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

[ladislavb]

Yes, Azerbaijan switched from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet in 2001.

Re:WOW

[Dayze!Confused]

China's effort to switch to Simplified. Vietnam's conversion from some form of Chinese to Latin.

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Turkish.

Re:WOW

[Zontar The Mindless]

Only thing I can think of that comes close is simplification of written Chinese under Mao, but even that wasn't as radical as this. (During the Cultural Revolution, the leftists wanted to switch to a Latin alphabet, but even Mao couldn't make that happen.)

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[lennier1]

Almost forgot about the latter.
It's interesting how the people in Vietnam, Korea, Japan and a few others "imported" Chinese characters and then all chose different paths of modifying/extending/replacing it to suit their own cultural needs.

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[Alypius]

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.

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[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

[Alypius]

That's really interesting, thanks!

Re:WOW

[Zontar The Mindless]

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

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[Anonymous Coward]

Turkey in the 1920s. See: Turkish alphabet, Ataturk's Reforms.

Re:WOW

[DNS-and-BIND]

Western things had already been expelled. The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to murder Chinese culture. That's literally why it was called the Cultural Revolution. Chinese characters? Outdated and the new Latin alphabet can serve to allow our people to communicate. Throw out the wisdom of the ancients, why do we need it? Our modern progressive theories can explain the world much better. Burn it all down and bury the ashes, so that nobody can be contaminated by these old thoughts. Pull down the statues, ban the books written before the modern age, and beat up all the priests. The Red Guards were basically Antifa with government backing. How did it work out? Let's ask the Chinese.

"We cast aside our three core ideas - Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism - and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978. We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster."
-- Zhu Zhongming, Shanghai accountant

China still has yet to recover. You know how old Chinese ladies are so tiny and short? It's because when they were children in the 50s and 60s, they didn't get enough to eat and their growth was permanently stunted. You know how Chinese people are rude, selfish and spit everywhere? This is from the Cultural Revolution that taught that manners are bourgeois and respecting your family meant that you were an enemy. This will eventually fade, but it will take another half century shake off the toxic effects.

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[jrumney]

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.

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[Humbubba]

In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk moved Turkey to a Latin based alphabet, replacing the Ottoman Turkish alphabet.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Easy to do when 99.6% of your populace is illiterate.
 
-=BeauHD=-

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[Zontar The Mindless]

The Red Guards were basically Antifa with government backing.

Please stick with the facts, and quit trying to shove your nutjob politics into everything. Thanks.

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[DNS-and-BIND]

College age kids from good Western colleges are suddenly acting in a manner that resembles Red Guards during Mao's cultural revolution. They identify what they perceive as an ideological enemy, they organize shaming sessions and they try to take him down by any means necessary. Group identity overtakes good sense. If you're not with us, then you're against us.

One can only hope that this generation grows the fuck up out of this madness, otherwise there are dark, dark times ahead. "Fuck free speech!" one group of social justice advocates recently told Vice Media, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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[Sique]

Turkey went from the Arab letters to Latin letters in the 1920ies (and at the same time replaced Osman Turkish with Modern Turkish). Many minority languages in Southeast Europe and Central Asia have several attempts at getting an alphabet for them, like the Udi language in the Northern Caucasus, which has had the Caucasian Albanian alphabet in the Middle Ages, a Latin based alphabet at the end of the 19th century until the 1970ies and uses now an Cyrillic Alphabet. Interestingly though, Udi is beside Georgian only the second indigenious Caucasian language to ever had their own alphabet (Armenian, albeit having its own alphabet, is not an indigenious Caucasian language, but indogerman).

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[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.

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[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.

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[AC-x]

> During the Cultural Revolution, the leftists wanted to switch to a Latin alphabet, but even Mao couldn't make that happen.

The Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically...

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? The US is moving to cyrillic you say?

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's precisely what you spend all your time on Slashdot doing, methinks the nutjob doth protest too much.

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[xlsior]

I am not sure I've ever heard of such an effort before, anyone else ??

Turkey switched from an Arabic script to a Latin-based one in 1928.

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[c6gunner]

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.

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[Barabul]

Romania switched from Cyrillic to Latin in 1862.

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[qaz123]

Those who used Cyrillic in the Eastern Europe continue to use Cyrillic. Some former soviet union countries in Cental Asia switched to Latin

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[Anonymous Coward]

Romania switched over from cyrillic to latin script in the 19th century, with some parts of the country using cyrillic sporadically well into the 20th century. Moldova switched to latin script in 1989 if I'm not mistaken.

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[Vinegar Joe]

That's for dictionaries and teaching.

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[Zontar The Mindless]

Western things had already been expelled.

Yeah, especially Western political philosophy.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> Slovania

Dumbass.

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[Zorpheus]

Germany stopped using its old-style letters in 1941. Though it already used both styles in parallel for 400 years.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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
* A rising line (crummy ASCII example: forward slash: /) indicating 2nd tone
* 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.

Re: WOW

[CrimsonAvenger]

per say

Per se. To paraphrase Old Biff "you look like an idiot when you spell it wrong"....

Re:WOW

[jrumney]

I was thinking Croatia and Slovenia at least, but apparently both Latin and Cyrillic were in official use in pre-split Yugoslavia, so it wasn't so much of a change as a reflection of the already existing reality.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

He had indeed invented modern Korean letter system as well as commanding his people do lots of overtime work to create various useful and helpful inventions. He was a great king no doubt but maybe horrible boss :D

Re:WOW

[Teun]

Indeed.
But Kazakhstan is very literate.
And large sections of the population master both the Kazakh and Russian language meaning in future they'll have to learn both scripts.

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[Teun]

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...

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

[AC-x]

It's also the main system for typing, so much so that some are forgetting how to write the characters by hand.

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[Anonymous Coward]

We have a similar issue with cursive script and it isn't more than about 52 symbols. Capital g z and q are uncommon. Remember how to write them?

Re:WOW

[PrimaryConsult]

From what I recall in language classes, while Korea and Japan imported the Chinese characters and used them as-is while simply grafting their own pronunciations to the characters (and eventually developing their phonetic-only alphabets to augment), Vietnam took a different route and rearranged the characters to fit their spoken language better while retaining meaning. The end result was something highly confusing and difficult to learn (for the time period). When the Portuguese showed up preaching Christianity the response seemed to be "this Jesus stuff is great and all but, wow can you teach us that alphabet your book is written in?"

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[c6gunner]

Per se. To paraphrase Old Biff "you look like an idiot when you spell it wrong"....

