Slashdot Mirror
Kazakhstan Is Changing Its Alphabet From Cyrillic To Latin-Based Style Favored By the West (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic script to the Latin-based style favored by the West. The change, announced on a blustery Tuesday morning in mid-February, was small but significant -- and it elicited a big response. The government signed off on a new alphabet, based on a Latin script instead of Kazakhstan's current use of Cyrillic, in October. But it has faced vocal criticism from the population -- a rare occurrence in this nominally democratic country ruled by Nazarbayev's iron fist for almost three decades. In this first version of the new alphabet, apostrophes were used to depict sounds specific to the Kazakh tongue, prompting critics to call it "ugly." The second variation, which Kaipiyev liked better, makes use of acute accents above the extra letters. So, for example, the Republic of Kazakhstan, which would in the first version have been Qazaqstan Respy'bli'kasy, is now Qazaqstan Respyblikasy, removing the apostrophes.
The BBC article goes on to explain the economics of such a change, citing a restuarant owner that marketed his business using the first version of the alphabet. "All his marketing materials, the labelling on napkin holders and menus, and even the massive sign outside the building will have to be replaced," reports the BBC. "In his attempt to get ahead by launching in the new alphabet, [the owner] had not predicted that the government would revise it. He thinks it will cost about $3,000 to change the spelling of the name on everything to the new version, Sabiz." The full transition to the Latin-based script is expected to be completed by 2025, impacting this owner and many other small business owners.
This sounds like a huge undertaking, and seems to be a smart move but it is daunting to think of the effort involved in changing a national alphabet. I am not sure I've ever heard of such an effort before, anyone else ??
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
To be more competitive with the west? Or to adopt the "west"? If it's for innovation, that has nothing to do an alphabet. I cant imagine the US changing the alphabet to something like Spanish (let alone Cyrillic) and getting away with it; this is one of those things tightly ingrained into the cultural psyche. Good luck, haha!
Wondering if we can expect a comment from Borat on this matter?
Korea invented a whole new writing system in the 1600s. In more recent times, China formalized a "simplified" version of their script in the 1950s and 1960s and quickly switched over to using it. It wasn't a sudden, imposed change, but over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Vietnamese has transitioned from being written in modified Chinese characters to being written in heavily accented Latin character. In a less extreme example, Japan imposed a standardized set of logographic characters after World War II and mandated some other changes to the writing system to improve consistency and make it easier to learn.
This changeover seems to be most similar to the Chinese simplification, in that it's a fairly major change being imposed in multiple steps fairly quickly.
Such a switch could result in a loss of various folklore in Kazakhstan centering on the shapes and percieved symbology of the Cryllic alphabet. Also such a change seems unecessisary and wasteful of resources, it's not like those books and letters will rewrite themselves.
It seems like they plan on enforcing it on everyone somehow, as opposed to having it affect only the government or public signage (a la bilingual signs), otherwise why would that businessman bother with the change at all?
Hilariously, a good example of why Unicode would be beneficial on Slashdot ("smart" quotes being a bad example) and no one has mentioned it:
The example of the new way of writing Qazaqstan Respyblikasy in the summary is incorrect.
By your reasoning, Kazakhstan should also revert to Arabic script.
And your complaint about Turkish letters having diacritics and/or different sounds than they do in other languages is just silly. Exactly the same things are true of any other language using the Latin alphabet.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If Kazakhstan can do this, maybe US could take it as an example and finally move to the metric system?
The whole idea is to leave the past behind. Turkey before Ataturk was a static, backwards culture. Ataturk brought Turkey into the modern age, with women's rights, mandatory public schools, suppression of religion, and all that good stuff. If the people had still been able to read the old texts, there would have been more resistance to feminism and other progressive ideologies.
Ataturk was a tremendously positive secular influence on Turkey, which lasted almost a century until Western powers insisted on elections, which to nobody's surprise (except the Western powers) elected an Islamist government. Now Turkey is looking to the past instead of progressing to the future.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
c does not sound like sh in Turksih, its like ch.
