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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

#31

Post by jsgo »

y_molodtsov wrote: post #19
emodendroket wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

emodendroket - in the case of Quebec, they've moved heavily towards French only (currently, French predominantly). I have zero issue with this and it would beat everything looking like my emails from corporate where they're blocks of FR/EN/ES or EN/FR/ES translated scripts. Works fine in emails, not sure how I'd feel looking at things out and about having a ton of translations though.

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

#32

Post by emodendroket »

jsgo wrote: post #31
y_molodtsov wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

emodendroket - in the case of Quebec, they've moved heavily towards French only (currently, French predominantly). I have zero issue with this and it would beat everything looking like my emails from corporate where they're blocks of FR/EN/ES or EN/FR/ES translated scripts. Works fine in emails, not sure how I'd feel looking at things out and about having a ton of translations though.

If you go around Asia, many signs are presented in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English, and it works pretty well for them. I think Quebec's political situation is somewhat unique.

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

#33

Post by jsgo »

jsgo wrote: post #23
emodendroket wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speak English only. I find it much easier to translate either online or via English-to-X dictionary if the other language uses Latin script. Could it be done? I'm sure it is possible, but without previously interacting with them, not easily. I'll say this, for work I travel to Montreal at moderately regular intervals. Because everything is in French, it makes it a bit harder, but I can either: a) infer based off si…

Okay, how about this then:

If it is in Latin script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can phonetically butcher whatever it is they're attempting to communicate with the other party.

If it is in Cyrillic script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can just stare at a person blankly or point at words on paper/signage if the other party is close enough. Provided they traveled at all for fear of this scenario.

Honestly, I think it is reasonable to attempt to obtain at least a passing capability to communicate in a foreign area, but the question is why would someone used to a Latin language prefer a similarly derived language vs one with completely different glyphs.

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

#34

Post by zokier »

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.

The new Kazakh alphabet is not subset of ASCII, so no benefit there. The "ugly" apostrophe version would have been though, but that got scrapped.

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

#35

Post by emodendroket »

skookumchuck wrote: post #29
emodendroket wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It makes it: 1. far easier to look up a word you don't know in a dictionary 2. you can make a stab at pronouncing the word 3. you can type it in on your western laptop/phone you brought with you

Cyrillic is also a phonetic alphabet and you can pretty easily add a Cyrillic keyboard to your phone or laptop. These arguments seem like they belong in a discussion of Chinese script or something similar.

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

#36

Post by adventured »

vbezhenar wrote: post #17

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…

> 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

It makes perfect sense if you want to move away from Russia to dramatically broaden your national potential over time. Russia has a very modest economy versus its population size. Canada and South Korea have overtaken it, and next up Spain, Australia, Mexico and Indonesia will do the same.

There's no hint Russia's economic backwardness is going to change soon. Putin has entirely failed to develop the nation's potential outside of energy. Their GDP per capita has fallen below much of Eastern Europe, including Croatia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia (as well as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Russia is ranked around #60 in the world on GDP per capita.

It would be wise of Kazakhstan to limit their dependency on trade with Russia and look to far larger opportunities globally.

The only future Russia can offer Kazakhstan is one of weak dependency, a future in which Russia dreams perpetually of re-acquiring its former empire territories.

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

#37

Post by fusiongyro »

vbezhenar wrote: post #17

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…

From a purely linguistic standpoint, I think Kazakh is a better fit for Cyrillic than the Latin alphabet. Look at all the diacritics they have to use to make this work. But we both know the real motivations here probably do not include cleaning up the orthography.

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

#38

Post by emodendroket »

jsgo wrote: post #33
jsgo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I speak English only. I find it much easier to translate either online or via English-to-X dictionary if the other language uses Latin script. Could it be done? I'm sure it is possible, but without previously interacting with them, not easily. I'll say this, for work I travel to Montreal at moderately regular intervals. Because everything is in French, it makes it a bit harder, but I can either: a) infer based off si…

Okay, how about this then: If it is in Latin script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can phonetically butcher whatever it is they're attempting to communicate with the other party. If it is in Cyrillic script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can just stare at a person blankly or point at words on paper/signage if the other party is close enough. Provided they traveled at…

This benefit, again, seems small (you may just be completely impossible to understand), and ignores the fact that Kazakhstan probably has more visitors from Russian-speaking places.

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

#39

Post by klez »

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.

ASCII with the English charset doesn't cover any Latin script based language I know of (granted, a limited set) other than English.

For example it doesn't cover Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, Vietnamese, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Irish, Occitan, Croatian, etc...

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