Cyril and Methodius Day is Thursday Feb 14, 2019!

[Jubal]

Cyril and Methodius Day is, as always, February 14, which in 2019 is a Thursday. So here's a thread to tell you what it is and how to celebrate it if you want to! Use this thread to wish everyone a happy C&M day and all such similar chatter

Please click and donate to our official charity fundraising effort for the day here!

Media
Here's a video I made way back in 2015 which explains some of the details:

FAQs

What is Cyril and Methodius Day?
As celebrated by Exilians and many others, Cyril and Methodius Day is a festival of literature, learning, languages, and linguistics. It's an alternative or additional celebration to the feast day of Saint Valentine - not as an "anti-Valentine's" project, but providing people another choice of celebration for the day.

How do I celebrate it?

• Read a book.
• Hug a friendly linguist, and tell them how much you appreciate alphabets.
• Tell other people it's Cyril and Methodius day. Spread the word!
• Recommend good books to a friend. Make ALL the reading happen!
• Celebrate and discover more about European, and particularly eastern European, culture, writing, food, arts, and more.
• Do some work on learning a language.
• Talk to your international friends from Europe (and beyond).
• Do conlanging/make a new alphabet!
• Donate to a reading-related charity

Is religion important here?
We've claimed Cyril and Methodius' Day in an entirely non-denominational fashion, as has happened to many other Saints' Days, so there is no religious prerequisite for celebrating it. Cyril and Methodius were of course Christians, as were almost all people in their cultural place and context, but their work included many fields combined with or outside purely religious functions including diplomacy, law, and languages.

You've got the date wrong!
Cyril and Methodius' Day is celebrated on Feb 14 in the Catholic and Anglican traditions - the Orthodox church and others celebrate their feast at other times of year.

Why can't you just celebrate Valentine's Day?
Not everyone wants to, for all sorts of reasons. Valentine's Day tends to involve heavy commercial promotion of a certain type of romantic relationship that just doesn't suit everyone - some people are happy being single, or indeed are aromantic, or asexual, have other reasons for not wanting to celebrate, or just don't want to define their relationships and celebrate them in the way that Valentine's Day now has a tradition of promoting. Other people may just decide that Europe, reading, and languages are something they value and want to celebrate more than the alternatives. Cyril and Methodius day offers a choice of festival that embraces this and can give people a fun and interesting rationale for something different to do on Feb 14.

Who were Cyril and Methodius?
Cyril and Methodius, apostles to the Slavs, were Greek saints in the ninth century AD. They're primarily known for the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet designed specifically for slavic-family languages, and the ancestor of the modern Cyrillic (which is named after Cyril). They accomplished numerous missions on behalf of the Byzantines, including to the north of the Black Sea, though most famously to Moravia (modern Slovakia). There they worked to create and spread a uniquely Slavic Christian tradition, drawing on both the Latin and Greek traditions of learning but with many unique elements. Despite Moravia moving into the Latin sphere after their deaths, their followers moved to other Slavic nations, especially Bulgaria, from which their work influenced many eastern Europeans to this day. They are patron saints of Europe in the Catholic church.

[Tusky]

Happy Cyril and Methodius Day everyone!

This is the first time I'll be celebrating it, and am doing so in the following ways:

• I'll read a bit of The North Water by Ian McGuire. I recommend it! It's extremely grizzly but fantastically written
• I'm trying to learn some Russian. I have continued to do so earlier by listening a lesson on some rather good audio books I have (these ones if you are interested. They use quite a different approach to the usual method of language learning, and I am rather enjoying it)
• I'll also try to memorise more of the Cyrilic alphabet. I've found that learning to read Russian is a much bigger challenge than with European languages - since the words are completely unfamiliar! Hopefully it will get more natural with time
• Finally - I donated to the very worthy fundraiser

[Caradìlis]

Happy Cyril and Methodius Day!!! I'll be celebrating by hopefully finishing my ba paper today (seems unlikely though...)

[Jubal]

Happy Cyril and Methodius Day!

I wish I'd had more time to celebrate it properly but today I've been at a hackathon workshop which I've organised with academics from all over the place. I guess I can say I've mentioned it to several people, and that at least one of our groups has explicitly been looking at different alphabets and using machine learning to to entity recognition on them. My own group is working on linking individuals between biographical databases (aka tagging systems for "I assert that X in your database is the same as Y in mine" so I guess there's a connectivity thing there.

One of my book orders, and I don't know which, has arrived, but I've not been able to go pick it up - new reading material available as of the weekend, though!

[Glaurung]

I'm not sure whether this counts, but I've spent some bits of today considering systems for transliterating Bulgarian from Cyrillic to Roman script. None of the existing systems feels entirely satisfactory to me, and the present official system is far too oriented to English spelling.

[Jubal]

I think that absolutely very much counts Is there any particular use-case you're considering, or is it just a curiosity itch that wants scratching?

[Glaurung]

Is there any particular use-case you're considering, or is it just a curiosity itch that wants scratching?

Yes there is a use-case, albeit an entirely personal one: my own records of where I've been. They're in HTML, ultimately, and had their first encounter with Bulgarian (and Greek) on my adventure in the Balkans last October. I'd prefer not to use the native scripts in my records because (a) it would take me a lot longer to puzzle out all the placenames, and (b) it would be rather tedious to have to type in all the HTML character entities for the non-Roman characters. So I prefer to transliterate.

Unfortunately, I'm quite picky. I want a reliable bi-directional mapping, with each Cyrillic character going to a single Roman character if possible (including those with diacritics, e.g. č, š, ž to represent English 'ch', 'sh', 'zh') or at least a unique two-character combination that won't arise any other way. I'm familiar with the Roman-script orthography used by other Slavic languages, particularly Czech and those from the former Yugoslavia, so I'd like to stick as close to those as I can. The Wikipedia article on Romanization of Bulgarian covers the various options - ISO 9 (1968) is the closest to what I want, but uses 'j' to represent both й and ь, which I want to avoid.

[Glaurung]

I'm sure you're all still on tenterhooks over my schism-provoking choices for transliteration of Bulgarian, so I felt I should reveal my system now I've worked it out. It's mostly the ISO 9 (1968) system, except for the tricky group of "letters involving glide sound", where I have gone for the following:
й = j
ь = ' (single quote)
я = ya
ю = yu

This ensures that there are distinct Roman-script symbols for й and ь. It also means that я and ю produce different Roman-script combinations from йа and йу respectively. I don't know if йа and йу actually occur in natural Bulgarian, but I can handle them if they do. The only potential duplicate now is that št could come from both щ and шт, but I think the two-letter combination is not used in Bulgarian. The only other downside is that 'y' isn't used in other Roman-script Slavic languages, but I'm familiar with 'ya' from English transcription of Russian, so I can live with it.