It's not your constant need to correct people, per say, which makes you seem like a cunt ... it's more in how you do it.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like they need to do it gradually, the same way you'd switch from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right-hand side (first week it's cars, then busses the next week, then trucks...)

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Vietnam ditched their hybrid Chinese-character abomination in the late 19th century I believe, once the French showed them they could spell their language with 40 characters instead of 4000.

The PRC seem to have evaluated switching to latin characters seriously. They have developed a very good script (hanyu pinyin) at least. It's not going to happen any time soon but they are seemingly ready.

Japan was well on it's way to script reform, driven by academics and government alike, and in fact did reform it's script a lot in the 19th century but efforts stalled in the 20th century possibly due to the same hypernationalism that carried them in WWII. Occupation forces also discouraged script reform movements from restarting either to prevent appearance of cultural imposition, or to hobble their fierce and recently conquered enemy, depending on your theory. There are still tiny movements in Japan. Like the dvorak and the duodecimilists, they are totally right but it's just too late now.

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[Anonymous Coward]

There is a price to accessibility and progress. The inability to read the old letters (unless you specifically sit down and learn Sütterlin)are the price for being understood by the rest of the world, and probably one of the things Hitler actually got right.

If backwards compatibility was so all overshadowing important, we'd still be speaking and writing in Latin.

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[cbraescu1]

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

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[rjune]

Actually, I do, but cursive is getting rarer and rarer. It's not even taught in schools anymore. They cite lack of time because so much of what they have to teach comes from above (The state) It's gotten to the point that college students don't know cursive. We may have to train "translators" to read older documents one day.

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[qaz123]

That's correct. That's the only exception in the Eastern Europe. But actually it's half correct. Because Moldovans speak Romanian language and Romanian has used the Latin alphabet much longer than since 1989

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[rkordmaa]

Similar stuff is being done fairly often, changing currency, alphabet, state language, measurement system, what have you. "It's hard" is a stupid excuse, changing is no harder than using the suboptimal standard forever to come. A lot of difficulty now is always outweighed by little difficulty forever to come. If it's clear that new system is better way to do things, then you switch and that's all there is to it.

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[fgouget]

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 ??

Meh. Sounds much easier than switching the US to metric!

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:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

The phrase I overheard in one of those newly-liberated "republics":

"Once we change the alphabet, we all will start to understand English!"

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone can do It, Trump can.

Re:WOW

[Oswald McWeany]

Kazakhstan is very literate.

And large sections of the population master both the Kazakh and Russian language meaning in future they'll have to learn both scripts.

In all likelihood, a large number of them probably already do know both scripts. I know in a lot of countries that don't use the latin alphabet, there is a large understanding of it- frequently out of necessity. I've never had to learn a language with a different alphabet, the languages I've learnt so far have been western, but from speaking to people who have learned Russian- learning the second alphabet is actually one of the easier steps of learning Russian. It's not that hard to learn a new alphabet- especially one with many similarities.

Re: WOW

[mrchew1982]

Korean and Japanese characters differ greatly from the Chinese ones, at least in modern day. I can always spot the Korean ones because they use a lot of circles.

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[Anonymous Coward]

per say

Per se. To paraphrase Old Biff "you look like an idiot when you spell it wrong"....

For all intensive porpoises he was close enough.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Azerbaijan did this in 2001. Korea switch from the Chines style characters to their own alphabet in the 1400s.

I predict the Chinese will switch to the Korean alphabet within the next 100 years. Character based language is full of fail for the computer age.

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[StuartHankins]

We can't even manage to switch to metric here in the US. When I was in elementary school, we were told not to bother with Imperial units as the metric conversion would surely happen soon. Well that didn't work out, we have to fiddle with 2 sets of tools, many times even to work on one assembly since the subcomponents are sourced from differently tooled shops.

Much respect for any large group of people who can accomplish such a huge task!

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with a cunt? Pretty much everybody loves them, which is more than I can say for you, turd chomper. Many people wouldn't stop to piss on you if you were on fire. But how does that make you feel?



Truth is, we don't really care. You're like gum on a shoe, briefly pesky but nothing a good scrape can't take care of.

Too many words? Go fuck yourself.

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[lennier1]

Of course we have to oversimplify things here to keep the topic from detailing, but ,,,

You're right on the Japanese and Vietnamese, though the Koreans chose a different route, replacing it with familiar looking characters of their own, that are also syllable-based, but where each character represents a structured combination of the letters/sounds. Basically, if you know the "letters" and the pattern in which to read Korean characters you can already read the words out loud, even without any understanding of the meaning of the words.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble is that some people want writing to accurately reflect the spoken word and this is not necessary. Writing is a form of speech compression and the context conveys meaning as well, so it is not necessary to represent every little tone, inflection and metrum in writing. If writing is kept simple, then people will be able to read it just as well (or better) as when it is done in an overly complicated way.

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[Anonymous Coward]

He's probably a butt-hurt Russian upset that the colonies are deserting the empire.

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[Miamicanes]

Simplified Chinese was a major OFFICIAL change, but at approximately half of the changes just changed the appearance of printed characters to match the way people had been writing them for YEARS using ballpoint pens and pencils.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that Romania switched from Cyrillic to Latin some 150 years ago.

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[Joey Vegetables]

My wife is from Macedonia. I believe only Cyrillic is official there, but the Latin alphabet is very widely used also, and when texting, posting on FB, etc., Macedonians typically type in un-accented Latin characters simply because those are the easiest to use, and the lack of accents rarely causes ambiguity in south Slavic languages. It does make it impossible to use Google Translate though. (It's close to Bulgarian, but not quite close enough.)

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[Anonymous Coward]

Slovenia? I don't think they ever used Cyrillic. As for Croatia and Bosnia, under Yugoslavia they were supposed to speak one language with the Serbs (Serbo-Croatian) which supported both Cyrillic and Latin scripts as official.

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[Srin Tuar]

Portuguese missionaries devised the quoc ngu.

The main reason it took over was not french influence so much as the fact that most people were illiterate so it would be their first written language, and the fact that it was simple much more suited to their language than the chu nom.

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[Joey Vegetables]

The only mildly hard thing about learning the Cyrillic alphabet is that some characters look the same as *different* Latin characters and vice versa and at first it's easy to confuse them. In time one gets used to this and it's not hard to switch between them.

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[Anonymous Coward]

All asian alphabets are primitive gobbledigook. They should be ashamed of using such imperfect tools. The modern world is Latin. Period.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Vietnam had some contact with Korea and Japan's alphabet system (extant by the time Portagees arrived).

