"What is going through the mind of someone who sends a thank-you letter typed on a computer - and worse yet - by emailing it, instead of writing it themselves and mailing it in an envelope? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to use a pen and write it with your own hand?"
With the exception of some "ligatures" like Ю (I + O) and special characters like Ъ, Cyrillic is largely based on Greek and some Aramaic (e.g. Ш). In the past it included pretty much the entire Greek alphabet.
Because Polish has avoided to use diacritics in many cases, many Polish words are much longer not only than their Cyrillic equivalent, but also than their Czech equivalent, where the Polish double letters are replaced by letters with diacritics.
(Going on a tangent.) The number of transformer explanations/tutorials is becoming overwhelming. Reminds me of monads (or maybe calculus). Someone feels a spark of enlightenment at some point (while, often, in fact, remaining deeply confused), and an urge to share their newly acquired (mis)understanding with a wide audience.
There's no rule that the internet is limited to a single explanation. Find the one that clicks for you, ignore the rest. Whenever I'm trying to learn about concepts in mathematics, computer science, physics, or electronics, I often find that the first or the "canonical" explanation is hard for me to parse. I'm thankful for having options 2 through 10.
Originally the aleph was intended to be merely a placeholder for a missing consonant at the beginning of a word, which effectively made it look like something representing (any) vowel.
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