Remove the letter Ѕ from the Serbian Cyrillic layout

[markokocic]

Letter Ѕ does not exist in the standard Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. That's why it should be removed from the bottom line in the layout. Removing that letter also allows all keys to have the same size.

GBoard and iOS keyboards don't have that letter in the bottom bar. Since some dialect still use that letter, it can be put as a pop-up on the letter З. That's the approach used by the iOS keyboard.

I'll send a PR for this.

[Helium314]

How are other Serbian speakers seeing this?

On AOSP / LineageOS keyboard the letter has been on the layout for more than 10 years as far as I know, and I don't want to change what people might have used for a long time based on a single user's feedback.

[markokocic]

I don't have a strong opinion on this, since it's easy to customize, except for correctness reasons:

• This letter is not a part of Serbian alphabet.
• There is no single word in the standard Serbian dictionary using this letter, and maybe a total of 10 obscure words in some dialects
• GBoard and iOS don't have that letter in the core layout
• PR did not remove it, just put on a less prominent place, for compatibility reasons.
• Even Serbian Latin alphabet doesn't have neither that letter, nor latin equivalent. It has latin S, that looks the same, but is different from Cyrillic Ѕ.

I have no idea why it was there in OpenBoard. Maybe a copy of some Windows keyboard layouts, where that letter was put instead of a Latin letter "Y", just because Y would otherwise be unused. This letter exist in a standard Macedonian.

[Helium314]

As I said, I just want more users' feedback.

Searching through the issues I found user @Strahinja (from #280) using Serbian layout and not (yet) complaining about the s.
@Strahinja (if you still use this keyboard) do you also think s should be removed?

I have no idea why it was there in OpenBoard

Because it was on AOSP keyboard, which OpenBoard is a fork of.

This letter exist in a standard Macedonian.

Interestingly Macedonian (AOSP layout again) doesn't have an s on the keyboard... weird. But actually a reason to put a little less trust into the original layouts.

[Strahinja]

Searching through the issues I found user @Strahinja (from #280) using Serbian layout and not (yet) complaining about the s. @Strahinja (if you still use this keyboard) do you also think s should be removed?

I have no idea why it was there in OpenBoard

Because it was on AOSP keyboard, which OpenBoard is a fork of.

The letter resembling the latin letter "S" historically existed, and still exists, now as an obsolete relic, in a number of Cyrillic keyboard layouts related to former SFRJ (Yugoslavia). Apparently, it is a part of Macedonian alphabet, and it is pronounced as /d͡z/. However, it is definitely not part of Serbian alphabet.

I don't think this is something opinion-based, it is a matter of philology, prescribed by the orthographies of languages in question. But if you want my opinion, which aligns with the prescribed norm, I think the letter "S" should be removed from Serbian Cyrillic layouts where possible. In this I also agree with Marko.

[Helium314]

Thanks for the comprehensive reply, then I guess it's time to modernize the old layout a little bit.

Out of curiosity: Why didn't you complain about this? Was it because that was the usual layout on some Android keyboards?

[Strahinja]

Out of curiosity: Why didn't you complain about this? Was it because that was the usual layout on some Android keyboards?

It was mostly because the extra letter generally isn't seen as some kind of an acute problem, unlike what the hypothetical lack of letters would be. It is superfluous, but just doesn't stand out that much. I believe that is also why Marko said he doesn't feel as strongly about this.

As I said, the letter Dze was not only present in the usual layout on (some) Android keyboards, but is also present in various existing Serbian Cyrillic keyboard layouts. This is probably an oversight made by some standardization body, especially given how standards couldn't keep up with the flux of geopolitics (sadly, linguistics is inevitably intertwined with it).

Related to this issue: a few years ago, I submitted a patch for suckless.org tool svkbd, having a discussion similar to this one.

[markokocic]

I can give some historical context why is that letter there, partially from the second hand.

In the good old DOS days, when the first computers arrived in Yugoslavia, there was no standard for different keyboard layouts. It was all English. Then the need for a Yugoslavian Latin alphabet arose, and the de-facto standard called YuSCII was created. First, and the only implemented version was Latin-only, non-Cyrillic. It basically added all Yugoslavian Latin letters to the places of some special characters, but still kept English letters Q, W, X, Y even if they don't exist in Yugoslavian languages. It was important to keep them, so people can type DOS commands and later Windows shrotcuts without switching the keyboard.

That layout got later standardised, but those English letters that don't exist are kept. Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian Later inherited from that.

The Standard Serbian Cyrillic layout came only a lot later. It was created so that Cyrillic letters are put in the same places where equivalent Latin letters are located. However, since some Cyrillic letters don't have their Latin counterpart as one letter, but as a combination of two, an extra place was required. Those letters are Љ = Lj, Њ = Nj and Џ = Dž. For that reason, they went to the places where in the Latin version the English letters that don't exist in Serbian are located, to Q, W and X.

After that, there was one physical key left on the standard keyboard, that didn't have any Serbian letters assigned. That was the Latin letter Y. Since it was wasteful, stupid to leave one precious key unused, and it was inconsistent with Latin to move some other key there, someone decided to put a Macedonian letter Ѕ there. Yes, it doesn't exist in Serbian, but there are a few words in some southern Serbian dialects that uses it, so having it there was better than having an unused key.

That was all about PC keyboards. Later, when mobile phones came, people just used the same layouts, and that's how the first layouts got created. That's why Serbian Cyrillic got Ѕ in some versions. Later, that letter probably got removed because in mobile there are no physical keyboards. GBoard removed it completely, iOS put it as a pop-up on З.

As @Strahinja said, its presence didn't bother me on other keyboards, but it started bothering me in HeliBoard, since because of it, on my phone, keys of the bottom row are a bit narrower than on the two top rows. Removing it makes all the keys the same size on my phone, and thus more accurate to type and especially to glide.

[Susexe]

I'm a native Serbian speaker myself, and I can confirm all this. Very interesting discussion.

Let me add that Pravopis crnogorskoga jezika (Orthography of the Montenegrin Language) from 2009 only mentions this letter (unlike adding new letters ś [ɕ] and ź [ʑ]). It lists the following words with it: биѕа, биѕин, бронѕин, ѕинѕула, ѕановијет, ѕипа, обѕовина, ѕера, Бороѕан, Бурѕан(овић). I found additional ones on the internet: биѕаче, биѕока, ѕавала, Ѕано, ѕамантати, ѕера, ѕингани, ѕинѕа, ѕиѕка, ѕик, ѕипати, ѕоља, Ѕуѕа, ѕунѕа, Маленѕа, Миѕа.

I read that some of these words can be heard pronounced like this in southeastern Serbia (ѕоља, ѕик, ѕинѕа, ѕунѕа, Ѕуѕа). To me, none of these sound familiar; I don't remember encountering this sound in my surroundings, unlike [ɕ] and [ʑ].

Anyway, I wrote this to showcase that this sound is not common in Serbia and that there's a limited number of words with the letter Ѕ. I'd say it's more common in Montenegro.