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

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

#181

Post by emodendroket » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:31 PM UTC

mynegation wrote: post #78

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.

When glyphs are recognizable, it is still better. If not for informational messages, at least names of the locations can be somewhat recalled. Let's say I drive and I need to go to Székesfehérvár. I have only a slightest idea how to pronounce it, but I will recognize it. Much harder to do if you need to drive to กรุงเทพมหานคร

Surely the government could easily print romanized place names in addition to Cyrillic ones, if this is the primary concern.

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

#182

Post by heliodor » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:32 PM UTC

eCa wrote: post #112

fusiongyro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, the measuring stick is not English.

Is it Latin? Which version? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet

Or is it all modern non-Cyrillic letters used in Europe that don't have diacritics?

In any case, diacritics are a positive. They're used to make a language as phonetic as possible, which is a net positive. As anyone can attest, learning to pronounce English words (or French, for that matter) is a lot of people wasting a lot of effort, which would be better spent elsewhere!

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

#183

Post by disordinary » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #178

disordinary wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just backing up the stereotype of an English speaker unfortunately. Cyrilic is extremely easy to learn, you can do it in under an hour, and even in Russia most places that tourists interact will have latin and cyrilic versions of the same text (on the metro, etc). Countries like China are tougher to travel in, but it's not exactly difficult.

> Countries like China are tougher, but it's not exactly difficult. Uh, no, that's definitely wrong. Learning Chinese script is a very difficult and time-consuming task. Literacy in Japanese requires about 2,000 characters; literacy in Chinese requires about 5,000.

I mean difficuilt to get around as a tourist - of course I didn't mean learn the glyphs, I've backpacked across China and, yes, if you're looking for a particular street you have to compare it carefully, you're making out the shapes as a picture rather than reading it like a language, but it's not that hard.

I modified my comment to better reflect the intention.

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

#184

Post by everdev » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:36 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…

In Crimea and Georgia, Russia used the argument of defending Russian speaking populations to justify military intervention.

Perhaps, they see the Russian language as a threat to their independence?

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

#185

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:36 PM UTC

vatueil wrote: post #180

kolinko wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

Using a Latin alphabet might help Kazakhstan interface with the West. However, I think the more direct reason is that a Latin alphabet would facilitate links with Turkey and other Turkish speakers who use Latin alphabets. Either way the move away from Cyrillic may loosen ties to Russia, but the fact that Turkey uses a Latin alphabet is a stronger motivation than any hopes of building bridges with the West. The latter…

> I think the more direct reason is that a Latin alphabet would facilitate links with Turkey and other Turkish speakers who use Latin alphabets.

Perhaps, but Kazakhstan intentionally decided not to make its new Latin alphabet mirror the Turkish alphabet. In the 1920s several Turkic nations took Turkey’s alphabet as a model, but then were condemned by the Stalinist regime for being too pan-Turkic, with tragic consequences. Kazakhstan is therefore trying to walk an independent course here.

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

#186

Post by rspeer » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:39 PM UTC

stordoff wrote: post #120

rspeer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Language codes made up off the top of someone's head are my peeve. If anyone else wanted to support Kansai dialect, they wouldn't necessarily (and probably shouldn't) make the same decision to pretend that it's a country with code KS.

It's not like the standards left them with anything to work with, but "ja-x-kansai" would have been quite acceptable.

At least it's not as bad as code I've seen that used "zh-SC" and "zh-TC" to represent Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese, because they either didn't know about "zh-Hans" vs. "zh-Hant", or didn't leave room for script codes in their database. (In my post I neglected to even mention Chinese, by far the largest example of a two-script language.) If you read the codes "zh-SC" and "zh-TC" literally, they're distinguishing whether it's "Chinese as used in Seychelles" or "Chinese as used in the Turks and Caicos Islands".

And it's not as bad as the OpenSubtitles language code "ze", which after some examination, I have to conclude means "this might be Chinese or might be English, we're not sure, we found it on a shoddily pirated DVD".

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

#187

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

gajomi wrote: post #172

cpursley wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visited Ukraine (Kyiv) last summer. I spoke a little Russian with them; nobody seemed to mind.

Honest question from a less than A1 level Russian student... Is there really a significant difference between the two? I have no doubt that there is different vocabulary etc. and of course that there are political reasons to count them as different languages but are they effectively mutually intelligible?

Russians often claim that Ukrainian is totally mutually intelligible, but it is easy to find counterexamples. There are Taras Shevchenko poems, for example, that if you present them to the average Russian speaker, that Russian speaker would have to guess at the meaning of a large number of words (and would guess wrong). All of the Slavic languages have retained common features and two speakers of different Slavic languages can often drop to a sort of basic shared level to communicate, but the innovations in each language – especially with the rise of complex standard languages – should not be underestimated.

Even within Ukraine, Ukrainians from Kyiv can face some difficulties understanding the Ukrainian spoken in the Carpathians (which is either transitional to Rusyn or is actually straight-up Rusyn), or the rural dialect of Trans-Carpathia that can include a great deal of Hungarian words.

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

#188

Post by bushin » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:41 PM UTC

"Munalbayeva Daurenbekovna, head of the National Academic Library"

Butchered her name. Latin alphabet didn't help.

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

#189

Post by enedil » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:42 PM UTC

gajomi wrote: post #172

cpursley wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visited Ukraine (Kyiv) last summer. I spoke a little Russian with them; nobody seemed to mind.

Honest question from a less than A1 level Russian student... Is there really a significant difference between the two? I have no doubt that there is different vocabulary etc. and of course that there are political reasons to count them as different languages but are they effectively mutually intelligible?

A friend of mine from Lviv tells me that Ukrainian language is closer in structure and vocabulary to Polish than to Russian. I can't really assess this information, as I speak only Polish, from these three.

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

#190

Post by dddddaviddddd » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 11:42 PM UTC

kobayashi wrote: post #88

eloff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Canada is a great example, since the vast majority of native French speakers are located in only one region. There is a stronger case for English Spanish bilingualism in the US than French English in Canada. With Kazakhstan, I can totally see the case for equal status of Russian.

Also it’s a constitutional issue in Canada. The foundation of Canada was by mainly two groups: the English settlers in the French settlers. The confederation of Canada therefore gave both languages equal status.

That's been the story since the 1960s at least; while the Constitution includes some guarantees for bilingualism this was much strengthened by the Official Languages Act as part of the federal response to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec.