One thing I find interesting about discussions of typography in Cyrillic is how poor the overall readability of text is in most fonts compared to Latin because of the relative scarcity of risers and descenders (e.g. pqlt etc)

One of my tutors at university claimed that she was able to read 9th century manuscript Cyrillic faster than modern printed books because the orthography was more varied and easier to scan/speed-read.

(That wasn't something I found to be true)

I remember seeing some studies that experimentally show this to be true for Hebrew (another de/ascender-poor writing system), but can't find them at the moment.

Thanks for the factual explanation! I found the example cyrillic texts unreadable as a set of horizontal lines (serif) and vertical lines (characters themselves) giving the feeling of a grid, but I dimissed it as "I can't read cyrillic anyways".

Now that you wrote it down, it does actually makes sense.

It is true to some point, yet no so bad

English letters with asc/descenders: b d f h k l g j p q

Cyrillic: б д у ф ц щ

Also ё й could be considered having “stuff” above.