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[Anonymous Coward]

Communism itself was acknowledged as being Western...Marx and Engels got a bunch of statues.

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[jbmartin6]

Korea switched from Chinese character to their own writing system, Hangul, in early twentieth century. before 1920 I think but look that up for yourself before quoting it.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You admit you are a depression case nutjob Zontar The Mindless https://slashdot.org/comments.... Keep projecting!

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[tepples]

My own cursive uses manuscript capitals. But as was taught in elementary school, capital Z is a 3 (as in Cyrillic), Q is a 2, and G is the logo of General Mills cereal.

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[painandgreed]

Korean and Japanese characters differ greatly from the Chinese ones, at least in modern day. I can always spot the Korean ones because they use a lot of circles.

Because at one point, Korea had a king that decided they needed their own phonetic language and had people create Hangul. This was done to make the written language easier and increase literacy of his people.

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[Anonymous Coward]

A correction to your korean example.

In the sign the syllables are do-hwa-yoek and do-won-o-goe-ri. In both cases the syllable for "do" is the same and the romanization is correct as the "h" is in another syllable.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Downvoted by Chinese patriots?

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[Malc]

Didnâ(TM)t Croatia switch to the Latin alphabet in the mid-19th century (Yugoslavian times being a linguistic blip)?

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[Malc]

Cyrillic comes from Bulgaria though! You give too much credit to the Russians :)

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

the other ex-yugoslav states (Croatia, Bosnia, Slovania) all of which used Cyrillic prior to the breakup of the country

Seriously? When exactly did Slovenians and Croatians in Yugoslavia ever use Cyrillic?

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[zabbey]

From where does the UNESCO Institute for Statistics get its information? Do they have teams in every country verifying the claims of literacy? Do they ask every person if they can read? Or do they do samples? If so, do they (really) get to pick the group of participants? Or do they rely or government reports?

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[ThanatosMinor]

More to the point, it wasn't even used correctly. "Per se" does not mean "exactly" or "specifically" or as generic space filler. "Per se" means "by itself" and is usually used to say something has an intrinsic property vs a property it has that is not intrinsic. It's used to say things like "an orthographical error is not a huge problem per se, but when it confuses the meaning or syntax of a sentence it can be."

Which brings me to the next point, which is that if you're going to be a pedant, at least be pedantic about shit that matters more than spelling.

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[stephanruby]

...as well as commanding his people do lots of overtime work to create various useful and helpful inventions.

Yes, not only he simultaneously invented both the "How to learn a new language in 4 hours" genre and the "For Dummies, Learn a new language in 10 days" genre.

"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.

But I can easily tell he's the type of boss that tells you to do something that will take you realistically at least 4 months to do, but that only gives you 1 hour to do it in, thus forcing you to do unpaid overtime to make up the difference -- all the while berating you that you're constantly late at meeting his super short arbitrary deadlines.

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[c6gunner]

Seriously? When exactly did Slovenians and Croatians in Yugoslavia ever use Cyrillic?

Always? I don't know too many Slovenians but I do know a bunch of Croats and they can all use Cyrillic. They don't much like it these days, and in Croatia itself there have been protests and acts of vandalism in areas which have tried to reintroduce Cyrillic, but they all can read it and write if if they want to because prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia it was one of the official alphabets.

Even prior to the formation of Yugoslavia, Cyrillic was used widely enough in Croatia that, during World War 2, the Nazi supported government of Croatia decided to ban it. You don't need generally ban things which people aren't doing.

Re: WOW

[Swave An deBwoner]

True. And he's biased against Latins anyway.

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Melania.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Turkish, Turkic. Not Persian, Farsi.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Turkic Family of languages. There is a big difference between those words. Turkish is also part of the Turkic Family.

Re:WOW

[GLMDesigns]

Get rid of the 4 Olds was a central point of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas)

The US is going through its own version of the Cultural Revolution right now.

"The constitution is evil." "Only the the revolution counts." "Anything that opposes the revolution is evil." "Fk free speech"

Re: WOW

[jrumney]

I admit my ignorance there, but I would still blame the Russians for any cases where Cyrillic has been imposed on a language as part of their cultural domination.

Re: WOW

[mcswell]

mostly right, but "phonetic language" should read "phonemic writing system". All spoken languages are phonetic, in the sense that words are represented by sequences of sounds. There's also a distinction between the phonetics of a language and its phonemics, but that would be getting into the weeds...

Re:WOW

[mcswell]

In English, right, you don't have to write tone, although we write some kinds of intonation using punctuation, like commas, question marks, exclamation marks and periods (full stops for the Brits here). But tone languages are different; in a tone language, you can have two or more words that have exactly the same consonants and vowels, but differ in tone. If you write such pairs (or triplets or...) in isolation (without context), and you don't write the tone, you can't tell which word it is--just like if we wrote /p/ and /b/ with the same letter, you couldn't distinguish 'pit' from 'bit'.

Tone languages vary as to how important tone is. In some languages, there are relatively few words that differ only by tone, so that if you write sentences in such languages without writing the tone, it's usually not hard to figure out the tones (assuming you are fluent in the language!). But in languages that have many words distinguished only by tone, writing without marking tone makes for confusing reading.

The majority of languages in the world (but not the majority by population) are tone languages. Chinese, of course (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and others), Vietnamese, Thai, Lao. Many languages of Africa, including Yoruba (but while Yoruba is "correctly" written with tone, in practice it tends to be written without tones). Many Amerindian languages, including Dene (Navajo).

Some tone languages have only two tones, but others have more. Thai has 5.

Re: WOW

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Of course you "can use Cyrillic" for Serbo-Croatian. That what Serbs do. Were your Croat friends secret Serbs?

Re:WOW

[mcswell]

Nothing primitive about other writing systems (although I guess you could make a case for alphabetic writing systems being better). And if you want imperfection in writing systems, you need look no further than written English. Learning to spell English takes years, and we even have contests for accurate spelling. I think that's absurd. Part of the problem is that we spell etymologically (why is there a 'y' in 'etymological'? why not spell it like it sounds, 'etimological'? what's the 'gh' for in 'though' and 'enough'?). Part of the problem is that we have well over ten distinct vowels in English, and only five vowel letters (we could have used 'y' as an additional vowel letter, but we use it instead as another way of writing 'i'). And part of the problem is that we spell the same sound in multiple ways (the aforementioned /i/ sound with 'i' and 'y'; the /k' sound with 'k', 'c', and 'ck'; the first sound in 'Jill' with 'j' in some words and 'g' in others. And for some sounds we need--or use--digraphs (more than one letter, like 'sh', 'ch', the aforementioned 'ck', not to mention the "silent e"). In sum, it's a mess, and we have the Latins (who only had five vowels) in part to blame for it.

