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Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

bbc.com

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Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#11

Post by emodendroket »

kolpa wrote: post #9
emodendroket wrote: post #6

The costs are not purely economic -- you will have people struggle to read in the new script and make old texts inaccessible to young people. Additionally, this isn't a case like Chinese where Romanization has the benefit of making it easier to acquire literacy. What is the benefit of this change? I find the claim in this article that using the same script to write their language is going to bring them closer to West…

ASCII with the English charset is easier than charset juggling and Unicode? Less subconscious negative feeling from Latin-alphabet-users? It's a linguistic version of website moving to "flat" UI design.

I mean, this is a solved problem

Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#12

Post by OliverJones »

Why? Thumbing their national nose at Russia? Trying to align themselves economically more with Europe and America?

And, will the Unicode for the new alphabet use existing glyphs from the Latin planes, like "A"? Or will they stick with the Cyrillic planes for letters that look the same, like "A"?

Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#13

Post by emodendroket »

pradn wrote: post #10
emodendroket wrote: post #6

The costs are not purely economic -- you will have people struggle to read in the new script and make old texts inaccessible to young people. Additionally, this isn't a case like Chinese where Romanization has the benefit of making it easier to acquire literacy. What is the benefit of this change? I find the claim in this article that using the same script to write their language is going to bring them closer to West…

The benefit is to more easily draw international tourists and conduct business around the world. Most rich countries use the Latin alphabet, so it's a bid to move away from the Russosphere.

Does it really make a difference to you if all the (from your perspective, as a visitor) unintelligible gibberish is written in Latin script rather than some other script?

Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#15

Post by forkerenok »

fanzhang wrote: post #5
forkerenok wrote: post #3

Don't have an opinion on the news itself, but find it amusing that the title picture features journals exclusively in Russian.

Is that right? It's not just Cyrillic, but actually Russian language? If so, that's pretty funny.

Yes, it's actually Russian.

For a second I thought they wanted to credit the origins of Cyrillic, but realized that then it would be Bulgarian.

Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#16

Post by niftich »

Hearts and minds. The immense monetary cost and hassle of doing so is weighed up against developing a closer connection to Turkey and Azerbaijan, ostensibly [1]; but the cultural subtext of easing consumption and learning of other latin-script media and art from the wider world.

There's an element of sticking it to the Russians, an element of exploiting a generational divide unlike other leaders who stuck with their aging power base, and an element of a leader wanting to make a permanent mark on the state, but they mismash into an ambitious scheme that continues Kazakhstan's to be a relevant actor and independent participant in the world stage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124215#14124449

Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#17

Post by vbezhenar »

I'm ethnical Russian living in Kazakhstan and I think that it's not a very wise decision. As correctly written in the article, overwhelming majority of Kazakhstani citizens speak and write Russian well. I just don't see any point with this change, but costs are tremendous, you have to rewrite every single book including learning books, you have to replace every street plate. When overwhelming majority of people speak Russian and Russia is the most important trade partner, I think that it's only logical to have Russian as one of the official languages in the country (with Kazakh language, of course). Instead Russian language has strange status as a "language of international communication" and basically they are trying to suppress its usage, many plates are not include Russian translations, etc. For example in Canada only 38% of population speak French, nevertheless French is an official language.

Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#19

Post by y_molodtsov »

emodendroket wrote: post #13
pradn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit is to more easily draw international tourists and conduct business around the world. Most rich countries use the Latin alphabet, so it's a bid to move away from the Russosphere.

Does it really make a difference to you if all the (from your perspective, as a visitor) unintelligible gibberish is written in Latin script rather than some other script?

I guess all people who think that way should visit Hungary and try to read the signs there.
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