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Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

bbc.com

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

#311

Post by bloak »

klez wrote: post #39
kolpa wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASCII with the English charset is easier than charset juggling and Unicode? Less subconscious negative feeling from Latin-alphabet-users? It's a linguistic version of website moving to "flat" UI design.

ASCII with the English charset doesn't cover any Latin script based language I know of (granted, a limited set) other than English. For example it doesn't cover Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, Vietnamese, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Irish, Occitan, Croatian, etc...

ASCII isn't really enough for (British) English. In handwritten English the following characters are very common: £ ‘ ’ “ ” · –/—. (You see that interpunct? That's the correct way to do a decimal point. Very common in handwriting; very rare in typing; often replaced with a full stop even in good typography.) Then there are some frequently used foreign words: façade, outré, Noël. I'll mention these, though they're rather old-fashioned and I would guess nearly everyone would use the ASCII equivalent even in handwriting: naïve, encyclopædia, œuvre. I could also mention the grave accent used in some poetry: learnèd.

Dutch, like English, is almost ASCII, though there are things like "één".

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

#312

Post by markvdb »

laingc wrote: post #165
vbezhenar wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An anecdote from the other side: I have personally met several such people in former Soviet republics, such as Latvia, and believe that it is not at all uncommon.

Plenty of personal observations of this cultural friction in Latvia indeed.

I'll share an anecdote from a different place though, something that gave me an epiphany on how to judge this kind of situation. Years ago, I was on a train near the language border area within Belgium: French to the south, Dutch to the north. I had a conversation with a mentally disabled person sitting next to me. In both French and Dutch. He was switching between them fluently.

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

#313

Post by rimliu »

disordinary wrote: post #233
everdev wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's hard to understand how people view their ethincity as different from their citizenship for people from countries with a colonial heritage. People who are of Russian ethnicity but live in another country like the Ukraine, or Latvia, or Lithuania, or Estonia, or any number of other former Soviet or Russian Empire states often consider themselves as Russian, they also often feel like they're marginalised in…

I can add about the "marginalisation" — if you live in the country for decades and still refuse to learn/speak the local language—you have marginalised yourself. Alas, the examples are plenty. These cases are an example of chauvinism ("велик и могуч русский яазык“, others are subpar) not racism.

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

#314

Post by michaelmrose »

coddingtonbear wrote: post #242
rasz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krushchev successor, Brezhnev send tanks to Czechoslovakia in 1968.

And the US successfully overthrew inconvenient governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1960, the Dominican Republic in 1961, Chile and South Vietnam in 1963, and Brazil in 1964, but you wouldn't call that evidence for the US being a repressive government, would you?

The US is a powerful nation that imposes its will by force on other nations and is indifferent to the interests of those it subjects to its will.

This has been true for a long time and remains true now much like Russias nature.

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

#315

Post by disordinary »

rimliu wrote: post #313
disordinary wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's hard to understand how people view their ethincity as different from their citizenship for people from countries with a colonial heritage. People who are of Russian ethnicity but live in another country like the Ukraine, or Latvia, or Lithuania, or Estonia, or any number of other former Soviet or Russian Empire states often consider themselves as Russian, they also often feel like they're marginalised in…

I can add about the "marginalisation" — if you live in the country for decades and still refuse to learn/speak the local language—you have marginalised yourself. Alas, the examples are plenty. These cases are an example of chauvinism ("велик и могуч русский яазык“, others are subpar) not racism.

Well, the example that I know best are the Baltic countries and most of the Russian minority in those countries do speak Estonian or Latvian or Lithuanian fluently.

It's not a case of people in the Crimea speaking Ukrainian but whether they have the freedom for their own culture. We're not talking people who have lived in a country merely for decades either, we're often talking people that have lived in a country for generations, certainly back in the tsarists period of the Russian Empire.

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

#316

Post by Asooka »

PunchTornado wrote: post #129

Isn't it better/easier to type at a keyboard using a latin alphabet rather than Cyrilic? There was once a guy trying to type Russian on my computer and he had to go to a website to type it. While when using a latin alphabet you can easily type Romanian with a US or French keyboard or whatever latin based keyboard. This benefit is huge.

Well, for Bulgarian, there are two different keyboard mappings one can use to type cyrillic with. The typewriter layout, which nobody uses. And the phonetic layout, which just maps the latin characters on your keyboard to their cyrillic equivalents where appropriate, plus about half a dozen character mappings where the latin character doesn't have a cyrillic character, so it's mapped to a cyrillic character that doesn't have a latin counterpart. I'm not sure how it is in Russian, but I suspect they have the same system.

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

#317

Post by k_bx »

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…

As a Ukrainian, I am somewhat jelous to you. We already switch our street signs and the rest to be in Latin for reasons as simple as tourism, it's somewhat strange that a tourist isn't even able to search for the street's name (nor read it) without Latin.

After the aggression, Ukraine switched from Russia being the biggest trading partner to EU being one, it's not as hard as it seems comparing to the threats Russia is accountable for.

We have a small but steady project called "Latynka" for Latin-Ukrainian alphabet and I wish it success http://latynka.tak.today/

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

#318

Post by memsom »

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…

Isn't this about bringing Kazakh closer to say, Turkish too? I wondered if part of the motivation wasn't to align themselves more with the Turks - both languages having a common language family/ancestor.

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

#319

Post by jwilk »

gnulinux wrote: post #307
M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> When you're learning English, for example, you mix up and write capital İ instead of I

That's part of the aforementioned fun.

Another part is bugs like this:

https://bugs.debian.org/579324

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

#320

Post by kingofhdds »

fusiongyro wrote: post #257
kingofhdds wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This standpoint is not linguistic at all. Cyrillic too had to be changed, in fact, to become suitable for Kazakh.

Yes, but that already happened.

So? Latin-based alphabet was in use for Kazakh for about eleven years before Moscow decided to impose Cyrillic on all peoples of Soviet empire (for purely political reasons).
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