That said, there are lots of languages written in some variant of the Latin script. Unlike English, when they need extra sounds, they often use accent marks or digraphs. And when languages are newly written (as for example all the Amerindian and Polynesian languages), one can at least ignore etymology (ok, you usually have to deal with loan words, which is a sort of etymological issue). So if you want a more perfect tool, you should write in Tzeltal (a Mayan language), or Navajo, or some other language that uses the Latin script in an reasonable way. Not English.

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

"per se", Latin for "by itself".

Re:WOW

[geekymachoman]

During Yugoslavia, kids in schools learned both Cyrillic and Latin and it was used equally. Most road signs were/are written in latin and cyrillic. Everybody that came from that system can read and write both scripts, Croats included.

Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe that had this.

Re: WOW

[PrimaryConsult]

Yup, but it wasn't until the 20th century that Korea had stopped using the Chinese characters (called Hanja). Hanja=Kanji=Hanzi="Chinese characters from the Han Dynasty". I was more illustrating that while Korea and Japan created their own simplified phonetic alphabets, Vietnam threw in the towel and modified the Roman alphabet to suit their needs.

Re:WOW

[Hognoxious]

As I understand it the spoken form is almost identical. The Croats preferred to write using the Latin alphabet because they're mostly bead-jigglers.

Re:WOW

[Hognoxious]

Mine doesn't even look like English unless I use a fountain pen.

Re:WOW

[eionmac]

Mao did by supporting a person change the romanised version to Pinyin. Which made a lot of folk literate( change 20% literacy to 80% literacy), so he had a major literacy change, by 'simplification' which allows computer use of keyboard.

Re: WOW

[Traxus]

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.

Sorry, but Croatia and Slovenia did not use Cyrillic, but a version of the Latin alphabet.

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Cyrill the Greek was just passing through...

Re: WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Poland didn't switch, but they have a Slavic language that uses the Latin alphabet.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Same AC here -- you're absolutely correct! I certainly overlooked the "h" in hwa. Well now I sure feel like a dolt. :-) Thank you for correcting me!

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

How about the Turkish switch from Persian Arabic to Latin?
Or the Korean switch from Chinese characters to Hangeul?

Re:WOW

[Alypius]

Yes. And the college Maoists that DNS mentioned above.

Re:WOW

[Alypius]

Yep, I've been saying this for months. We're starting to see the beginnings of the American Cultural Revolution where anyone who doesn't toe the line is personally destroyed (cf. Eich, Brendan). Heck, we have future lawyers yelling "fuck the law." Doesn't exactly engender confidence (although it does mean I won't hire CUNY grads...)

What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Alypius]

IIRC, the effort in the 70's to shift to the metric system was met with shotgun blasts to the road signs! Wish I was old enough to actually remember that...that would've been fun!

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

The US has no official language and it is up to local customs what people use. It's already happened where I live.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Huh? Spanish and English both employ the Latin alphabet.

The Kazakhs are a Turkic people who traditionally used the Arabic writing system. Cyrillic writing was imposed on their very non-Slavic language only relatively recently (ca 1940 IIRC).

Re: What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spanish doesn't have a separate alphabet, as I'm writing this with "Spanish alphabetic characters"

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is computers and technology affecting the evolution of a language.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's really too bad you can't use Cyrillic letters on a computer.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they got a great deal on used, foreign computing equipment and didn't want to pass on it.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

must be awful living in such ignorance or are you in bliss? My keyboard and computer have both Cyrillic and Latin characters.

Re: What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

^--- faggot

Re:What's the reasoning?

[gravewax]

Really? which computer system did you find that doesn't readily support almost any alphabet? one of the beauties of computers is they are completely neutral to human language or alphabet.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Cyrillic overlay to a Latin keyboard costs a couple of bucks (including markup and profit for the vendor). Far cheaper than the 600 million cost of changing the alphabet.

Re: What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Spanish has an additional letter: ñ, this is important when sorting.
And Spaniards fought fiercely in Brussels to keep this letter, this is understandable since "prospero año nuevo" would change its meaning from "happy new year" to "happy new anus" if you suppress the "~" on the "n"!

Re: What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

^--- person who pointlessly makes the internet worse

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

An awful lot of software and many websites and older equipment still have crappy Unicode support.

Re: What's the reasoning?

[Hognoxious]

Double l is also considered a letter in its own right. So llama sorts after luz.

Correction: s/is/was/, they changed it recently. Looks like my dictionary is out of date.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Hognoxious]

What, in this day and age? I donÂ(manishsuckscock$TM) believe you!

Re: What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

"happy new year" to "happy new anus" if you suppress the "~" on the "n"!

In fact the pronounce of the plural of "years" in Portuguese (anos) does sound like anus (in Portuguese).

Re:What's the reasoning?

[tepples]

It's hard to print Arabic, Chinese, or Hindi on retro video game consoles. Their graphics are based on "text mode", with usually space for about 256 different 8x8-pixel glyphs defined by the program. Most glyphs loaded into a console's video memory represent bits and pieces of a level's map, but 32 to 64 tend to get reserved for the text in score bars and dialogue. Arabic needs a lot more than that for the connecting forms of its letters. Hindi is written with Nagari script, which uses many ligatures. Chinese not only needs thousands of glyphs, of which a single game's dialogue may use hundreds, but the glyphs are also bigger (16x16).

Re:What's the reasoning?

[mcswell]

Son, if you were old enough to remember it, you wouldn't remember it. Take it from me: I'm old enough, but I don't remember it.

A variant on this: Judy Collins reportedly said if you remember the 60s, you weren't there.

Re: What's the reasoning?

[mcswell]

I'm going out on a limb, but I believe the 'ch' also used to be considered a different letter in Spanish.

BTW, the origin of the ñ was two 'n's written, one above the other. Got simplified to ñ.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[mcswell]

Computers are becoming more so, but they're not there yet for all writing systems. Before Unicode, you could do ASCII-based alphabets just fine, but anything else was variable. (Hint: /.)

There's still lots more to supporting a writing system than having code points for all the letters. Even after Unicode was invented, Arabic script was hard for a long time--not only right-to-left, but also with some characters that changed shape depending on their position in a word. There's an entire block of Unicode which is a kludgy solution to this problem (Arabic Presentation Forms). Fortunately, fonts have caught up, and that block is no longer strictly necessary for Naskh or Kufic styles. The Nasta'liq style of Arabic script (which is, btw, quite beautiful as a script) has been approximated with less or more success for some time; SIL recently came out with a Nasta'liq font that is quite nice (IMO). But it wasn't long ago--maybe a decade (and for all I know, more recently)--that Urdu newspapers were written by calligraphers (humans!) and then printed by photo-offset, because Nasta'liq is so hard to get right.

