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

321–330 of 422 posts

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

#321

Post by klez »

kolpa wrote: post #210
klez wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you can do transliterations doesn't make it a good idea. > French (accents can be dropped) What? No! See for example https://french.stackexchange.com/a/24410

English has non-homophobic homonyms too. We just carry on regardless.

I guess you meant homophonic.

Anyway, for example "a" and "à" are homophones. As are "la" and "là".

A nice one is "chasse"/"châsse". Both are pronounced \ʃas\ but the first one means "hunt", the latter one means "reliquary".

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

#322

Post by Uberphallus »

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…

To add to your position on the subject, when I was on holiday in Kazakhstan, I'd say 90% of the young ethnic Kazakh I met in Almaty didn't speak more than very basic Kazakh, and 100% spoke Russian (at least better than me, I'm A2 at best).

I guess the number would be lower for rural areas, but even in Kegen (don't ask) I found my way speaking Russian without issue.

The only place in CA where I found people with whom I couldn't communicate in Russian at all was in Tajikistan, including Dushanbe(!).

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

#323

Post by lioeters »

chaoky wrote: post #294
fusiongyro wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Absolutely not. Czech orthography is beautiful. Latin letters, clear featural marking of palatal consonants (č, š, ž, ď, ť) and simple marking of vowel length (á). The spelling is even morphophonemic!

As an outsider with casual knowledge of Czech, I totally agree that the Czech orthography is logical and consistent (which is beautiful :). It makes it so much easier to learn to pronounce words, because the spelling tells you how - like it should. There are (almost) no surprises like in English, where the language is a hybrid of rules/exceptions depending on the etymology of each word. The reason for orthographic consistency in Czech could be that they were able to standardize it more recently? I also find Czech typography wonderful.

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

#324

Post by jwilk »

rspeer wrote: post #186
stordoff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 "z…

Even if they didn't have room for script codes, they could still use zh-CN / zh-TW.

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

#325

Post by lioeters »

gerdesj wrote: post #216
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…

I've read one or two comments here about "we should conform to the standard". I'm a Brit, speak English and disagree. It is handy to have a "Lingua Franca" (Frankish language or "French") and at the moment that is generally considered to be English (unless you happen to live in the rather large bits of the world where it isn't). @vbezhenar is bloody close to fluent in my language. "I'm an ethnic Russian" is better th…

Vive la différence! (French)

¡Viva la diferencia! (Spanish)

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

efrafa wrote: post #252
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With factors of 2,3 and 4 its actually easier to deal with English than metric. A third of a meter? Good luck.

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 :)

[deleted]

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

#328

Post by pauljurczak »

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…

Chinese alphabet is much more complex than cyrillic and they don't have any problems with international trade. This is mostly a political gesture.

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

#329

Post by sajithdilshan »

azangru wrote: post #147
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…

> 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…

Agree with you. I hardly think having a different native alphabet makes it harder for people to learn a western language. All the south Asian countries have a different alphabet which is far different from latin one, but English is widely used/spoken in those countries as one of the official language.

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

#330

Post by Mike90 »

shmerl wrote: post #109
vbezhenar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can move away from Russia as a person. You can't move away from Russia as a country. Those countries are just next to one other, their border probably longer than Europe's perimeter. You have to think for hundreds of years when you're talking about breaking relationships between nations. Putin will die in max 30 years, probably earlier. He's extremely unlikely to be the next Russia's President. Russia might turn…

> You can't move away from Russia as a country. Russia pretty much caused Georgia and Ukraine to do it, thanks to the absurd aggression of the Russian mafia government. So surely you can, if there is enough will for it. First major step should be reducing economic dependency.

"...Russia pretty much caused Georgia and Ukraine thanks to the absurd aggression of the Russian mafia government..."

whatever you say western troll

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/12/pushing-nato-to-russia...

Post reply on HN