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Kazakhstan Is Changing Its Alphabet From Cyrillic To Latin-Based Style Favored By the West (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic script to the Latin-based style favored by the West. The change, announced on a blustery Tuesday morning in mid-February, was small but significant -- and it elicited a big response. The government signed off on a new alphabet, based on a Latin script instead of Kazakhstan's current use of Cyrillic, in October. But it has faced vocal criticism from the population -- a rare occurrence in this nominally democratic country ruled by Nazarbayev's iron fist for almost three decades. In this first version of the new alphabet, apostrophes were used to depict sounds specific to the Kazakh tongue, prompting critics to call it "ugly." The second variation, which Kaipiyev liked better, makes use of acute accents above the extra letters. So, for example, the Republic of Kazakhstan, which would in the first version have been Qazaqstan Respy'bli'kasy, is now Qazaqstan Respyblikasy, removing the apostrophes.
The BBC article goes on to explain the economics of such a change, citing a restuarant owner that marketed his business using the first version of the alphabet. "All his marketing materials, the labelling on napkin holders and menus, and even the massive sign outside the building will have to be replaced," reports the BBC. "In his attempt to get ahead by launching in the new alphabet, [the owner] had not predicted that the government would revise it. He thinks it will cost about $3,000 to change the spelling of the name on everything to the new version, Sabiz." The full transition to the Latin-based script is expected to be completed by 2025, impacting this owner and many other small business owners.
Yes, Azerbaijan switched from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet in 2001.
China's effort to switch to Simplified. Vietnam's conversion from some form of Chinese to Latin.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
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.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Kazakh was written in Arabic script for a thousand years prior to Soviet times. Try again.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
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.
Thus, most Germans can't read the handwritten letters of their grand-parents anymore, because the script is unknown to them.
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.
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.
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.
Thought I'd drop by and clarify on this point, as someone who speaks Chinese (simplified Mandarin / mainland Chinese). Sadly Slashdot doesn't support UTF-8 so I can't demonstrate the details reliably. I will try to use some, but I dunno how they'll turn out. I'll try to stick to ASCII + descriptions + links.
True pinyin cannot use the Latin character set (ex. ISO-8859-1) because it lacks several glyphs that contain necessary diacritic marks for its vowels. Written pinyin requires several different diacritics to be accurately represented, always written above vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and French u (u with two dots above it)):
* A straight line (crummy ASCII example: hyphen: -) indicating 1st tone /) indicating 2nd tone
* A rising line (crummy ASCII example: forward slash:
* A rising-falling line (crummy ASCII example: letter v: v) indicating 3rd tone
* A falling line (crummy ASCII example: backslash: \) indicating 4th tone
* No diacritic means no tone (which some call "5th tone")
Here's a reference for pinyin tonal depiction on Wikipedia.
There are several variances of romanized Chinese created over the years -- Yale, Wade-Giles, Sin Wenz, and several couple others that slip my mind. For example, I can't read most of them, but can (grudgingly) read Wade-Giles when forced to (some 1960s educational books were written in this format); I was taught pinyin in (American) school. I do not believe Chinese today are taught any of these variances; they are, however, taught pinyin as children. Whether or not they remember it is an entirely separate matter. :-)
Here is a better Wikipedia article on actual Chinese romanization methods. The variances if compared side-by-side look innocent/minor but are actually quite annoying if encountered in bulk.
Anyway, to combat the limitation/annoyance of diacritic marks, many people online use a bastardised combination of pinyin and Wade-Giles, allowing for romanized Chinese using pure ASCII. You may see this version occasionally. Again, lack of UTF-8 on Slashdot makes this hard, but the sentence "tonight I went to the Beijing language institute" would, in this format, be written as jin1tian1 wan3shang4 wo3 qu4 le bei3jing1 yu3yan2 xue2yuan4. No number means a word without tone (ex. particles).
There's also what's called bopomofo which is the system Taiwanese use. Please note the tonal marks section. Cantonese (Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, etc.) use the Jyutping system.
By the way: Korean Hangul has the same problem -- several romanization variances with no widespread standard. Someone will probably chastise me for this, so I'd better correct myself (kind of): the Korean government deployed a standard called RR or MoC2000 for street signs, and wants it adopted in all other mediums (textbooks, etc.). But adoption has been extremely slow outside of road signs, and it's a fairly new/recent method (though to their credit: RR doesn't use diacritics). I learned Korean only a few years after the introduction of RR, so I got a strange intermixed combination of Yale and RR. But not even South Koreans seem to get it right: take this street sign for example, which reads "Dohwa Jct" and "Dowon Stn"... except the "do" is the same character in Hangul; someone added the "h" by mistake (because habits). Easier to just use actual Hangul, especially because it's super easy to learn; King Sejong was remarkably intelligent, focused on making something even "country bumpkins" could remember.
Asian linguistics lesson over.
Per se. To paraphrase Old Biff "you look like an idiot when you spell it wrong"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.