Latin has 5 vowel symbols, but many languages have more, including English. You either put up with ambiguity or you use diacritics, or both. Ataturk did it to break ties with Persia and Iran and focus towards the west. And as statues in front of many schools show him teaching children the alphabet himself, https://www.shutterstock.com/i..., a big focus was in literacy.
Turkish is a vowel-heavy language with 8 native vowels and a few pulled in in Arabic loan words, but the Arabic script only partially represents vowels a,i, o by doubling the meaning of glottal stop, y and w, or using diacritics.
switching to Latin made sense for Turkish.
Importantly Ataturk allowed on transition time like the Qazaqs are thinking. it had to be done within months, under pain of fines. Medical words in Turkish are mostly Arabic, Maritime are Greek, early 20th century words are French, many modern words are English, computer and tech words are mostly Turkish - becuase that was also a great success of the Turkish language project, to creatively generate new Turkish words. bilgisayar=knowledgecounter=computer.
Xaxaxaxaxa
Russians count funny. What? Oh, right, Russians ARE FUNNY!
The Slavic languages have a few phonemes, which aren't included in 'the western alphabet'. Let's take Polish as an example. They have nine additions to the letters of the basic Latin script. I would quote them here, but guess what - even slashdot doesn't like'em:
http://adsorption.org/awm/info/pl-codes.htm
This is painful in both reading and writing. It just plain sucks. It is always an imperfect 'add-on', something improvised...
Bolshevics, and their leader Vladimir Lenin, planed to switch to Latin alphabet for all languages of the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually they did it for the Kazakh language in 20s, but finally it was returned back to Cyrillic.
Both, Cyrillic and Latin alphabet originated from the Ancient Greek alphabet. Cyrillic though remained a bit closer to it.
Nowadays a printer can print in any alphabet. So there will be no economy on typewriters as there could be in the early 20th century.
Image wise, in my opinion, they will not make themselves to look like the US or a rich European country, but rather like a country of say Latin America.
Keyboards, coding software, making it easier for dual language, English/Regional. Of course it opens up English speaking countries to considerable influence from non-English speaking countries as those non-English speaking countries learn more English. So no technical or social benefit for English speaking countries, in fact English media will then come under considerable competition, sheer numbers. English is simply becoming the dominant trading language but will now be subject to 10 times the current number holding to alternate cultures. Expect a lot more 'new' words to appear in English over the next decades. Cultural words that have no English equivalent.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Stuff like this, oh man, i just can't get enough!
All these switches from cyrillic to latin-based had nothing to do with what people really want and need. It is just a political game. Instead of making their economies better, improving peopleâ(TM)s living standards, building true multi-cultural society, most of ex-ussr governments turned to build mono-nationalistic countries. These leaders focused on growing their own wealth, begging for western money infusions under building democracy disguise in order to grab as much as possible. At the same time removing all possible ties with russia and forcing russian-speaking citizens change their culture or live as a second-class citizens became reason for war in Moldova and recently in Ukraine as much as the reason why Crimea population was happy with joining Russia.
even arabic script is way to new fangled and screwd up the turkish language. you would have to go to the turkic runes in order for things to be properly pronounced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.
Same could be said of Old English from the same period despite using largely the same alphabet (eth and thorn not withstanding).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Writing in Cyrillic alphabet is a PITA if you are using a computer and have to switch all the time between Cyrillic and Latin. Say, you write a LaTeX doc. The commands are in Latin and there is nothing you can do about it. The text is in Cyrillic. And you have to switch the keyboard layout all the time, assuming the text is Unicode-encoded, which of course it must be.
From the article it looks like they will be using the Turkish (i without a dot). Just goes to prove how much research went into the decision, since that is the one of the most problematic letter for computers to process correctly. It makes it impossible to determine the lower case of letter "I" without knowing the locale, and very easy to do it wrong when using the incorrect locale. And obviously the letter I/i is everywhere, including the text of programming languages and data interchange formats. You will get into hilarious situations like trying to lower case "RESPÝBLIKASY" and having to use a different locale for the tags and for the contents, or else you end up either with with the wrong I or the incorrect spelling of Respýblkasy with i.