Another script that can still be difficult to render well on computers is Burmese. Indic scripts aren't that easy; some versions of TeX (notably LuaTeX) don't do well with Indic fonts (including those for both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages). (But XeTeX does well with virtually all of these, afaik.)

And the last time I checked (maybe five years ago), Java-based apps mess up on Thaana (used for writing Dhivehi). There's been a bug report on that for a long time (ever since I noticed the bug--the folks at XMLMind submitted the report, IIRC), but afaik it's still not fixed.

Re: What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

You also need to indicate the accent on a vowel if it doesn't fall on the expected syllable. Not going to try to give an example due to /. lack of Unicode.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[gravewax]

Ahh yes so a country is converting to Latin characters because of limitations in computers 20+ years ago.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah I am sure those retro gaming consoles played a huge part in their decision to convert to Latin characters, similarly the English letters of model T Ford Engine blocks/

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is absolutely nothing preventing any of those being rendered correctly on any modern system of the last 20 years and regardless this has absolutely nothing to do with why they are converting, it is purely political. None of those languages are a technical problem, they are purely a lack of usage problem, something the Cyrillic character set doesn't have an issue with.

Re:What's the reasoning?

[Rakarra]

Son, if you were old enough to remember it, you wouldn't remember it. Take it from me: I'm old enough, but I don't remember it.

A variant on this: Judy Collins reportedly said if you remember the 60s, you weren't there.

That says more about Judy Collins and the sorts of people she hung out with than it does about people of the 60s as a whole.

Great success!

[thesjaakspoiler]

Wondering if we can expect a comment from Borat on this matter?

Korea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Korea

[Anonymous Coward]

That Korea (actually the king Sejong himself) invented new writing system in 1443 (not 1600s) does not mean that Korea switched writing system overnight. It took far too long to happen - became the official writing system in 1894. Because those high up on the ladder would not bother with it. The king created mainly for those who could not afford education so could not read nor write. And yet up until around at least mid-1990, major newspapers have mixed many Chinese letters in (many Korean words were actually derived from Chinese characters) Nowadays I think most of them just print with less Chinese letters if at all though.

Re:Korea

[Strider-]

One of the most modern writing systems is likely to be the "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" system. It was developed around 1840, and is used to write multiple First Nations languages (Cree and Ojibwe) as well as Inuktitut (The language of the Inuit people). If you haven't seen it before, it looks a lot like runes with extra triangles, but it's a fully fleshed writing system, with full Unicode support.

Re:Korea

[mcswell]

Right. There are a few others that are modern: Cherokee (it sort of looks like Latin script, but it isn't), Vai (a language/ script of Liberia), Khom (a script used in the early 20th century for Lao), Pahawh Hmong. A bit older is Thaana, a script sort of based on Arabic (in somewhat the same sense that Cherokee is based on the Latin script) used to write Dhivehi. Probably others that I don't know.

There are of course lots of alphabets that have been invented in the last 100 or so years by missionaries (especially SIL), but afaik these are all based on a local script (often Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic). Often they need to add new letters for a phoneme. Usually these are based on letters of the regular alphabet plus diacritics, but occasionally you get s.t. new, which eventually gets added to Unicode. But of course this are not new writing systems in the same way that Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics or these other scripts are.

Loss Of Heratige

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[Anonymous Coward]

Stalin was good at solving people problems.

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, he was. He solved problems by solving the people.

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[thegarbz]

otherwise why would that businessman bother with the change at all?

Yes why would a business risk being progressive hip cool, why would they explore new things rather than sticking with something old? How many times has CocaCola changed their logo? Did Bush force them to do it last time?

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[Anonymous Coward]

Even then, the Kazak language wasn't pure cryllic. It is cryllic PLUS 6 letters from the Greek Alphabet.

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[Teun]

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?

Because most countries have language specified in their national laws.
Or how would you conduct efficient business in a language different to the legal system you have to comply with?
Remember Kazakh belongs to the Turkish languages and almost a century ago Turkish went from the Arab script to Latin
Also, I'm really interested why someone found your remark Insightful.

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[SPopulisQR]

The Soviets did not lift , on aggregate, anything and there is multiple irrefutible evidence that Soviets killed economic progression of that region for many years and the consequences are felt today. Asian countries are getting rid of Cyrilic now.

Re:Loss Of Heratige

[mcswell]

There must have been a Soviet joke about that, da? Maybe this one (stolen from wikipedia):

Stalin loses his favourite pipe. In a few days, Lavrenti calls Stalin: "Have you found your pipe?" "Yes," replies Stalin. "I found it under the sofa." "This is impossible!" exclaims Beria. "Three people have already confessed to this crime!"

Horrible idea

[kbahey]

What is it with dictators trying to shape their countries' cultures with changing alphabet in the name of modernity?

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.

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.

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.

Now, another dictator is doing the same thing to another country in the name of modernization. The results will be similar.

Re:Horrible idea

[Zontar The Mindless]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[idji]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[rtb61]

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.

Re: Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a faggot. STFU.

Re:Horrible idea

[gblfxt]

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/...

Re:Horrible idea

[serviscope_minor]

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).

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still mad those stupid missionaries made us change from runes to Latin :-(

Captcha: mistake

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.
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 /.). Turkish needs about 8, but there was no chance they they adopt the alphabet of their nemesis.

Re:Horrible idea

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Horrible idea

[Teun]

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?

Re:Horrible idea

[Nidi62]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Joey Vegetables]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"until Western powers insisted on elections" ... and supported the Arab spring uprising.

Thank you team Obama/Clinton.

Re:Horrible idea

[yuriklastalov]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[kbahey]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[kbahey]

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).

Re:Horrible idea

[kbahey]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[kbahey]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[mcswell]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Godwin O'Hitler]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Godwin O'Hitler]

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, ...)

Re:Horrible idea

[kbahey]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Horrible idea

[serviscope_minor]

Very interesting post, thanks!

Unicode

[Zaelath]

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.

Re:Unicode

[AmiMoJo]

No need to rush, I'll have this replacement for Unicode finished in a year or two and I'm sure the ISO will quickly adopt it. Maybe for Slashdot's 25th anniversary?

Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

If Kazakhstan can do this, maybe US could take it as an example and finally move to the metric system?

