Slashdot Mirror
Kazakhstan Is Changing Its Alphabet From Cyrillic To Latin-Based Style Favored By the West (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic script to the Latin-based style favored by the West. The change, announced on a blustery Tuesday morning in mid-February, was small but significant -- and it elicited a big response. The government signed off on a new alphabet, based on a Latin script instead of Kazakhstan's current use of Cyrillic, in October. But it has faced vocal criticism from the population -- a rare occurrence in this nominally democratic country ruled by Nazarbayev's iron fist for almost three decades. In this first version of the new alphabet, apostrophes were used to depict sounds specific to the Kazakh tongue, prompting critics to call it "ugly." The second variation, which Kaipiyev liked better, makes use of acute accents above the extra letters. So, for example, the Republic of Kazakhstan, which would in the first version have been Qazaqstan Respy'bli'kasy, is now Qazaqstan Respyblikasy, removing the apostrophes.
The BBC article goes on to explain the economics of such a change, citing a restuarant owner that marketed his business using the first version of the alphabet. "All his marketing materials, the labelling on napkin holders and menus, and even the massive sign outside the building will have to be replaced," reports the BBC. "In his attempt to get ahead by launching in the new alphabet, [the owner] had not predicted that the government would revise it. He thinks it will cost about $3,000 to change the spelling of the name on everything to the new version, Sabiz." The full transition to the Latin-based script is expected to be completed by 2025, impacting this owner and many other small business owners.
This sounds like a huge undertaking, and seems to be a smart move but it is daunting to think of the effort involved in changing a national alphabet. I am not sure I've ever heard of such an effort before, anyone else ??
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Wondering if we can expect a comment from Borat on this matter?
Korea invented a whole new writing system in the 1600s. In more recent times, China formalized a "simplified" version of their script in the 1950s and 1960s and quickly switched over to using it. It wasn't a sudden, imposed change, but over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Vietnamese has transitioned from being written in modified Chinese characters to being written in heavily accented Latin character. In a less extreme example, Japan imposed a standardized set of logographic characters after World War II and mandated some other changes to the writing system to improve consistency and make it easier to learn.
This changeover seems to be most similar to the Chinese simplification, in that it's a fairly major change being imposed in multiple steps fairly quickly.
Such a switch could result in a loss of various folklore in Kazakhstan centering on the shapes and percieved symbology of the Cryllic alphabet. Also such a change seems unecessisary and wasteful of resources, it's not like those books and letters will rewrite themselves.
It seems like they plan on enforcing it on everyone somehow, as opposed to having it affect only the government or public signage (a la bilingual signs), otherwise why would that businessman bother with the change at all?
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!
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).
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Hilariously, a good example of why Unicode would be beneficial on Slashdot ("smart" quotes being a bad example) and no one has mentioned it:
The example of the new way of writing Qazaqstan Respyblikasy in the summary is incorrect.
By your reasoning, Kazakhstan should also revert to Arabic script.
And your complaint about Turkish letters having diacritics and/or different sounds than they do in other languages is just silly. Exactly the same things are true of any other language using the Latin alphabet.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This is computers and technology affecting the evolution of a language.
The whole idea is to leave the past behind. Turkey before Ataturk was a static, backwards culture. Ataturk brought Turkey into the modern age, with women's rights, mandatory public schools, suppression of religion, and all that good stuff. If the people had still been able to read the old texts, there would have been more resistance to feminism and other progressive ideologies.
Ataturk was a tremendously positive secular influence on Turkey, which lasted almost a century until Western powers insisted on elections, which to nobody's surprise (except the Western powers) elected an Islamist government. Now Turkey is looking to the past instead of progressing to the future.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
c does not sound like sh in Turksih, its like ch.
Latin has 5 vowel symbols, but many languages have more, including English. You either put up with ambiguity or you use diacritics, or both. Ataturk did it to break ties with Persia and Iran and focus towards the west. And as statues in front of many schools show him teaching children the alphabet himself, https://www.shutterstock.com/i..., a big focus was in literacy.
