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Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
131–140 of 422 posts
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#132The 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…
I really don't think changing the script while keeping the language is all that difficult. At least as long it has a somewhat similar glyph count. In my teens I learned about runes and was able to write my native language in runes within half an hour and fluently within 3, including reading of course. Also as a Computer Science major I have a somewhat okayish knowledge of the Greek letters and when visiting Greece I…
I've spent time learning multiple Asian languages. You can learn Korean script in a couple days. Anything more than halting sounding-out takes much longer. If you read frequently, you learn to recognize the shapes of words, rather than sounding them out. All that goes out the window with a new script.
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#133I'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.
They have 6 diacritics, that's similar if not less than french (which has 12 if I'm not mistaken), or my native polish (ąćęóńłśćżź).
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#134I'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…
Well compared to how Russia treats its minorities, i.e. Tatars in Crimea, I think Kazakhstan does a better job.
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a figure of speech. Surely you did not think I was confused on this point.
GGGP wrote that they spoke only one language, that implies that this is their mother tongue. So as soon as you 'pick one language' you are talking about two languages, your birth tongue and another one. This was not the case with the comment I replied to so either you are off-topic or you really are confused. So I guess you are off-topic then rather than confused?
In a hypothetical situation where you were given the choice of any language on Earth as your native language before being born, [insert the rest of my comment here]. I hope this helps.
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#136Earlier 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.
I'm sure that there are many titles in English for international tourists. I can't tell for entire country, but in Astana (capital) almost every title contains English translation (or transliteration) and I think that it's better approach. May be English tourists who visited Kazakhstan will correct me.
I would not be surprised if that were true.
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#137I'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…
The difference is that there is little political/military threat from France towards Canada.
I'm Polish, and thanks to the latin alphabet we're using, the country has it much easier to be close to the west. People have easier time learning English, and it eases the communication a lot. If we were using cyrylic, the country would be naturally leaning more towards Russia - which, considering the history, wouldn't be good.
I don't know too much about Kazakhstan, but perhaps it's the same thing? The country trying to build moats between them and Russia?
If we were in a similar situation (that is - using cyrylic instead of latin), I be pro-change. A few billion in costs of such changes, even for a poor country, will produce a good ROI, considering greater independence and better international trade.
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#138Earlier 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.
Learning to read/write Cyrillic is still a substantial, intimidating step. I felt a lot more comfortable in Turkey and Romania than in Bulgaria, just because the Latin alphabet meant I could at least read printed signs aloud and people could tell me what sign to look for.
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, but existing Latin scripts have their own equivalents; your everyday person probably could not read Fraktur, for example, and you'd be hard pressed to find a person who can read the original Beowulf: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Be... . Even scripts that haven't changed all that much, like Classical Chinese, are hard to read for modern readers without training because it is so archa…
There's a difference between being unable to read ancient texts and being unable to read anything published before 2018. Most materials will never get the lavish treatment given to universally-recognized classics like Beowulf and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based
#140I'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…
Are there many recent examples of France asserting that since a region has a fairly decent density of French speaking people and people of French descent it's totally ok to annex the territory or in a milder case move in troops and create a self proclaimed "independent" state.