Re: Next the U.S of A

[jecowa]

The USA switched to metric in 1975. It's taught to children across the nation. Is this not enough? Are you wanting to ban non-metric units? I don't think that's going to work out.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[gravewax]

yes you should ban non metric sign posting, measurements in purchased products etc. sadly the only way to get out of archaic habits is to ban it, similiar to witch burning, dueling, slavery etc. expecting people to change just because what they are doing is stupid is never enough to create change. The part I find so amusing is for a country that trumpets its independence movement and forward thinking and yet clings tightly to a relic of the british empire.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't need to outright ban it, but you do need to ban it from any government entities, road signs, enforce it in weights and measures for commercial products, fuel etc. eventually as those too stubborn to change die off you will be able to finally do away with it all together. This worked pretty well in most other countries in converting, I don't think americans are that much dumber than the rest of the world that it can't work there too.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[91degrees]

Most of the British ex-colonies changed over in the 1970's, with Britain itself being a bit of a holdout. Mostly this was enforced by legislation. US laws currently have all sorts of restrictions on weights and measures in a mish-mash of metric and US customary.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as all the speed and distance signs show miles, you didn't switch anything at all.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have a strangely religious obsession with units of measure. It's not that big a deal.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we'll do that when the UK does. Get in a car in the UK, look at the speedometer. MPH. The road signs list distances in miles. People weigh themselves in "stones", for heaven's sake - pretty sure that's not metric. Plenty of butcher shops still use old measurements. Etc.

Meanwhile there is plenty of metric usage in the US, anyone that thinks we don't use it extensively is an idiot. All drug measurements are in metric. 1-liter soft drinks. Lots of industry usage. In fact the US now uses metrics over 60% of the time. Many of the terms of the old system are obsolete and never used. Just a small number of core measures are still in use.

We legalized the metric system early on, the mid 1800's, we just didn't mandate its usage 100% of the time - like a number of other countries that are supposedly "all metric".

And, on a worldwide basis, there is plenty of non-metric usage. The airline industry everywhere measures plane height in feet. Boating use knots and nautical miles, very non-metric.

What amazes me is everyone whining about many Americans not speaking a foreign language, even though the usefulness of that is minimal in a huge continent sized country, as opposed to somewhere where you drive a short distance in any direction and enter another country. Yet our ability to use 2 measurement systems is somehow "terrible". It's not that hard. And it's done around the world in reality.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

That is nice that you like to follow the UK's lead. I guess you really still have daddy issues.

Re: Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

ahhh yes, The US so progressive that it legalised the metric system in the mid 1800's when it wasn't even developed till the late 1800's

Re: Next the U.S of A

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact the US now uses metrics over 60% of the time. .

citation please! In my recent 6 week holiday their I did not come across a single instance of the metric system in use that I can recall and drinks were most definitely NOT in metric.

Your move, Putin

[Anonymous Coward]

Xaxaxaxaxa

Re:Your move, Putin

[gravewax]

I don't think he gives a Govno!

And what about its number system?

[Anonymous Coward]

Russians count funny. What? Oh, right, Russians ARE FUNNY!

Re:And what about its number system?

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:And what about its number system?

[dunkelfalke]

Actually, the Russian number system is not really that different from the English one and is almost the same as in other Slavic languages. It is quite regular, about the only exceptions are the number 10 (but it is similar in English - ten, -teen, -ty), the number 40 (used to be a special number, similar to a dozen) and the number 90 (ok, that one is sort of funny).
Still, it is not nearly as silly as the German numbering style, or yep, the French one (quatre vingt dix neuf).

Re:And what about its number system?

[Opportunist]

Funny about the German system is only that they count from right to left (fourty-one is actually literally "one and fourty").

How does this beat "four times twenty plus ten plus nine" for 99 in French?

Re:And what about its number system?

[dunkelfalke]

Well, because even the Germans often enough mix up the two digit number endianness and write the numbers down in the wrong order. It is as non-intuitive as it gets and while I grew up with it, I still would rather do the French math.

Re:And what about its number system?

[Opportunist]

Well, it doesn't really affect me that much, since where it really counts I call out (or get called out) the digits one by one anyway.

Re:And what about its number system?

[Godwin O'Hitler]

The "quatre-vingts" system fails when combined with the French way of pronouncing phone numbers as series of two figure numbers.
06 43 90 12 56
is pronounced exactly the same as
06 43 92 56
which invariably prompts the reply "you only gave me only eight figures there"

Re:And what about its number system?

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Correction: 16 43 80 12 56 for the first one!

Re:And what about its number system?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is worse: http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/...

May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

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...

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Slavic person (not from Poland) I can say that you are wrong. I can presume that you are coming from a country which has some kind of Germanic type language as primary (probably English). Because the problem of heteronyms like "tear (in the eye)" and "tear (rip)" doesn't exist in most Slavic languages. Use of additional phonemes makes them easier to read aloud, and it enlarges the western alphabet by just a bit. In my country W, X an Y are not even used in a standard language.

And we shouldn't forget the umlauts of the Germans, diacritics of the French. What are they if not new letters?

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

They are a pain in the ass. They disrupt writing/typing. In other words: They are just fucking add-ons as well.

...In my country W, X an Y are not even used in a standard language.

Exactly! This is because the alphabet you are using for writing doesn't fit to your spoken language. ;-)

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot ate some of my reply, but there's also t-comma, s-comma and a-breve in Romanian.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Opportunist]

In all fairness, only two of the German umlauts (o: and u:) actually account for different phonemes, with a: being essentially pronounced the same as e but used in words that have roots that used to have an a there.

And French, well, in French, what you write has nothing to do with what you say anyway. ;)

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

My point exactly. They are a pain to write or type. If you have a keyboard with 'umlauts' it is usually no fun to program on it (Javascript, f.e.). The needed brackets { } [ ] become accessible only via the right alt-key or crap like that...
Like you figured out, you only have a fake Latin character set as slashdot ate some of your add-on characters without a warning. It sucks.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the keyboard layout sucks, it has nothing to do with the letters themselves... There is nothing which forces the various kinds of brackets to be so awkwardly placed, they just are because they were so rarely used when the layout was originally made - and its creators living in the dark ages before VIM.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

The Latin alphabet does not fit English any better, and English is uniquely sloppy in matching sounds to letters (and it is therefore quite hard to read aloud without reading ahead). As for the W, X, and Y: to my ears, the English cannot even pronounce the W (instead they do the French ou), and Y is used for a variety of different, unrelated, and mostly unnecessary, purposes in English.

