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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

#221

Post by briandear »

pc2g4d wrote: post #168
azangru wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have easier time learning English, and it eases the communication a lot Is this really so? Are you sure having a different alphabet would make it harder for people to learn a western language? I am Russian, and I can safely say that pretty much every literate adult in Russia who has at least a basic school education can read Latin letters just fine, because there is no way around it; the alphabet is taught a…

The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans. I can only imagine it makes Kazakh even more daunting. I don't think Cyrillic letters pervade American culture in quite the same way that Latin letters pervade Russian culture, so it's not quite the same.

The alphabet is easy; the grammar is another story.

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

#222

Post by emodendroket »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #196
emodendroket wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to pick just one, English is a pretty good choice, because there are few places you can go where absolutely nobody speaks it.

> there are few places you can go where absolutely nobody speaks it. I can only assume you have never been to francophone or lusaphone Africa or many Latin American countries. Yes, if you search you might be able to find an intelligentsia that can manage some English, but the majority of people you meet will expect to communicate in French, Spanish or Portuguese.

I'm not talking about having a discussion on the finer points of Melville here. I personally have some familiarity with Spanish and French and anyway haven't ever traveled to Africa.

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

#223

Post by evincarofautumn »

titanix2 wrote: post #198
pc2g4d wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans. I can only imagine it makes Kazakh even more daunting. I don't think Cyrillic letters pervade American culture in quite the same way that Latin letters pervade Russian culture, so it's not quite the same.

It’s more likely the problem of these people or the American education system because learning a new alphabet as close as the cyrillic is only a matter of days for a motivated person. It’s even the closest to the Latin one (with Greek), not something like the Davanagari with complex ligature rules or that looks totally foreign like thai or that have multiples letter forms like arabic.

It also depends on your learning style when it comes to languages. For someone like me, who learns languages more aurally (listening and speaking) than visually (reading and writing), writing systems aren’t that hard to learn but they’re hard to master in terms of reading at normal speed.

With any text in a Latin alphabet, in any language, show me the phonology of the language and I can read it aloud at normal speed with decent pronunciation within a few hours. If it’s in a different writing system, it’s going to take me days or longer to get up to even a moderate reading speed—and a lot of that would be cheating by just memorising the text and using the writing as a cue.

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

#224

Post by emodendroket »

disordinary wrote: post #197
emodendroket wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to pick just one, English is a pretty good choice, because there are few places you can go where absolutely nobody speaks it.

You'd think that, but it's not true. Or, people learn it at school which is quite different from being able to convey even basic conversation in it. With a language if you don't use it you forget it.

There is a good chance whoever you find will have halting, stilted, or limited English. But that's a little different than the situation you'd encounter if you tried, for instance, speaking Japanese outside of Japan.

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

#225

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

emodendroket wrote: post #222
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are few places you can go where absolutely nobody speaks it. I can only assume you have never been to francophone or lusaphone Africa or many Latin American countries. Yes, if you search you might be able to find an intelligentsia that can manage some English, but the majority of people you meet will expect to communicate in French, Spanish or Portuguese.

I'm not talking about having a discussion on the finer points of Melville here. I personally have some familiarity with Spanish and French and anyway haven't ever traveled to Africa.

> I'm not talking about having a discussion on the finer points of Melville here.

No, seriously, the level of English in those countries is sometimes so low that you won’t even be able to obtain the most rudimentary things. In francophone Africa, even French is sometimes limited only to the upper classes. (In Madagascar, for instance, French disappears as soon as you leave the capital city and people generally speak solely Malagasy from then on.)

Only a person who hasn’t actually traveled on every continent will believe that English (or even other languages) is widely enough spoken now to always get by. There is a reason that that "point to the picture" phrase book is still published and loads of travelers swear by it.

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

#227

Post by evincarofautumn »

ahakki wrote: post #204
heliodor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Learing to pronounce French words is rather easy. English is a huge mess.

It’s relatively easy for an English speaker to learn because we have a lot of French vocabulary, but the correspondence between pronunciation and spelling isn’t simple[1]—although granted it is somewhat simpler than English[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Sound_to_sp...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Spelling_p...

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

#229

Post by disordinary »

emodendroket wrote: post #224
disordinary wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think that, but it's not true. Or, people learn it at school which is quite different from being able to convey even basic conversation in it. With a language if you don't use it you forget it.

There is a good chance whoever you find will have halting, stilted, or limited English. But that's a little different than the situation you'd encounter if you tried, for instance, speaking Japanese outside of Japan.

Maybe in the cities, but it can still take time and you're often in the street trying to find someone to act as a translator, disrupting their day.

It's a completely different proposition if you're somewhere rural.

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

#230

Post by my_first_acct »

A couple of comments on the article:

1) The article doesn't mention the latinization scheme that was initially proposed last year by the committee of linguists that was tasked to study this issue. Their proposal used only the 26 letters of the English alphabet; since Kazakh has more than 26 sounds, the additional sounds would be represented by digraphs (pairs of letters). President Nazarbayev over-rode the committee, and proposed the "apostrophe" version (mentioned in the article). After much outcry, the final version (with diacritical marks) was adopted. So here is the evolution of the letter currently written with the Kazakh Cyrillic "ә": ae, then a', then á. Note, by the way, that "ә" does not exist in the Russian version of Cyrillic; in order to write Kazakh in Cyrillic, additional letters needed to be introduced back in the 1930s. My opinion: the digraph proposal was the most forward-looking. I'm guessing that most young Kazakhs will end up skipping the diacritical marks when they send text messages, whereas they would have used the digraphs.

2) The article is a bit confusing, in that it mixes up two different initiatives. The first initiative (the main focus of the article) is to convert Kazakh to the Latin alphabet. The second is to reduce the use of Russian in favor of Kazakh. (At some point, President Nazarbayev expressed the goal of educating all children in 3 languages: Kazakh, English, and Russian).

3) The article (and most of the comments) seem to be focused on the question of whether latinization would improve Kazakhstan's economic ties with European and Turkic nations. But Kazakhstan's most important neighbor is China, and it is safe to assume that more Chinese are familiar with the Latin than with the Cyrillic alphabet, so latinization makes sense in this regard as well.

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