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Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

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

#111

Post by bonzini »

klez wrote: post #96
spacenick88 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It almost covers German except for ä, ö, ü and ß all of which have a very easy transliteration ae, oe, ue and ss. Similarly it almost covers Italian, French (accents can be dropped), Spanish and a couple more

That you can do transliterations doesn't make it a good idea. > French (accents can be dropped) What? No! See for example https://french.stackexchange.com/a/24410

Surely it is incorrect to drop them, but the result is still intelligible. Same for the "hacek" and accent (carka) in Czech for example.

In Italian, however, accents are only on the last letter of a word so they are usually replaced with apostrophes if your keyboard lacks them (in fact even on an Italian keyboard È is usually typed as E'; most word processors autocorrect it).

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

#112

Post by eCa »

fusiongyro wrote: post #37
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.

Lots of latin-alphabet languages have letters that don’t exist in English. Czech, for example, has 42 letters[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography

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

#113

Post by kornakiewicz »

Semirhage wrote: post #28
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.

Hungarian (and Finnish) are unique cases; you haven’t identified a pattern, but the Uralic exceptions. It’s a language family only 25 million people on Earth speak, it is the proverbial exception proving the rule.

I've moved to Finland four months ago. There are not so many (indo)-european patterns you notice right there, although they exist. Some words are tricky like "appelsin" - "orange" or "matka" - in my mother tongue "mother" ("travel"). Needless to say,I would be much more lost if alphabet were not latin. Or if Finland were not officially bilingual, so most useful information is available also in germanic Swedish.

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

#114

Post by djsumdog »

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…

I was in Moldova a few years back and the friends I was visiting only spoke Romanian. Almost all native Moldovans speak Russian and Romanian (and can read/write both alphabets). Some people would only talk to my friends in Russian though, even when they kept saying they only knew Romanian.

One of my friends said this was a political thing, with some people using the choice of their default language being who they support (Russia vs EU). Moldova is constantly caught in trying to get support/benefits from one or the other; drastically changing their policy to fit one only to be blocked in inclusions (Moldovans make the type of wines that people in the EU like instead of the Russian varieties, but then France and Italy start over producing those same variants to block them out of the market .. or countries in the EU offering to lend their government money, but only if they reject x offer from Russian.)

Do you see the same thing in Kazakhstan? Do some people chose to use one language more often than the other due to political beliefs or affiliations?

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

#115

Post by bonzini »

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.

Well, the two (now three) languages that use dotless i are Turkish and Azeri, both of which are Turkic languages like Kazakh. So it does make sense, even though it's going to be painful.

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

#116

Post by amaccuish »

emodendroket wrote: post #81
parliament32 wrote: post #46

Here's a country changing their alphabet to boost their international compatibility... now if only the US would switch to the metric system.

Not like people are going to refuse to trade with the US because we have customary units, realistically. That's the benefit of being the world's richest country and not a small Central Asian one.

And people refuse to trade with countries with a different alphabet?

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

#117

Post by RomanPushkin »

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…

> Russia is ranked around #60 in the world on GDP per capita.

Nonetheless, GPD rank is ~12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Per-capita rating of countries like India, China is lower (~100). But these are apparently strong economies.

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

#118

Post by Fins »

btilly wrote: post #86
singingboyo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I studied Russian enough to know that you are wrong. Technical words, recent inventions, sports and brand names tend to be straightforward transliterations. Plus more are borrowed. Take Russian words like диносавр, Макдоналдс, киоск, and гамбургер. You probably have no idea what they mean, but the direct transliterations are dinosavr, Makdonalds, kiosk, and gamburger are a little easier to guess? Not every word by an…

To a point of pedantry, it's диноЗавр.

Also, холодильник would be transliterated something like kholodeelnik.

But you always have to be aware of "false friends". Russian магазин (magazin) does not mean what one might think it does.

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

#119

Post by bluGill »

jacquesm wrote: post #63
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…

> I speak English only. That's the problem right there. Speaking only one language is super limiting.

There are several thousand different languages in the world. Until you speak them all I can find a situation where not knowing the right language will limit you. (you will not live long enough to learn them all). English is currently the most useful language to know if you travel the world, any language you learn after English might or might not be useful. Depending on where you travel some other language might be more useful, but they are all regional. (though sometimes the region is vast and has very few people who know English)

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

#120

Post by stordoff »

rspeer wrote: post #62
swrobel wrote: post #56

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 thin…

BCP 47 language codes [1] have three major parts: the language, the script, and the region. Canonically, the language is two or three lowercase letters, the region is two capital letters or three numbers, and the script is four letters in title-case. These values can be filled in from context. "en-US" means the same thing as "en-Latn-US" because it's always written in the Latin alphabet. "ja" (Japanese) means the sam…

> "ja" (Japanese) means the same thing as "ja-Jpan-JP" (Japanese, as used in Japan, written in the combination of scripts that is unique to Japanese).

Incidentally, I noticed that Facebook has both ja-JP and ja-KS (for Kansai-ben) recently, which I haven't seen elsewhere before.

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