So, good luck with your change, you'll need it.
Quoting from the movie by Woody Allen:
Esposito: From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.
I suspect that a major drive for dropping Cyrillic is to visually distance themselves from Russia, lest they too be 'liberated' and 'get to' rejoin the glorious motherland.
They've seen up close what a shared ethnic and cultural heritage brought the Crimea region of Ukraine.
No entiendo lo que dices.
...is being undertaken and we can expel this heretic script.
I'm still mad those stupid missionaries made us change from runes to Latin :-(
Captcha: mistake
c does not sound like sh in Turksih, its like ch.
Latin has 5 vowel symbols, but many languages have more, including English. You either put up with ambiguity or you use diacritics, or both.
Ataturk did it to break ties with Persia and Iran and focus towards the west. And as statues in front of many schools show him teaching children the alphabet himself, https://www.shutterstock.com/i..., a big focus was in literacy.
Turkish is a vowel-heavy language with 8 native vowels and a few pulled in in Arabic loan words, but the Arabic script only partially represents vowels a,i, o by doubling the meaning of glottal stop, y and w, or using diacritics.
switching to Latin made sense for Turkish.
Importantly Ataturk allowed on transition time like the Qazaqs are thinking. it had to be done within months, under pain of fines.
Medical words in Turkish are mostly Arabic, Maritime are Greek, early 20th century words are French, many modern words are English, computer and tech words are mostly Turkish - becuase that was also a great success of the Turkish language project, to creatively generate new Turkish words. bilgisayar=knowledgecounter=computer.
c does not sound like sh in Turksih, its like ch.
Latin has 5 vowel symbols, but many languages have more, including English. You either put up with ambiguity or you use diacritics, or both.
Ataturk did it to break ties with Persia and Iran and focus towards the west. And as statues in front of many schools show him teaching children the alphabet himself, https://www.shutterstock.com/i..., a big focus was in literacy.
Turkish is a vowel-heavy language with 8 native vowels and a few pulled in in Arabic loan words, but the Arabic script only partially represents vowels a,i, o by doubling the meaning of glottal stop, y and w, or using diacritics.
switching to Latin made sense for Turkish.
Importantly Ataturk allowed on transition time like the Qazaqs are thinking. it had to be done within months, under pain of fines.
Medical words in Turkish are mostly Arabic, Maritime are Greek, early 20th century words are French, many modern words are English, computer and tech words are mostly Turkish - becuase that was also a great success of the Turkish language project, to creatively generate new Turkish words. bilgisayar=knowledgecounter=computer.
c sounds like dzh; ç sounds like ch
In French, y is considered a vowel, make it 6, and the w is considered a semivowel by some. However French has way more than 6 vocal sounds, way more if you include nasal vowels, so some vowels combinations are used for some sons, for example "ou" for "oo" in "boot". With such conventions you can easily increase the number of vocalic sounds beyond the number of symbols. Portuguese is an extreme case, the number of subtly different vocalic sounds is extremely large (in Portugal, not so much in Brazil). At least none of these languages is as crazy as English, where the "great vowel shift" means that vowels in writing are poorly (to put it mildly) correlated to pronunciation. /.). Turkish needs about 8, but there was no chance they they adopt the alphabet of their nemesis.
The Greek alphabet has 7 vowels (although 3 have the same pronunciation in modern Greek, and the "oo" in "boot" uses "ou" as spelling, sorry I can't type Greek on
The results will be similar.
Similar to what? Relevant texts translated, and the world turning on? Have you read Bullokar's Expositor? I haven't and have no inclination to do so either. There does exist a field of people who do however study this and write in a modern style their analysis on it. If something is translatable it can also be translated. No great loss. You say this as if the Diwan Lughat Al Turk is some lost unreadable script.