All European languages use more sounds than there are letters in the Latin alphabet. There are basically three ways to solve that: 1) matching multiple sounds to one letter (like English does most of the time), 2) matching sounds to specific combinations of letters (like ph, sh, or ou in English; Dutch does this very often), or 3) using diacritics (like Polish, Romanian do very often). Languages use a mixture of techniques, and some are neater (like Polish) and some scruffier (like English) in their approach. The scruffy approach has as an advantage that it is easy to absorb foreign words without worrying about the way they are written, and the neat approach is friendlier to little children learning to read.

The scruffiness of English is to me always most noticeable when I have to read aloud Chinese names in Pinyin for a roll call: for instance the pronunciation of Lü (Wade-Giles, using German style umlaut) would be immediately transparent to me, but Lyu (Pinyin) is hard to parse.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

... and because of the need for additional keys for the additional characters. You could solve this with dead-keys, but then you would suffer when typing in that language.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

The point is that you don't need that in Cyrillic. You have the letters you need and you don't have those, which are not needed. It fits to their language (Slavic). The Latin character sets don't. Thus you require those crutches (diacritics).
You can write any language in any alphabet, with crutches. You could even pick Katakana and add a few apostrophes. It doesn't improve things, however.
Kazakhstan is making a silly thing, dictated from above for political reasons. It's not like the Korean approach, where they tried to figure out something better. This is just gonna suck. The people will suffer.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

You can write any language in any alphabet, with crutches.

Yeah, I write Portuguese with runic alphabet. Very cool. Makes me look mysterious.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

French keyboards do both : a dead key for two of the kinds of accent, and the most used accented letters (plus ç) have their own keys.
The AltGr key (right Alt) is needed for \, |, #, [, ] {, }, ~ and also @ and ` and standalone ^.
We're used to it. Some useful characters are accessible with a single key press like *, &, ", $, !, (, ), _, so a programming language that uses these would be easy.

The worst ever is coming across a program that expects ctrl-\ to do something. It's not even inconvenient : I can't do it, asshats!

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[mcswell]

"The French don't care what they say, actually, so long as they pronounce it properly." --Henry Higgins, c1906.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

The German language is far from practical when it comes to writing. Let's compare the sibilants, for example:
In German, you have the CH in "Krach" for one phoneme which is written as X in Cyrillic.
You have the SCH in "Schneid", which corresponds to on Cyrillic character as well.
The TSCH in "Matsch" is once again only one letter in Cyrillic.


In other words: Where you type only one key in Cyrillic you have to type two to three in German. ;-)

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Opportunist]

Write me an "H" in Cyrillic. And don't get me started on the yers, nobody so far could explain their reason to exist.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

Write me an "H" in Cyrillic.

They don't have them in their language(s). That's the whole point. Cyrillic fits to Slavic languages, which makes sense.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Citing English as an orthographic trainwreck is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Having said that, the W is one of its rare letters whose pronunciation never varies and is predictable in both directions. But it's a semi-consonant, not an "oo" sound.
French, Spanish, and Japanese all feature the same semi-consonant, although with different spellings of course.
Although it can indeed be spelt with a W in Holland, Belgium, and French Flanders.

Re: May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Brownstar]

Only Slavic language I know is polish, so I can't speak for the others,

But in Polish there is an h sound used quite often, written as ch (as long as it's not at the end of a word. If at the end of the word it's an h sound with a slight gutteral sound at the end). If there is no 'h' sounding letter in Cyrillic you would have the same issue (no clue I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet or any languages that use it.)

As to the additional letters to type or write, it's not a problem in writing and would be an equal problem or worse in typing due to the standard keyboard not accommodating the additional letters anyways (and alternate style keyboards that do are even worse).

The fact that the language is almost purely phonetic is a huge plus.

And this is coming from a native English speaker that has had to learn polish.

Now the declanations on the other hand are a pain in the ass, but that would be the same regardless of the character set used for the alphabet

Re: May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[xxxLCxxx]

And this is coming from a native English speaker that has had to learn polish.

I think this is the main reason. You grew up on Latin characters, which makes it easier.
The same applies to me as well. I only started learning Cyrillic characters when I was an adult. I barely get to see them these days. However, whenever I see a text in a Slavic language written in Latin letters, I immediately think how much simpler the whole caboose would be in Cyrillic. What I get to see is mostly Polish, but also some Slovenian, Croatian and such.
I must admit that the Polish greeting "Czes'c'!" (Slashdot doesn't like them characters either) already gives me eye cancer. That IS NOT practical.
We can get used to many things. Our keyboards are still designed after the old typewriters even though it has been proven a thousand times that this doesn't make any sense.
Looking at it from a neutral perspective you can see the flaws.

Re:May sound good to us, but it's utter crap

[Anonymous Coward]

You may want to look at EURKey keyboard layout.

Bolsheviks ideas come to fruition

[Max_W]

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.

Re:Bolsheviks ideas come to fruition

[Joey Vegetables]

Cyrillic was invented for the South Slavic language family, and intended to be purely phonetic (as most if not all alphabets were at first), using characters from both Greek and Latin as well as a few I don't believe are found in either. As it spread north and eastward, it adapted to some degree to the different phonemes available in various (mostly) Slavic languages. The Cyrillic alphabets used for Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, and others are slightly different, just as are those of various Romance languages, but are still fairly close to being phonetically correct in each of them.

Re:Bolsheviks ideas come to fruition

[Max_W]

I would like just point out that the Latin script also originated from the Ancient Greek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Latin or Roman script is a set of graphic signs (script) based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, which is derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet, used by the Etruscans."

Re:Bolsheviks ideas come to fruition

[Joey Vegetables]

Fair enough. Going back further, it turns out that the Semitic alphabet of circa 2000BC is the ancestor of just about every alphabet in widespread use, and this, in turn, probably descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The following is a fascinating read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

Re: Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck is this? This is gold.

Re: Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[Pseudonym]

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

Re:Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[tepples]

I don't process "Zontar" as any more fake than "Alistair" or any other variant of "Alexander".

Re: Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's an example of Vietnamese, clearly.

Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

This is why i come to Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Stuff like this, oh man, i just can't get enough!

Re:This is why i come to Slashdot

[mcswell]

There are books on this; a co-worker, Amalia Gnanadesikan, has written a book on the history of writing systems; there are other good books on writing systems as well. Also museums, like the Museum of the Alphabet in Waxhaw, North Carolina (USA). (The latter was created by missionaries with SIL; SIL has created writing systems for hundreds, if not thousands, of small languages. But the museum is more about the history of the alphabet, and can IMO be appreciated from a purely secular viewpoint.)