Turkish is a vowel-heavy language with 8 native vowels and a few pulled in in Arabic loan words, but the Arabic script only partially represents vowels a,i, o by doubling the meaning of glottal stop, y and w, or using diacritics.
switching to Latin made sense for Turkish.
Importantly Ataturk allowed on transition time like the Qazaqs are thinking. it had to be done within months, under pain of fines. Medical words in Turkish are mostly Arabic, Maritime are Greek, early 20th century words are French, many modern words are English, computer and tech words are mostly Turkish - becuase that was also a great success of the Turkish language project, to creatively generate new Turkish words. bilgisayar=knowledgecounter=computer.
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...
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.
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
Bolshevics, and their leader Vladimir Lenin, planed to switch to Latin alphabet for all languages of the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually they did it for the Kazakh language in 20s, but finally it was returned back to Cyrillic.
Both, Cyrillic and Latin alphabet originated from the Ancient Greek alphabet. Cyrillic though remained a bit closer to it.
Nowadays a printer can print in any alphabet. So there will be no economy on typewriters as there could be in the early 20th century.
Image wise, in my opinion, they will not make themselves to look like the US or a rich European country, but rather like a country of say Latin America.
Keyboards, coding software, making it easier for dual language, English/Regional. Of course it opens up English speaking countries to considerable influence from non-English speaking countries as those non-English speaking countries learn more English. So no technical or social benefit for English speaking countries, in fact English media will then come under considerable competition, sheer numbers. English is simply becoming the dominant trading language but will now be subject to 10 times the current number holding to alternate cultures. Expect a lot more 'new' words to appear in English over the next decades. Cultural words that have no English equivalent.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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/...
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.
Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.
Same could be said of Old English from the same period despite using largely the same alphabet (eth and thorn not withstanding).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Writing in Cyrillic alphabet is a PITA if you are using a computer and have to switch all the time between Cyrillic and Latin. Say, you write a LaTeX doc. The commands are in Latin and there is nothing you can do about it. The text is in Cyrillic. And you have to switch the keyboard layout all the time, assuming the text is Unicode-encoded, which of course it must be.
From the article it looks like they will be using the Turkish (i without a dot). Just goes to prove how much research went into the decision, since that is the one of the most problematic letter for computers to process correctly. It makes it impossible to determine the lower case of letter "I" without knowing the locale, and very easy to do it wrong when using the incorrect locale. And obviously the letter I/i is everywhere, including the text of programming languages and data interchange formats. You will get into hilarious situations like trying to lower case "RESPÝBLIKASY" and having to use a different locale for the tags and for the contents, or else you end up either with with the wrong I or the incorrect spelling of Respýblkasy with i.
So, good luck with your change, you'll need it.
I don't think he gives a Govno!
Quoting from the movie by Woody Allen:
Esposito: From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.
I suspect that a major drive for dropping Cyrillic is to visually distance themselves from Russia, lest they too be 'liberated' and 'get to' rejoin the glorious motherland.
They've seen up close what a shared ethnic and cultural heritage brought the Crimea region of Ukraine.
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.
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
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I wish they switched to the original Turkic script. Kazakh is a Turkic language. Its original script is the Turkic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It ideally fits phonetics of Turkic languages (unlike Latin). Also it looks beautiful
Kazakhstan used its own variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, with ~6 extra letters compared to Russian. Finding fonts that support Kazakh was a pain in the ass because of this.
The accents on capitals seen in the new alphabet are a lot more common, so will be easier to support.
What, in this day and age? I donÂ(manishsuckscock$TM) believe you!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
ntr
Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.
Same could be said of Old English from the same period despite using largely the same alphabet (eth and thorn not withstanding).
Eth and Thorn are not really all that complicated and were sometimes used interchangeably since there were no firm grammatical rules at the time. Generally though, at the beginning (and sometimes the end) of a word substitute an '' and inside of a word substitute a ''ð' wherever you have a 'th' in a modern English word. The rest of old English, I'll admit, is harder. The funny bit is that some Icelanders can actually stumble through an old English text that the modern English stand no chance of understanding by virtue of the fact that they still speak old Norse.