By the way comparing something in 1074 CE to this is utterly stupid. Kazakh has been written in Cyrillic script for an astonishing total of 89 years! This change won't represent any great historical loss to the Kazakhs even if for some reason the world does forget how to read a Cyrillic script.
The purpose is not modernization. The purpose is exactly what you stated as the consequence - to deprive future generations of their history and heritage. Changing the alphabet essentially gives the state a blank slate to impose whatever version of history they prefer.
It started to be written in Arabian "alphabet" in XIII century. In 1920, it was changed to Latin alphabet.
Does anyone know any advantages of Latin over Cyrillic, apart from the "follow the masses" one (which causally is circular reasoning and hence invalid)?
Korean has a really elegant system that makes a *lot* of sense in every aspect. One character per syllabe. The sub-characters look (roughly) like the shape you make in you mouth. Consonants are added to the vowel roots. It can be learned in 15 minutes, which kills the popularity pseudo-argument. And it looks good too.
(I plan on designing a version for my own language, German.)
Well, at least it isn't Tibetan. ;)
This is rather old news. They switched a year ago.
Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet for the 3rd time during the last 100 years
arabic -> latin (1929)
latin -> cyrillic (1938)
cyrillic -> latin (2017.10.26)
Actually 4 times. Because they didn't like the version of their new latin script of 2017.10.26 and changed it to another version on 2018.02.19
1939-40 the Cyrillic script replaces the Latin Alphabet in Soviet Central Asia.
I wish they switched to the original Turkic script. Kazakh is a Turkic language. Its original script is the Turkic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It ideally fits phonetics of Turkic languages (unlike Latin). Also it looks beautiful
Kazakhstan used its own variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, with ~6 extra letters compared to Russian. Finding fonts that support Kazakh was a pain in the ass because of this.
The accents on capitals seen in the new alphabet are a lot more common, so will be easier to support.
ntr
Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.
Same could be said of Old English from the same period despite using largely the same alphabet (eth and thorn not withstanding).
Eth and Thorn are not really all that complicated and were sometimes used interchangeably since there were no firm grammatical rules at the time. Generally though, at the beginning (and sometimes the end) of a word substitute an '' and inside of a word substitute a ''ð' wherever you have a 'th' in a modern English word. The rest of old English, I'll admit, is harder. The funny bit is that some Icelanders can actually stumble through an old English text that the modern English stand no chance of understanding by virtue of the fact that they still speak old Norse.
Who the fuck is this? This is gold.
I've daydreamed before, as a language/linguistics nerd, at how the world might be different if we had a single common alphabet that all languages use. Sure it might need to have way more letters than is typical for alphabets to cover all possibilities but one advantage could be that given a single letter A, you could safely assume that it was a reasonably similar sound in every language that uses it. Then it would likely be the case that native speakers would typically only learn the subset of letters that apply to their language but the upside would be that if one ever went to learn a new language, one would only need to learn the letters not used by the native language.
So this would make learning other languages easier, make computing easier and likely help promote learning 2nd and 3rd languages.
Look at Ataturk and what he did to Turkish. He changed the alphabet to be Latin too, but with extra accents on some letters to make up for the sounds that do not exist in Latin. The result is that the same letters sound different. For example the c letter sounds like sh, and so on.
First the simple stuff... the Turkish "c" sounds more or less like a "j" in English. It's the "ç" that you probably thought about and it actually sounds like "ch."
Plenty of other languages use diacritics. Czech would be the best example, probably, since they have so many. But French also has some (on vowels) and Spanish has the "ñ." The sounds of letters (or combinations of letters) is not exclusive either. What the Portuguese language does with "nh", the Spanish do with "ñ" and the French or Italian do with "gn." What the Italians do with "che" the Portuguese and Spanish do with "que." So what Ataturk did is neither rare nor absurd.
Turks today do not speak English, Spanish nor French, nor any other widespread language despite that the alphabet is 'Western'. They are also cut off form their 600 or so years of recorded history with a vast amount of literature written in the Osmanli script, which is Arabic derived.
