The Double E-Mail

One thing I had noticed a while back but kept forgetting to write about is the phenomenon of the "double" e-mail in Bulgaria. (That's the name I have given it.) What is the double e-mail? When you send official e-mails in Bulgarian you are supposed to write them in Cyrillic. Frequently, however some people's e-mail programs don't automatically recognize Cyrillic. Then you have to manually switch the message's encoding, etc. etc. A process that although not that complicated just makes it that tiny bit more annoying for you to read your e-mail. The solution to this problem is the double e-mail. The message first appears in Cyrillic, then is transcribed with Latin letters underneath. Not a very efficient solution either, since you have to write every message out twice basically. But... for official e-mails this seems to be the norm. One can ask, why not just go with the Latin-script version, as do most Bulgarians that e-mail/message each other? But there is a whole school of people who oppose this although it would save quite a bit of time. I don't necessarily understand their reasoning. It goes something like, if we give up Cyrillic in e-mails, then slowly we will give up Cyrillic script altogether. Which I don't think is necessarily the case. Although I must say that since kids have started using computers more often, and thus Latin script to e-mail and chat instead of Cyrillic, their spelling errors have significantly increased. One might argue this is not only due to computers... but I think that computers and less use of Cyrillic have a lot to do with it.

Another note on this topic: there is also a growing school (especially of younger people) who want to get rid of the Cyrillic script altogether...and have us switch to the Latin one. Apparently, they will be holding protests on May 24th, the Day of Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture and the Slavonic Alphabet. Now that is a bit too much... although who knows maybe in time, with the ever-growing use of technology and less need for writing things out, there will come a day in which for simplicity's sake we will switch to the Latin script. Personally I think that would be a shame... but can also easily see it happening. Any thoughts/feelings on that possibility?