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.

Comments

WOW

[Archfeld]

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 ??

Re:WOW

[Zontar The Mindless]

Really? Interesting...as I understand it, the Cultural Revolution was basically an expulsion of anything Western...I'm surprised they wanted to convert to a Latin alphabet.

Your understanding is not entirely incorrect. The Cultural Revolution was not anti-Western as much as it was anti-capitalist and especially anti-traditionalist.

Re:WOW

[Zontar The Mindless]

In VietNam's case, they had some prompting from the French.

Re:WOW

[Sique]

And even Germany changed at least the diverse cursive scripts in use in 1915 to Suetterlin script, which in 1941 was forbidden during the Nazi regime and replaced with a new antiqua based cursive similar to the english one. (Albeit the modern German cursive does not "cross the t", but uses the t-cross as connection to the next letter. Any attempt to graphologically interpret the way the ts are crossed thus runs into some problems with German cursive.)

Thus, most Germans can't read the handwritten letters of their grand-parents anymore, because the script is unknown to them.

Re:WOW

[stephanruby]

King Sejong is a celebrated Korean ruler who can literally say he invented the alphabet. He was also one of two rulers in the country's history awarded the titles "the Great." Sejong the Great was the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty, and ruled from 1418 – 1450.

He created 28 letters for a Korean alphabet. As time went on, revisions were made. Currently, 24 characters are used and are still under ongoing studies.

Government officials and aristocrats opposed the spread of "Hunminjeongeum," but they were outnumbered. The publication was completed in 1443 and approved in 1446. It spread among lower-class citizens, who were finally able to read and write.

After the publication of "Hunminjeongeum," longer documents followed. The next volume was called "Hunminjeongeum Haerye."

"A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days," the "Hunminjeongeum Haerye" says.

And if this Korean historical drama is accurate (I personally have no idea if it is), I believe this is the same king who commissioned an architectural structure to serve as an almanac of the stars so that Korean farmers who couldn't read would know when to plant and harvest their crops.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Some information here is incomplete.

There is no single one official cursive script in Germany. There were attempts to do this, but since every state had their own ideas on how to improve things and make writing curse more fluent different scripts were introduced over the time. This can lead to a lot of confusion between generations and people from different states because all scripts are valid. Working as an assistant to a professor at a German university I get to correct exams from time to time. And since students come from all over Germany and their scripts can be different I had to learn all of them. Fortunately for me, electric engineering does not require a lot of writing, but mostly mathematics and physics, which have their own conventions.

The cursive T that I learned during the early 90's in a German school looks exactly like this one here http://loopsandtails.com/cursi...
The script I learned here is the "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift", which loosely translates to 'Latin script' and was introduced in 1953. This script was developed from the "Deutsche Normalschrift" which was forced as a standard in 1941. Given only the minor differences between these two scripts it can still be considered to be modern today, depending on the state you're in.

Re:WOW

[rkordmaa]

You idiot, post soviet countries have highest literacy rates in the world, education is the one of the few things CCCP was actually really good at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[Zontar The Mindless]

Kazakh was written in Arabic script for a thousand years prior to Soviet times. Try again.

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[Alypius]

When I was in grad school, there was a lot of ink spilled over why Eastern European countries abandoned anything that favored Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union while Central Asian countries more or less retained it all. Since I was taking economics classes, all the lit decided that it was because the Soviets uplifted them into the 20th century, which, as an argument, has some merit. Also, since I was taking economics classes, all the lit completely ignored any kind of cultural implications viz-a-viz Cyrillic symbology. Sigh.

Turkish

[matushorvath]

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.