Do you think the English, the Spanish or the French read 1000 year texts from their own languages? Do you think the French speak English, even though they can see England from their coast?
I don't get it. Cyrillic is awkward to learn if you're used to Latin script. I did this the past two years when visiting Moscow. It was quite fun. Spelling through and finally recognising "Starbucks"written in Cyrillic is funny. And fun. Also getting around the metro without a dictionary. Fun, challenging and still easily done because you have to be a moron not to understand Moscows metro layout.
But as for the script itself: it has different glyphs and some switched out meanings, but it's trivially easy to learn and usually totally in sync with spoken language, much like German or the scandic languages. Moving to Latin is a total waste of time and the citizens are rightfully pissed IMHO.
Now if the Japanese or Chinese would switch - that I would totally get. It takes years to learn even the most basic Chinese or Japanese script. They're totally inefficient. Cyrillic otoh is very effective, perhaps even more than Latin script. Definitely way more efficient than English writing.
Bottom line: This makes no sense what so ever. Stupid.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And your complaint about Turkish letters having diacritics and/or different sounds than they do in other languages is just silly. Exactly the same things are true of any other language using the Latin alphabet.
Not quite, English is a prime example where spelling remained as is while pronunciation of vowels changed drastically from the original.
Danish is another example, they even added and removed some letters. And take French, or how else would you explain the pronunciation of the name of the Canadian prime minister?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
By your reasoning, Kazakhstan should also revert to Arabic script.
It might be because I naturally connect most of my letters when I write, but I found learning how to write Arabic incredibly easy and natural, even though it is written right to left. The main problem with an Arabic script is the diacritic vowels that are very often dropped when writing or in print. Makes reading Arabic a real pain because the same 3 root letters can have different meanings and pronunciation based on those missing diacritics so can only be figured out through context or practice. But find a way to use an Arabic script without needing the diacritic vowels and you've got yourself a pretty decent and often visually appealing alphabet.
Interesting sidenote, my college roommate who served a tour in Iraq said he remembered the spelling of the imperative "stop" because it looked like 2 guys in a canoe.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Then everything is fine
See Subject: Last night cdreimer came home dressed as a pirate with a few other guys similarlly dressed
He told me that he and his merry band were there to pillage my ass and have me walk the gang plank
They all fired in my hole
APK
P.S. => Afterwards they took turns flogging me and put me in my proper place because we all know my kind... apk
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The accents, acutes and circumflexes etc are quite unnecessary in writing. One can deduce which similar words are actually meant from the context. For example, Hebrew uses a single character (Aleph) for all vowels. It consequently has many words that are written the same way and people can still read it just fine.
This is why patience is important. Of course you need wait until a new communication systems deployment is running and stable for a few years before investing your entire marketing campaign into it. Wouldn't they troubleshoot and bug fix a system that they're installing for the first time in that country as a major transport protocol? Communication networks and protocols while in rollout should not be trusted not to go through a few revisions and patches before it is stable. Human communication s are in dynamic no different then computer communication s. The same basic principles apply to either
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings. Just like AssFux (lol), amicusNYCL, ShanghaiBill, and so many other "ne'er-do-wells" posting under fake names, you can't help but COMPLETELY EMBARRASS and DESTROY yourself trying to argue with me while I handle you perfectly...
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
I don't process "Zontar" as any more fake than "Alistair" or any other variant of "Alexander".
You know, with the Mass genocide of The Great leap Forward and the cultural revolution.
Communism kills...
... it won't render properly on Slashdot.
Have gnu, will travel.
Writing is a form of speech compression and the context conveys meaning as well
Converting a color image to grayscale is also compression, but good luck "decompressing" a black-and-white photo of a flower garden.
so it is not necessary to represent every little tone
Tone contours in Chinese languages reflect consonant distinctions that have been lost over centuries, in a process called cheshirization. Several words with completely different meanings, such as "mother", "horse", and "preceding sentence is a question", may be pronounced identically apart from tone contour. Use the wrong tone, and a question becomes an insult against the listener's mother. Or would you prefer that the written language preserve the consonants that have disappeared, leaving only traces in the spoken language, letting readers distinctions by replaying the last millennium of sound changes, as French and Tibetan (and to a lesser extent English) do?
