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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.