There's also the linguistic viewpoint, which I personally find even more fascinating. (Disclaimer: I'm a linguist.)

Who benefits this?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Who benefits this?

[Anonymous Coward]

These days, "multi-cultural" lights up a red alert in my mind. Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

Let's chant!

[Anonymous Coward]

Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*
Zon-tar is gay! *clap* *clap* *clap-clap-clap*

Fag-got! Fag-got! Fag-got!

*applause*

Fuck you Zon-tar!
Fuck you Zon-tar!

I fucking hate you. You're a complete asshole. Apk destroys you at every opportunity.

Not a bad idea at all!

[Maimun]

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.

Re:Not a bad idea at all!

[Anonymous Coward]

inputenc

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.

Re:Turkish

[matushorvath]

...and Slashdot has just stripped the letter I am talking about from the comment, making it look like nonsense. Which kind of illustrates what kind of problems I'm talking about.

Re:Turkish

[Daimanta]

This is more a Slashdot problem than a general internet problem. The majority of websites support UTF-8 encoding and have very decent Unicode support.

Re:Turkish

[Anonymous Coward]

The Turks I ran across on IRC always wrote ý instead of I for whatever reason when trying to speak in English.

I think it's a code page problem too.

(0xDD is a dotted I in CP857 but an accented y in 850...)

(...I have no idea why they insisted on a dotted I.)

Re:Turkish

[edtice1559]

And I can now go register a bunch of legitimate-looking websites using the Turkish I

Bananas

[LordHighExecutioner]

Quoting from the movie by Woody Allen:
Esposito: From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.

Russia

[xlsior]

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.

Re:Russia

[dargaud]

Yeah I guess too; so how much in that decision is politics (distancing themselves from Russia) and how much is practical (latin being easier/faster to read/learn/type, etc...) ?

Re:Russia

[xlsior]

Yeah I guess too; so how much in that decision is politics (distancing themselves from Russia) and how much is practical (latin being easier/faster to read/learn/type, etc...) ?

Cyrillic has a similar size alphabet to Latin, so I doubt there'd be any significant difference in how easy/hard it would be to learn, understand, or type in their native language. However, after the switch it could make it a little easier for Kazakhstan people to learn other languages based on Latin alphabets, since you can skip learning a whole new lettering system at that point. Over time that could make it easier for trading and economic ties with the Western world.

But in the short term, it is bound to be very disruptive: You're going to have a bunch of mostly older people that will flat out refuse to learn because they think it's too difficult, or completely pointless. Meanwhile newspapers, magazines, signage, government communications and such will all be switching over to the new official alphabet before long, leaving potentially millions of newly-illiterate people in its wake which will effectively be sidelined from modern society. You're likely going to see increased political polarization, with vocal groups of people romanticizing and clamoring for 'the good old days', and the destabilizing effects that might bring along.

But in the long run, it only makes sense: supposedly ~36% of the world uses the Latin alphabet, vs ~4% Cyrillic.

Re:Russia

[qaz123]

I don't understand people saying that it will make learning languages easier. If it's difficult to you to learn 26 characters how are you going to learn thousands of words, phrases and rules? Also why should it matter to me how many people from countries with different languages use the same alphabet as my language? It doesn't matter.

Re:Russia

[billakay]

Freedom from the borderline retarded Ukrainian government and a vastly improved quality of life under Russian administration? Maybe don't talk about stuff you don't know anything about.

Que?

[Anonymous Coward]

No entiendo lo que dices.

Re: Que?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ma fahimt

I'm glad this linguistic Crusade...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is being undertaken and we can expel this heretic script.

Turkish language

[Anonymous Coward]

It started to be written in Arabian "alphabet" in XIII century. In 1920, it was changed to Latin alphabet.

Should've gone with something like Korean Hangul

[Anonymous Coward]

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. ;)

They are changing alphabet for the 3rd time

[qaz123]

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

They used the Latin alphabet before

[Anonymous Coward]

1939-40 the Cyrillic script replaces the Latin Alphabet in Soviet Central Asia.

Turkic runes

[qaz123]

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

Good move

[hackertourist]

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.

Now if only Kekistan would follow suit

[sproketboy]

ntr

Re:Now if only Kekistan would follow suit

[Anonymous Coward]

that fake country is made up of only male virgins so it will die soon enough

a universal alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:a universal alphabet

[Chrisq]

There is an International Phonetic Alphabet. The problem is that to be comprehensive enough to cover all sounds in all languages it has to be extremely complicated. Also different regions pronounce things differently, so you either have regional spellings or one or more "standard" dialect

Re:a universal alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an International Phonetic Alphabet. The problem is that to be comprehensive enough to cover all sounds in all languages it has to be extremely complicated.

Yeah, like the full Chinese.

Why? This is basically pointless.

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:Why? This is basically pointless.

[pablo.cl]

Cyrillic is easy to learn if you're used to Latin script. (Awkward means difficult to deal with).

As long as it make benefit glorious nation of Kaza

[Anonymous Coward]

Then everything is fine

cdreimer pillaged my ass last night... APK

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Script is a form of sound compression

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Script is a form of sound compression

[mcswell]

Whether you need accents (acute, circumflex, grave, tilde,...) is entirely dependent on how many phonemes the language has and how many distinct letters the writing system (I'm assuming alphabetic) has. Most alphabetic writing systems have 20-30 symbols, not counting diacriticized letters as distinct. That works fine for languages like Hawai`an, but it stinks for languages that have to distinguish lots of consonants and vowels. That's precisely the reason (IIUC) that Turkish switched from Arabic script to Latin script; Turkish has to distinguish lots of vowels, and Arabic makes that hard. (Uyghur manages by using diacritics.)

Hilarious, the business owners jumped the gun and

[edris90]

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

Zontar = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

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

And Anti-Lifest

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, with the Mass genocide of The Great leap Forward and the cultural revolution.

Communism kills...

No matter what they use ...

[PPH]

... it won't render properly on Slashdot.

Tone contours reflect lost consonants

[tepples]

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?

Re:Unicode: See SoylentNews.

[Anonymous Coward]

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... ^.^

That's Just Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

"...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.

This idea sounds

[nuckfuts]

VERY NICE !!!

I hope Potassium exports won't be affected

[Anonymous Coward]

We do have to consider that all other countries have inferior potassium.

longer than you think

[epine]

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.

Re: As long as it make benefit glorious nation of

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Japan and China Should follow

[Anonymous Coward]

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

It's starting

[Anonymous Coward]

Kazakhstan, Greatest country in the world!