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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.
Yes, Azerbaijan switched from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet in 2001.
China's effort to switch to Simplified. Vietnam's conversion from some form of Chinese to Latin.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
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.
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.
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.
A number of former Soviet and East European countries have changed from Cyrillic to Latin. I would expect all of the -stans to follow suit with either Latin or Persian script, as their languages are related to either Turkish or Persian (depending on the country), and have nothing linguistically in common with Russian, the only reason they are using Cyrillic is their Soviet colonial past. Even some countries with Slavic languages, which are related to Russian have switched from Cyrillic to Latin as they've grown politically further from Russia and closer to Western Europe.
Really? Which ones? AFAIK only the orthodox Slavic countries have used Cyrillic in 19th or 20th century (Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia), and none of those have switched.
Not "switched" per say, but several of the countries you listed have both Cyrillic and Latin versions of their alphabets. Both of them are in common use.
Also, while you mention Serbia and Macedonia, you fail to mention the other ex-yugoslav states (Croatia, Bosnia, Slovania) all of which used Cyrillic prior to the breakup of the country, and which now (iirc) only reckognize the Latin version as their official alphabet.
Hell, even romance languages have phonemes that aren't included in the western alphabet". ñ ç ã õ â ê î ô û to name some.
Thought I'd drop by and clarify on this point, as someone who speaks Chinese (simplified Mandarin / mainland Chinese). Sadly Slashdot doesn't support UTF-8 so I can't demonstrate the details reliably. I will try to use some, but I dunno how they'll turn out. I'll try to stick to ASCII + descriptions + links.
True pinyin cannot use the Latin character set (ex. ISO-8859-1) because it lacks several glyphs that contain necessary diacritic marks for its vowels. Written pinyin requires several different diacritics to be accurately represented, always written above vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and French u (u with two dots above it)):
* A straight line (crummy ASCII example: hyphen: -) indicating 1st tone /) indicating 2nd tone
* A rising line (crummy ASCII example: forward slash:
* A rising-falling line (crummy ASCII example: letter v: v) indicating 3rd tone
* A falling line (crummy ASCII example: backslash: \) indicating 4th tone
* No diacritic means no tone (which some call "5th tone")
Here's a reference for pinyin tonal depiction on Wikipedia.
There are several variances of romanized Chinese created over the years -- Yale, Wade-Giles, Sin Wenz, and several couple others that slip my mind. For example, I can't read most of them, but can (grudgingly) read Wade-Giles when forced to (some 1960s educational books were written in this format); I was taught pinyin in (American) school. I do not believe Chinese today are taught any of these variances; they are, however, taught pinyin as children. Whether or not they remember it is an entirely separate matter. :-)
Here is a better Wikipedia article on actual Chinese romanization methods. The variances if compared side-by-side look innocent/minor but are actually quite annoying if encountered in bulk.
Anyway, to combat the limitation/annoyance of diacritic marks, many people online use a bastardised combination of pinyin and Wade-Giles, allowing for romanized Chinese using pure ASCII. You may see this version occasionally. Again, lack of UTF-8 on Slashdot makes this hard, but the sentence "tonight I went to the Beijing language institute" would, in this format, be written as jin1tian1 wan3shang4 wo3 qu4 le bei3jing1 yu3yan2 xue2yuan4. No number means a word without tone (ex. particles).
There's also what's called bopomofo which is the system Taiwanese use. Please note the tonal marks section. Cantonese (Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, etc.) use the Jyutping system.
By the way: Korean Hangul has the same problem -- several romanization variances with no widespread standard. Someone will probably chastise me for this, so I'd better correct myself (kind of): the Korean government deployed a standard called RR or MoC2000 for street signs, and wants it adopted in all other mediums (textbooks, etc.). But adoption has been extremely slow outside of road signs, and it's a fairly new/recent method (though to their credit: RR doesn't use diacritics). I learned Korean only a few years after the introduction of RR, so I got a strange intermixed combination of Yale and RR. But not even South Koreans seem to get it right: take this street sign for example, which reads "Dohwa Jct" and "Dowon Stn"... except the "do" is the same character in Hangul; someone added the "h" by mistake (because habits). Easier to just use actual Hangul, especially because it's super easy to learn; King Sejong was remarkably intelligent, focused on making something even "country bumpkins" could remember.
Asian linguistics lesson over.
Per se. To paraphrase Old Biff "you look like an idiot when you spell it wrong"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Oh yeah, at the time of Atatürk Turkish moved from Arabic script to Latin.
Because Kazakh is of the Turkish family of languages it sounds kind of logic to do this move.
But in Turkey there is now a small religious movement to go back to Arabic...
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You've never seen a Frenchman count if you think Russians count funny. As soon as it goes beyond 70 it starts to be a fucking math project.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Those who used Cyrillic in the Eastern Europe continue to use Cyrillic. Some former soviet union countries in Cental Asia switched to Latin
Moldova switched in 1989 from Cyrillic to Latin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_Cyrillic_alphabet
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com