You've never seen a Frenchman count if you think Russians count funny. As soon as it goes beyond 70 it starts to be a fucking math project.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I don't get it. Cyrillic is awkward to learn if you're used to Latin script. I did this the past two years when visiting Moscow. It was quite fun. Spelling through and finally recognising "Starbucks"written in Cyrillic is funny. And fun. Also getting around the metro without a dictionary. Fun, challenging and still easily done because you have to be a moron not to understand Moscows metro layout.
But as for the script itself: it has different glyphs and some switched out meanings, but it's trivially easy to learn and usually totally in sync with spoken language, much like German or the scandic languages. Moving to Latin is a total waste of time and the citizens are rightfully pissed IMHO.
Now if the Japanese or Chinese would switch - that I would totally get. It takes years to learn even the most basic Chinese or Japanese script. They're totally inefficient. Cyrillic otoh is very effective, perhaps even more than Latin script. Definitely way more efficient than English writing.
Bottom line: This makes no sense what so ever. Stupid.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And your complaint about Turkish letters having diacritics and/or different sounds than they do in other languages is just silly. Exactly the same things are true of any other language using the Latin alphabet.
Not quite, English is a prime example where spelling remained as is while pronunciation of vowels changed drastically from the original.
Danish is another example, they even added and removed some letters. And take French, or how else would you explain the pronunciation of the name of the Canadian prime minister?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
By your reasoning, Kazakhstan should also revert to Arabic script.
It might be because I naturally connect most of my letters when I write, but I found learning how to write Arabic incredibly easy and natural, even though it is written right to left. The main problem with an Arabic script is the diacritic vowels that are very often dropped when writing or in print. Makes reading Arabic a real pain because the same 3 root letters can have different meanings and pronunciation based on those missing diacritics so can only be figured out through context or practice. But find a way to use an Arabic script without needing the diacritic vowels and you've got yourself a pretty decent and often visually appealing alphabet.
Interesting sidenote, my college roommate who served a tour in Iraq said he remembered the spelling of the imperative "stop" because it looked like 2 guys in a canoe.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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
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
I don't process "Zontar" as any more fake than "Alistair" or any other variant of "Alexander".
... it won't render properly on Slashdot.
Have gnu, will travel.
Writing is a form of speech compression and the context conveys meaning as well
Converting a color image to grayscale is also compression, but good luck "decompressing" a black-and-white photo of a flower garden.
so it is not necessary to represent every little tone
Tone contours in Chinese languages reflect consonant distinctions that have been lost over centuries, in a process called cheshirization. Several words with completely different meanings, such as "mother", "horse", and "preceding sentence is a question", may be pronounced identically apart from tone contour. Use the wrong tone, and a question becomes an insult against the listener's mother. Or would you prefer that the written language preserve the consonants that have disappeared, leaving only traces in the spoken language, letting readers distinctions by replaying the last millennium of sound changes, as French and Tibetan (and to a lesser extent English) do?
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).
Same thing when, e.g., speakers of Romance languages type on U.S. keyboards. Accents and some punctuation get dropped. It's usually easy for native speakers to use context to figure out what was meant, but not terribly easy for others. And Google Translate isn't usually smart enough to handle this situation.
Nonaggression works!
It's an example of Vietnamese, clearly.
Ezekiel 23:20
VERY NICE !!!
Canada introduced metric product labelling circa 1976 and half of our grocery stores still boast their beef prices by the pound on the butcher display placards. But then it's back to kilograms at the cash register, due to the law, etc.
I read recently that the last person born in the 19th century just passed away at age 117.
This further supports my longstanding presumption that the last grocery store to promote beef by the pound will cease doing so circa 2050 (around the time that clear recollections of 1975 are hard to come by).
I'm metric/Imperial bilingual in a big way, but even so I have my own strange oases. Temperatures near the boiling point and yeast fermentation temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Food safe temperatures I know best in Celsius. Warm outdoor temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Cold indoor temperatures I know best in Celsius.
I also harbour these weird zones in mass and distance.
Patchwork transitions can linger in the weirdest ways.