They've had unicode for years now. The really sad part being: If slashdot wasn't concerned with keeping the codebase proprietary, they could probably backport most of it from Soylent's SlashCode port if they really wanted to, the messiest parts being any changes made to support the UI changes they made since the last GPL'd SlashCode release.
Soylent has ported it to perl 2.0, kept most of the old style interface (including the no-javascript filtering options) plus added CSS button support for viewing/hiding individual comments, so they can start out with a compacted view of the threads and you can expand lower ranked comments under high ranked comments you find interesting. The best part is, while there is quite a bit of overlap in articles posted, there are tons of articles on Soylent that never make it to Slashdot, as well as journal entries just like many people used to post here (And Soylent actually posts hot journal entries in the right sidebar of the front page!)
Check it out, you might be suprised and pleased with what they have accomplished. Unlike the Slash it is non-commercial too, with only 5-10k a year in hosting costs. Maybe that would go up if they got a few million more users though... ^.^
Same thing when, e.g., speakers of Romance languages type on U.S. keyboards. Accents and some punctuation get dropped. It's usually easy for native speakers to use context to figure out what was meant, but not terribly easy for others. And Google Translate isn't usually smart enough to handle this situation.
Nonaggression works!
"...Western powers insisted on elections..."
That's completely stupid. Turkey has had elections for 100 years, and continues to do so. Turkey has moved to a more authoritarian government, and their leader flirts with Islamist ideas, yes. Western powers have voiced concerns about that and rightly so.
However you seem to be trying to drop the blame for these changes at the feet of "Western powers". Turkey's moves are Turkey's. Suggesting otherwise is not merely wrong, but actively stupid.
"until Western powers insisted on elections" ... and supported the Arab spring uprising.
Thank you team Obama/Clinton.
It's an example of Vietnamese, clearly.
Ezekiel 23:20
VERY NICE !!!
We do have to consider that all other countries have inferior potassium.
Canada introduced metric product labelling circa 1976 and half of our grocery stores still boast their beef prices by the pound on the butcher display placards. But then it's back to kilograms at the cash register, due to the law, etc.
I read recently that the last person born in the 19th century just passed away at age 117.
This further supports my longstanding presumption that the last grocery store to promote beef by the pound will cease doing so circa 2050 (around the time that clear recollections of 1975 are hard to come by).
I'm metric/Imperial bilingual in a big way, but even so I have my own strange oases. Temperatures near the boiling point and yeast fermentation temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Food safe temperatures I know best in Celsius. Warm outdoor temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Cold indoor temperatures I know best in Celsius.
I also harbour these weird zones in mass and distance.
Patchwork transitions can linger in the weirdest ways.
On another note, I sure hope they ditch the ugly apostrophes. Orthographic transitions in 2018 should not be constrained by the 1984-era ASCII-centric bigotry of Big Blue's indestructible Model M keyboard.
And take French, or how else would you explain the pronunciation of the name of the Canadian prime minister?
Because French is a trash language. There is no other explanation.
It benefits just a few at the top, they will get more money from budget and they can raise âoeswitchâ tax. If you can reason switching in US to metric system as something because of Russia, sure that will happen soon.
No!
They should stick with what they have now, since most of their culture (literature, poetry, history, ..etc.) is written in Cyrillic.
That is my point.
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At what cost?
He is just like Napoleon: an army officer who made himself absolute ruler. He saved Turkey from direct occupation, and as idolized, and he took advantage of that to have absolute power. He forced people to abandon their customs (dress, for example) and culture (script for example).
On two visits to Turkey in the 1990s (before the rise of Erdogan), I see how appallingly he is worshiped until now. His statues are everywhere. His visage is on the front page of newspapers, every day! No criticism can ever be spoken of him, punishable by law. A kid on his dad's lap on a ferry, who cannot be more than 4 years old, was asked by his father: who is this, and the kid replied: Ataturk.
