Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 422 posts

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

#261

Post by luckydata »

vbezhenar wrote: post #128
rasz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Russia send Kazakh people to gulags for speaking/teaching own language like it did in Poland, Ukraine and many other places? Might have something to do with resentment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification

I don't think that anyone was prosecuted strictly because of speaking/teaching language. But there were Kazakh intelligence (who probably promoted language among other national agendas) prosecuted for opposing soviet regime. Again, I don't think that language itself has anything with it. That said, yes, USSR forced other nations to adapt Russian language and it's understandable that those nations didn't like it. But…

Ask the Ukrainians about "current realities".

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

#262

Post by indiv0 »

apaprocki wrote: post #236
gajomi wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can try it out for yourself -- listen to some Okean Elzy on your favorite streaming service and see if you can understand him. (For all other non-Russian, non-Ukrainian speakers, the music is pretty good either way :))

I'm a Russian speaker who listens to Okean Elzy and I heartily give this suggestion a thumbs up.

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

#263

Post by mantas »

vbezhenar wrote: post #126
djsumdog wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sup…

I might imagine that someone would refuse to speak Russian to underline his anti-Russian position, but I never met such a person.

Come to Baltic states. Some people went as far as refusing to speak Russian during Soviet times. Now many young people don't speak Russian and don't even try to because of anti-Russian position.

Personally I don't respond in Russian if I'm sure the person was born or lived here for decades. If they look like tourists, I try to help with few Russian words I know or ask if they speak English... Old good pointing at the map goes a long way too.

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

#264

Post by interfixus »

kolinko wrote: post #137
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…

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…

You are getting a lot of disagreeing comments, but I do believe you're right. No, it isn't that big a deal to pick up a new alphabet, especially not a closely related one like anything in the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic family. But yes, it does make a difference in the absorbtion of a new language whether you are somehow submerged in it, and can run the osmosis routine on it.

Having had peek access to all Western European languages since the day I learned to read has clearly helped me gain early access to the style and idiosyncracy of each. Not that I can read them as such, but I can with some confidence pick out basic meaning from simple text in more or less all Indo-European languages written in some kind of Latin letters. For very basic meaning, this includes languages like Polish and Czech. It does not include Russian, unless I make some extra effort.

I actually know more Russian than Polish, but would no doubt have an easier time learning the latter. It does tend to matter what you had chiselled on your brain at age three or four.

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

#265

Post by fusiongyro »

FRex wrote: post #160
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.

It's really not that bad. They've added 9 of their own to 33 of Russian Cyrillic for a total of 42 when using it for Kazakh. Now they're gonna add 6 diacritics and two digraphs, that's much less already. Compare this to even Polish that has: 1. 9 additional letters: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż. 2. Technically no x, v nor q, but everyone knows their sound so casually or artistically you can use them, just not in 100% or…

The source of the diacritical mess in Polish is that it is a Slavic language rendered in a Latin orthography. Cyrillic is a good start for Slavic languages. Latin is a good start for Romance languages. Arabic is a good start for Semitic languages. When you start from an orthographic base of a related language, you don't need as much of these shenanigans. Persian, by the way, is in the same boat as Polish: a language with a large consonant inventory rendered in an orthography that is relatively consonant-poor.

However, the Turkic languages don't have a good start in any of these three, yet they're all written in one of them with a large number of diacritics.

From the linguistic point of view I posit, your primary concern in designing an orthography is: does this line up nicely with the phonology? If it does, congrats, your literacy rate just went up. Every digraph you add is another exception you have to explain, every sound with two letters is another exception you have to learn. My son is in kindergarten. He wrote "KUMIN" on a piece of paper and hung it on the door the other day. I asked him what it said, he told me "It says 'come in'". Was that obvious to you? It wasn't obvious to me.

So, in the grand scheme of things, I know a new Turkic orthography is probably a long shot. But wait, there is already a Turkic language with similar phonology: Turkish. Did they take the Turkish orthography and modify that? Not really. They had to come up with yet another g diacritic.

I hope they do normalize the spelling and make it phonetic. Then at least, they may improve literacy, assuming it wasn't as phonetic as it could be under the old alphabet. Because otherwise, what are they getting for what they're spending this huge amount of money replacing books, retraining teachers, fixing software, etc.?

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

#266

Post by [deleted] »

thirduncle wrote: post #51
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.

[deleted]

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

#267

Post by fusiongyro »

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

I don't think the Latin alphabet is particularly well-suited to English either. We pay for C, but it never does anything K or S don't already do. Yet, we cannot be bothered to buy letters for 'sh' and 'th', digraphs which cover two sounds apiece and are extremely common.

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

#268

Post by eCa »

heliodor wrote: post #182
eCa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We are in complete agreement, sorry for making my argument a bit on the terse side.

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

#269

Post by pvg »

shmerl wrote: post #247
pvg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that reference does not say anything close to "During Stalin, it was the general policy to suppress national languages." There was no such general policy, the thing you link talks about the tension between the desire for centralized (typically Russian) control and the Marxist ideological demands of 'internationalism'.

There was no "tension". Formal internationalism was quite effectively replaced with persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, including suppression of languages and education. Internationalists were some groups like Makhno's anarchists. Stalin was the complete opposite. But I think I'm wasting my time here. If you want to deny historic facts, do it elsewhere.

We're looking at the sources you came up with.

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

#270

Post by jsgo »

jacquesm wrote: post #98
emodendroket wrote: post #84

Earlier 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?

The GGGGP (who you’re talking to) asked the GGGGGP if a country having a Latin based alphabet would really be easier for a non-speaker than another alphabet (in this case Cyrillic). I stated I only speak English for context (I can get by with Spanish and a middling amount of French, but neither at a level where I’d say proficient) as to why, yes, I would personally find a Latin based alphabet easier to search for words than one where the glyphs are very different as being able to locate said words helps with the stresses of traveling in a foreign area.

If anything, I’d say the initial statement of the limited nature of speaking a single language was off-topic. True, yes, on topic, not so sure.

Post reply on HN