Just as at the end of last week, President Aleksandar Vučić listed five sets of measures that should help the Kosovo Serbs and strengthen Serbia's presence in Kosovo, so on Sunday at Vuk's Assembly, the Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković announced three steps that the Ministry he is responsible for will begin to undertake in order to preserve the Cyrillic alphabet and the Serbian language.
He noted that "caring for the Serbian language and script is not a platitude, but a measure of our self-awareness and self-respect, a measure of our concern for the future", as well as that all this will be implemented "with the support of the President of the Republic and the Government of the Republic of Serbia".
Three steps
The three steps announced by the minister are: the acquisition of an exclusively two-letter keyboard, the purchase for libraries of only books printed in Cyrillic, and a contest for the design of Cyrillic fonts that will be distributed free of charge.
All three steps are, let's call it, weird.
A two-letter keyboard is unnecessary because everyone who uses a computer and a mobile phone knows that whenever they want, they can choose the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet and - start writing. A click on a single command is enough. So there is no need for the keys of the keyboard to have the letters of both alphabets, as Selaković announced that it will be from January 1.
How will it look in practice, will the Cyrillic letter be marked on the left side of the key and the Latin letter on the right half? Or vice versa, so that the Cyrillic alphabet is on the right? Will it change the self-awareness of computer users? Will the production of a new type of keyboard begin?
Minister Selaković would have to explain all this in the near future.
chorister
About the second step, about the intention that the Ministry of Culture buys from publishers, for the needs of libraries and readers, only those books that were published in the Cyrillic alphabet, one does not know what one would say, except that the Cyrillic alphabet will not have any visible benefits from it, and the state none at all.
This is wrong on various grounds. This is, among other things, a limitation of the publisher's freedom to choose the letter he wants, or which is more appropriate for the target group for which the book is intended. Are you going to print a book that deals with some important scientific issues in Cyrillic and make it impossible for experts who only read Latin to use it? Or: why should people from the Latin area not be able to read about the unique Serbian medieval frescoes? Isn't that restraining and limiting the achievements and values of one's own country?
At the gathering held last winter in the National Library of Serbia, publishers were criticized for printing Latin books solely for the sake of profit. How, for example, to market them in Croatia. What is wrong with Serbian publishers marketing their books in Croatia? Or what they want to earn, isn't that good for the entire publishing industry of this country?
Floss
The third step, designing gift Cyrillic fonts and Cyrillics is something that has been around for 20 years, invented and successfully implemented by the authors portal Tipometar. And everyone who is interested in the Cyrillic alphabet and typography in general knows this very well. And the Ministry of Culture could also know, especially since Tipometar participated in many of its competitions, and has long been proposing various useful and effective things for the Cyrillic alphabet.
But, of course, the Ministry's idea of free new fonts is a good one, and it is also good that someone else besides Typometra is dealing with it. It is to be believed that for that third step, the Ministry will select people who will be aware that designing any font in this world requires enormous knowledge from various fields, not just a high five from art.
We will repeat, the Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković stressed that "caring for the Serbian language and script is not a platitude". How do you experience these three steps of his?
