Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by thirduncle » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

Instead Russian language has strange status as a "language of international communication" and basically they are trying to suppress its usage.

Well, that's kind of the whole point behind the move (or at least a big part of it), actually.

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

#52

Post by viseztrance » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

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.

I think the bigger benefit is that it will make English easier to learn by the local populace.

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

#53

Post by nbabitskiy » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

JetSpiegel wrote: post #25

fanzhang wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Copy-pastable Magazine title (I just copied from a Cyrillic alphabet): Пекарь Seems to be something about bread.

It's Лекарь (doctor), not Пекарь (baker). It's actually borrowed germanic root[0]

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/læce

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

#54

Post by jsgo » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #35

skookumchuck wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

a cyrillic keyboard to my laptop that I'd have to memorize what latin key it replaces.

My laptop flips to French fairly regularly (machine was created with an image containing French and English keyboards) and it is frustrating as it is only easier in the sense that it is poking around for the 1 key to find e with grave or the like vs playing with keystrokes until I land on alt+0232 on numpad.

Phones with touchscreen keyboards though, yeah, I could see that being reasonably okay.

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

#55

Post by emodendroket » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #49

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…

Turkic languages are split between Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic-based scripts. Kazakhs in Turkey, for example, already write in Latin script. Is there an issue with Turkish scholarship of history since Ataturk pushed Latin-based alphabet?

According to the article, Turkish literacy was low at the time that change was enacted. Of course historians will cope but I'm talking about everyday people here.

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

#56

Post by swrobel » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

I'm really curious about how this will be implemented from a software standpoint. Will the language use the same ISO (or whatever body determines them) browser language code like en-US or will there need to be two separate codes that exist in parallel, one for the old cyrillic version, and one for the new latin one.

Are there any modern examples of this sort of transition having to be implemented? I think we all think of the set of possible language codes as something that has been static for a long time, but this shows that it can be rather fluid.

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

#57

Post by jsgo » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

ibdf wrote: post #30

Next, the US will try to adopt the metric system (again).

I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler.

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

#58

Post by emodendroket » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

singingboyo wrote: post #47

emodendroket wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C3%B4_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Di%E1%... Can you make out anything in this article other than personal names?

I think that for languages that didn't get adapted into english, the 'similar word' effect is essentially missing - it really only works for romance languages and maybe the odd germanic word. However, if I had a dictionary or something, that article would be much easier to translate than, say, Japanese (or Mandarin, or really any language where writing involves a large number of symbols). I'm not sure that that appli…

That's my point here -- Latin script doesn't offer that many benefits over Cyrillic script, which makes it pretty questionable, in my mind, whether the upheaval is worth it.

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

#59

Post by zokier » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #27

Did they seriously go with dotless i, the character that is endless source of fun for any case mapping code. Would í have really been so bad? All the other accented characters are using ´ ffs.

And while I'm considering stupidities, why are the two digraphs apparently part of the alphabet, instead of simply being two characters? Does this imply that they need to be collated specially? Or are they just shown like that for transitional convenience?

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

#60

Post by vbezhenar » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #36

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, an…

You can move away from Russia as a person. You can't move away from Russia as a country. Those countries are just next to one other, their border probably longer than Europe's perimeter. You have to think for hundreds of years when you're talking about breaking relationships between nations. Putin will die in max 30 years, probably earlier. He's extremely unlikely to be the next Russia's President. Russia might turn 180 degrees in 5 years. Many things might happen. That's even if yours words are true, which I don't fully support.