Stroppiness

The inhabitants of some countries get stroppy because they are not allowed to smoke. The inhabitants of other countries get stroppy because they are not allowed to drink. There may be countries, of which I would approve, where the inhabitants get stroppy because they are not allowed to chew gum in public.

While I have just read that the inhabitants of the Balkans get stroppy because they have to learn to cope with having two alphabets on the go at once. I quote: 'In Serbia and Croatia, both the Roman and the Cyrillic alphabets are taught to all elementary school children and are used interchangeably by the skilled reader. Most characters in the two alphabets are unique to one alphabet or the other, but there are some characters that occur in both. Of those, some receive the same phonemic interpretation, regardless of alphabet (common letters), but others receive a different interpretation in each alphabet (ambiguous letters). Only letter strings composed exclusively of common letters can be pronounced in the same manner in both alphabets. In contrast, strings that contain ambiguous but not unique letters are phonologically bivalent. They can be pronounced in one way if the characters are considered Roman letters and in a distinctly different way if they are considered Cyrillic letters'.

Reference 1: Toward a Strong Phonological Theory of Visual Word Recognition: True Issues and False Trails - Ram Frost - 1998. Then and now a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.