Ataturk is idealized by many, but he was an authoritarian totalitarian dictator.
His practices along with his successors in the army, and the above worship of him, are what led to the rise of Erdogan as backlash to this continual oppression: generations were falsely, yet romantically, told that there is a better alternative (religious government) and it is much better, and most of the rural conservative areas followed.
The result: now Turkey has the opposite type of dictator, with the same methods and striving to entrench himself further and further (made himself president, changed the constitution to his favour, and after the failed coupe he is more paranoid than ever).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
You are confusing the script with the language. Two separate things.
But to your point: Old English is barely English.
Beowulf is not English at all for example.
English as it is understood today is the result of the end of the Viking rule and down to the Norman invasion. From that era onwards, it is recognizable (Chaucer to Shakespeare).
Turkish is recognizable from before the work of Kashgari. He just recorded it and systematized it.
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The idea here is not which is better script: Latin or Arabic. Each has its challenges.
The idea here is cutting the people from their cultural past. Only literature that was approved was to be published in the new script, and the rest which does not agree with the narrative of the totalitarian state was left behind.
The result is that the dictator now has a population that reads only 'approved' stuff: Q.E.D!
My point is that a radical break with the past such as what the Turks did, and now the Kazakhs, will leave the population ignorant of their cultural history. That is bad.
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He changed it because the Arabic script is a terrible way to write the Turkish vowels; you have to have diacritics all over the place. Uyghur does it, but it's not easy.
this would make more sense in countries where reading and writing is a super complex to learn due to their many symbols.
They should put pride aside and get rid of their crappy writing
Diacritics lose a lot of credibility when it's possible to type in capitals in, say, French, and not have to use them.
And it's a lossy change if you then need to spell a proper name correctly when all you've seen is the upper case, non-diacritical version.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
French spelling needs ways of expressing its variety of vocal sounds, true, but does it really need to have a gazillion ways of writing the sound "oh"? ...)
(o, ô, oo, os, -od, -ot, au, eau, aux, eaux, -aut, -aud, -ault, -eaut, -eault,
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
In practice, it is not a problem at all, once you 'get it'.
It is the same for Arabic: with diacritics, everything is clear and explicit. Without, you subconsciously do inference from context. Newspapers (and news sites) in Arab countries do not have diacritics at all, yet everyone manages to read them, write and read contracts, read signs on shops, ...etc. without any problems. BBC Arabic News has no diacritics and everyone manages quite fine. It becomes second nature. For a non-native Arabic speaker it is a steep learning curve, until they 'get it'.
English has similar pronunciation and spelling challenges. Ask anyone who is not a native English speaker how it is like. An American who grew up in Hungary tells me how he was surprised that they had to take spelling lessons in English, while Hungarian (according to him) is fully phonetic with no need for exceptions. A Mexican showed me how Spanish is fully phonetic while English is not.
And ask yourself: how did the Turks manage to read and write their script for 8 centuries with no issues?
Again, this is not a defense of the Arabic script. Rather the lament of cutting off people from their culture and heritage by force. The Kazakhs should stay with what their culture is written in, which happens to be Cyrillic.
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Correction: in Turkish, c sounds like hard j in English (as in jack). C with a cedilla (tail on the bottom) is ch. S is s, and S with a cedilla is sh in English.
The undotted i is almost but not quite like a schwa -- the closest estimate I have is the almost-not-there vowel sound between s and m in any "ism".
Turks do not hear American style terminal Ts and Ps, as Americans actually replace them with glottal stops (or something like that). Say "boat" (without aspirating that final T) and "bow", and the Turks hear the same word. They also for the most part cannot pronounce "W"; they will pronounce "water" like "vwatter" -- and that central T will be a T, not a D as Americans reduce it.
Kazakhstan, Greatest country in the world!
Very interesting post, thanks!
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