On another note, I sure hope they ditch the ugly apostrophes. Orthographic transitions in 2018 should not be constrained by the 1984-era ASCII-centric bigotry of Big Blue's indestructible Model M keyboard.
And take French, or how else would you explain the pronunciation of the name of the Canadian prime minister?
Because French is a trash language. There is no other explanation.
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).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
No!
They should stick with what they have now, since most of their culture (literature, poetry, history, ..etc.) is written in Cyrillic.
That is my point.
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At what cost?
He is just like Napoleon: an army officer who made himself absolute ruler. He saved Turkey from direct occupation, and as idolized, and he took advantage of that to have absolute power. He forced people to abandon their customs (dress, for example) and culture (script for example).
On two visits to Turkey in the 1990s (before the rise of Erdogan), I see how appallingly he is worshiped until now. His statues are everywhere. His visage is on the front page of newspapers, every day! No criticism can ever be spoken of him, punishable by law. A kid on his dad's lap on a ferry, who cannot be more than 4 years old, was asked by his father: who is this, and the kid replied: Ataturk.
Ataturk is idealized by many, but he was an authoritarian totalitarian dictator.
His practices along with his successors in the army, and the above worship of him, are what led to the rise of Erdogan as backlash to this continual oppression: generations were falsely, yet romantically, told that there is a better alternative (religious government) and it is much better, and most of the rural conservative areas followed.
The result: now Turkey has the opposite type of dictator, with the same methods and striving to entrench himself further and further (made himself president, changed the constitution to his favour, and after the failed coupe he is more paranoid than ever).
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You are confusing the script with the language. Two separate things.
But to your point: Old English is barely English.
Beowulf is not English at all for example.
English as it is understood today is the result of the end of the Viking rule and down to the Norman invasion. From that era onwards, it is recognizable (Chaucer to Shakespeare).
Turkish is recognizable from before the work of Kashgari. He just recorded it and systematized it.
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The idea here is not which is better script: Latin or Arabic. Each has its challenges.
The idea here is cutting the people from their cultural past. Only literature that was approved was to be published in the new script, and the rest which does not agree with the narrative of the totalitarian state was left behind.
The result is that the dictator now has a population that reads only 'approved' stuff: Q.E.D!
My point is that a radical break with the past such as what the Turks did, and now the Kazakhs, will leave the population ignorant of their cultural history. That is bad.
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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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ahh yes so a country is converting to Latin characters because of limitations in computers 20+ years ago.
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Diacritics lose a lot of credibility when it's possible to type in capitals in, say, French, and not have to use them.
And it's a lossy change if you then need to spell a proper name correctly when all you've seen is the upper case, non-diacritical version.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
French spelling needs ways of expressing its variety of vocal sounds, true, but does it really need to have a gazillion ways of writing the sound "oh"? ...)
(o, ô, oo, os, -od, -ot, au, eau, aux, eaux, -aut, -aud, -ault, -eaut, -eault,
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
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"
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Correction: 16 43 80 12 56 for the first one!
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
In practice, it is not a problem at all, once you 'get it'.
It is the same for Arabic: with diacritics, everything is clear and explicit. Without, you subconsciously do inference from context. Newspapers (and news sites) in Arab countries do not have diacritics at all, yet everyone manages to read them, write and read contracts, read signs on shops, ...etc. without any problems. BBC Arabic News has no diacritics and everyone manages quite fine. It becomes second nature. For a non-native Arabic speaker it is a steep learning curve, until they 'get it'.
English has similar pronunciation and spelling challenges. Ask anyone who is not a native English speaker how it is like. An American who grew up in Hungary tells me how he was surprised that they had to take spelling lessons in English, while Hungarian (according to him) is fully phonetic with no need for exceptions. A Mexican showed me how Spanish is fully phonetic while English is not.
And ask yourself: how did the Turks manage to read and write their script for 8 centuries with no issues?
Again, this is not a defense of the Arabic script. Rather the lament of cutting off people from their culture and heritage by force. The Kazakhs should stay with what their culture is written in, which happens to be Cyrillic.
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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.
Very interesting post, thanks!
SJW n. One who posts facts.