semi permanently or permanently. If only partially, only the Anitolian interior is left and possibly other Asia minor and Africa.

A quickly vanquished model would not run toward Latin script, but rather a seesaw battle back and forth that would so sap the local people that maybe an influx of new people/contrary religion/standards to have this result. As said, extremely horrible, although plagues could do it by alternate horror. Like Coptic, the religious connection was the bind, and this is normally very persistent excepting these scenarios AFAIK. Again, very horrible.

To the best of my knowledge, only Romanian (19th century) and Albanian (the now minority greek orthodox church used/uses?) (1300 --1880's) changed to the Latin script since Roman times:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_alphabet

These might not be an additional guideline, since to my mind similar processes were involved. Albanian because of the Muslim majority and Romanian (assumed) because of of their uniquely Latin speaking majority, none of which were able to be duplicated elsewhere.

You are in for writing some messy times for a late POD, it is feared.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Cyrillic_alphabet
 
Off hand, keystone POD would be Kievian Rus in the 10th century for the latter.

Romanian isn't a Slavic language (grammatically, it's a cousin to western romance languages). Its conversion/reversion to the Latin alphabet is congruent with its linguistic development.

The only way to cement the Latin alphabet in the Eastern Slavic regions is to have a much higher level of western Christian missionary activity in these regions. The close proximity of Constantinople to Kiev renders the adoption of Byzantine Christianity and Cyrillic a much more likely choice both in OTL and ATL. Perhaps the Roman missionaries could have pushed further eastward after converting Poland in the late 10th century. I do not know why Poland is the easternmost frontier of western Christianity. Perhaps someone else on this board knows.
 
I heard that the Cyrillic alphabet is much better at protraying sounds for Slavic languages than the Latin alphabet, which requires a lot of diacritics. A Polish friend told me this who knew English and Russian as well as Polish. Thus, Slavic languages already using Cyrillic won't have a lot of reason to switch to Latin. I think writing in Latin will only make sense if the culture is first introduced to writing by the Latin West, which requires a conversion to Catholicism.

As for Greece, almost impossible. Greeks were using their alphabet before the Romans conquered them and continued to use them afterwards. It would require a Latin ruler of Greece for centuries that engaged in an ongoing cultural struggle to repress the Greek alphabet. Hard to see that happening or being successful.

The cultural differences between the Latin West and Greek East have much more profound sources than that they use different alphabets. The West had a Church/State divide because of Pope vs Emperor while the East had Caesaropapism which subordinated the Church to the state. The West embraced classical rationalism while the East became more mystically oriented. The West had a long heritage of divided powers and rival governments while the East had imperial supremacy. The West remained free of foreign control, while the East had both the Ottoman conquest and the Tartar yoke.

Learning a new alphabet is fairly easy. Anyone who has the talent and desire to learn a foreign language can master a new alphabet without too much trouble. When France was the dominant power in Europe, much of the Russian aristocracy spoke French as their everyday language and knew the Latin alphabet. Their elite was totally open to Western culture, but it didn't change anything.
 
I don't think an early POD would help much here. The Greeks had their alphabet, they considered their literature and culture to be superior to Latin, and to be blunt, they had a point there. It is all but impossible to see Western missionaries successful enough to literally take over all of Eastern Europe. And if we posit that the Slavic civilisationms do not take their writing system from the Greeks, they had other candidates to adapt closer to home.

I think it more likely for that shift to happen in the nineteenth or twentieth century in a massive social engineering push. Atatürk's government did it in Turkey (against strong opposition, but nonetheless, they did it). Of course a Cyrillic alphabet is much more practical for Slavic languages, but then, the Latin alphabet isn't exactly ideal for Germanic ones, either (let's not talk about the abomination that is phoneme-grapheme correspondence in English). It doesn't matter overmuch in the end, and it wouldn't for Slavic tongues, either. The Poles and Czechs do fine with a Latin alphabet for their languages. If a government wanted to push this through hard enough, it would not be too difficult. Have it precede or conincide with mass literacy drives and you are there. I'm not sure that Peter the Great is a likely candidate - he would more likely make the entire nobility switch to a foreign language than teach the Russian people a different writing system. But if we could find a POD involving him, that would create an example for almost every other Eastern European nation to emulate come the end of Ottoman dominance. Especially if politics could spin adherence to the Church Slavic alphabet as 'collaborationist'.
 
In a post 1900 / Great War PoD those countries could switch from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet to modernise and open themselves to the West just as Turkey has done it in OTL.
 
In a post 1900 / Great War PoD those countries could switch from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet to modernise and open themselves to the West just as Turkey has done it in OTL.

Uh, I just thought of this. As scary as it might be, if Germany won in either WWI or WWII the chance of serious inroads if not total change over (except Greece and Bulgaria, in all likihood) is very high, WWII more so. Whether it would stick or not is another matter, and it could happen independently, to identify with needed support in the West against Germany as did Lebanon circa 1800's.
 
In a post 1900 / Great War PoD those countries could switch from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet to modernise and open themselves to the West just as Turkey has done it in OTL.

Changing alphabets doesn't make your country suddenly modernize.

Besides, Eastern Europe was already very open culturally to the West. Their elites already knew French or English. Their monarchies and government were already part of the European state system. Changing the alphabet doesn't affect that.

What Ataturk did in Turkey was very different. The Ottomans were fundamentally a Middle Eastern/Islamic culture. Their frame of reference and cultural heritage were outside Europe although they were involved in European affairs. Ataturk wished to decisively break that mentality and completed orient (maybe "occident" would be a better word) the society to a completely new culture.

The use of the Latin alphabet was just one way to do that. The reason here was not so much to make Turks magically modern, it was to alienate them from their previous history. Because anyone who was taught to read after the reforms could not read any of the old Ottoman literature. They would only be able to read new things that were published. All of the old books in the Arabic script would be unreadable to a new generation that only knew the Latin alphabet. It was that kind of massive social engineering that Ataturk wanted. He was waging war against Turkish culture as it then existed because he thought that was what was needed for Turkey to survive.

I don't think any of the Slavic countries were in a similar position. They were already very open to the West and there was already a lot of common ground. They didn't need to take such a drastic step.
 
The use of the Latin alphabet was just one way to do that. The reason here was not so much to make Turks magically modern, it was to alienate them from their previous history. Because anyone who was taught to read after the reforms could not read any of the old Ottoman literature. They would only be able to read new things that were published. All of the old books in the Arabic script would be unreadable to a new generation that only knew the Latin alphabet. It was that kind of massive social engineering that Ataturk wanted. He was waging war against Turkish culture as it then existed because he thought that was what was needed for Turkey to survive.

I don't think any of the Slavic countries were in a similar position. They were already very open to the West and there was already a lot of common ground. They didn't need to take such a drastic step.

I get your point about what Attaturk wanted to do in Turkey, but it would seem to me, with regards to what I have the part of your quote I have just put in Bold, that this is exactly what a certain system of government that ruled over much of eastern Europe for most of the 20th century would want to do, ie Communist governments.

This is especially in the early stages of these Communist governments, where there was quite a strong and often sincere ideological push to modernise at all costs (as opposed to the equally brutal, but more pragmatic forms of authoritarian rule that the Soviet Union later moved to).

The ironic thing of course about the Soviet Union and other Communist nations was of course that despite politically opposing the West, they saught to in many culturally Westernise their nations, because the Western way of life was seen as more progressive that their own traditional cultures. I believe that at one stage Mao Zedong did at least contemplate the idea of China adopting the Roman alphabet?
 
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