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

301–310 of 422 posts

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

#301

Post by netmare »

M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #281
gnulinux wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used dotless, dotted i all my life never had any problems. What endless source of fun are you talking about?

Convert ı to upper case and you get I. But convert I back to lower case and what should you get? i or ı?

By converting to uppercase you lose information. There's no magic way to avoid this, unless you store the original. Greek also has this problem with stress accents. For example, both "γέρος" (old man) and "γερός" (strong) become "ΓΕΡΟΣ" in upper case. Case round-tripping isn't available in all languages.

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

#302

Post by y_molodtsov »

School-Cotton wrote: post #295
gerdesj wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? French (there are quite a few of them - think CA for example) has just as many idiosyncrasies as English when you really get in to it.

This is categorically wrong. French spelling has absolutely nowhere near as many idiosyncrasies as English spelling. It is totally impossible to predict how an unfamiliar written word is pronounced in English, but quite easy in French (barring some ambiguous situations like if a noun ends in “s”.) By the way, I don’t know what CA means. If you’re referring to the French word “ça”, its pronunciation is completely regu…

Well, it's possible, but only if you know where did the word come from.

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

#303

Post by simias »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #223
titanix2 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see your point but it's not that clear cut in my experience because even if two languages share the same alphabet the way it maps to pronunciation can vary wildly. If you take random made up words like "tothon", "ylho", "sturcti" or "boqurkït" and ask English, German, French and Portuguese people to pronounce them as words in their native language you'll get wildly different results. So in a way you have to learn to override your native language and re-learn to read when you're switching to a foreign tongue, even if it uses the same alphabet.

Latin alphabet might give you the illusion that you can read a text aloud but it's really just that, an illusion. Ask a French speaker with no knowledge of English to read this comment aloud "phonetically" and see if you can even recognize the words.

It's even conceivable that using a different alphabet actually helps you getting the pronunciation right since you might be less tempted to read it in English.

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

#304

Post by anovikov »

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…

Well this is exactly why they are doing it: they want to separate themselves from the evils of Communism, to teach themselves not to be Commies/Russians as much as possible, by moving away from Commie-dominated sources of information. Wise decision.

If you feel yourself and pose yourself as Russian, you are immediately at odds with all the civilized world, associations are clear: Stalin, evil Commies, Putin, occupation of Ukraine, etc. If you are a Kazakhstani of Slavic origin, that's fine, who bothers? You are perceived neutrally. So this is good for you.

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

#305

Post by zby »

English is not very well suited for the Latin alphabet! Learning writing in English is much more difficult than in Polish for example despite the additional letters in Polish. Especially with vowels - come on: 'a' can mean 'æ', 'ɑː', 'ɑ', 'eɪ', 'ə' - and it is also used in 'ea' where it has even different pronunciation.

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

#306

Post by Cadabrum »

enedil wrote: post #189
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?

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.

That's right, but only few people speak pure Ukranian language (and they do it mainly for political reasons). It is incovinient as it lacks some modern words and concepts. One can discuss prices on the market or neighbor girl, but when topic is switched to scientific or ingeneering matter - Russian is language of choise. Same with Kazakh language - the language of nomads.

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

#307

Post by gnulinux »

M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #281
gnulinux wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used dotless, dotted i all my life never had any problems. What endless source of fun are you talking about?

Convert ı to upper case and you get I. But convert I back to lower case and what should you get? i or ı?

This is a very strange question. In English you get i. In Turkish or Azeri you get ı. There is a very fundamental difference between ı and i and basically no native speaker mixes them up. When you're learning English, for example, you mix up and write capital İ instead of I. The rule is basic: ı I and i İ. No magic going on.

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

#308

Post by lmm »

emodendroket wrote: post #159
lmm wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If learning to write in a new script is a substantial and intimidating step, doesn't it make more sense to put it on visitors than on your entire citizenry?

Transition costs are only paid once, and if everyone is learning together that's probably a lot less intimidating.

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

#309

Post by erk__ »

TomK32 wrote: post #276
efrafa wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is calculating 1/3 of 100cm an issue? Im living on California for 2 years and imperial system still make no sense to me :)

Has California become and island already?

Parts of it is ;) [0]

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116225/

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

#310

Post by rimliu »

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.

This also supresses the amount of propaganda coming from Russian media. If you have not seen it, you would not believe how bad it is.
Post reply on HN