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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

#331

Post by nazgul5 »

Cadabrum wrote: post #306
enedil wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Confirm: Ukrainian is perceived by russians as "peasant's" language. As for scientific and engineering matter - I observe more use of words borrowed from English.

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

#332

Post by zokier »

netmare wrote: post #301
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?

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.

Lossiness is not the (whole) problem here. Bigger issue is the locale-dependence: in Turkish locale i->İ and ı->I, while in the rest of the world i->I. So it actually would be better if case conversation was lossy in this case. This is further excarberated by the fact that 'i' is in basic ASCII and widely used

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

#333

Post by mantas »

markvdb wrote: post #312
laingc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. H…

I wonder if Belgium in recent history had censorship of either language or if students were made to wear shame plates "today I spoke French/Dutch"...

If you want to imply that even mentally ill people can switch languages, but ex-USSR people can't... Plenty of them could. Many of them do that with English. Or is refusing to speak certain language in certain cases worse than mental illness?

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

#334

Post by rauanm »

(Disclaimer: I'm kazakh and passively pro-switch)

I'm gonna ignore political aspects of the switch and focus on pseudo-scientific side. (my personal views and thinking)

Except for words and phrases adopted from arabic or sort of persian (also arabic, but 'persianised'), our language is agglutinative and mostly follows vowel harmony. (that might not tell you much, but basically means we don't need any special letters or stacks of letters to hint the spelling - we have kind of built-in elements of style when it comes to phonetics)

After a long period of using arabic alphabet and brief period of latin-based alphabet (yes, we had that until Stalin decided to change horses midstream - for everyone in ussr), we changed our alphabet to cyrillic. (and when I say 'we', I usually mean soviets did that for us)

While doing so, we just took all of 33 letters from russian alphabet and added our own 'custom' letters. This lead to drastic repercussions, because instead of conforming new words and terms to proper lexical and phonetical rules, we adopted everything literally unchanged from or through russian. (no need to remind you that there were no independent science, culture, or literature)

Fast-forward to our days. We have long and clumsy alphabet. We write and spell letters we don't need, sometimes basically speaking two languages at once (it feels like spanglish or franglais, except we don't always have an alternative - it either sounds awkward, doesn't exist, or is so archaic no one knows or cares for it).

My take is giving up and saying well we sucked dick for 100 years so might as well keep doing it is not the answer.

I personally have no idea if there's a way to pay off the technical debt and fix the upstream. Cyrillic is subjectively harder to read or spell because of all the crufty legacy, and the way I see it we don't have a linguistic institution making decisions and defending the language for the sake of the language and its beauty. (god I envy frenchmen and their zealous protection of la Langue).

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

#335

Post by ajuc »

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…

> I wouldn't expect significant numbers of people flock to learn Russian (or Kazakh) as a foreign language anyway, because why should they?

It makes it much easier for tourists when country uses the same alphabet.

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

#336

Post by jaratec »

rauanm wrote: post #334

(Disclaimer: I'm kazakh and passively pro-switch) I'm gonna ignore political aspects of the switch and focus on pseudo-scientific side. (my personal views and thinking) Except for words and phrases adopted from arabic or sort of persian (also arabic, but 'persianised'), our language is agglutinative and mostly follows vowel harmony. (that might not tell you much, but basically means we don't need any special letters…

Out of curiosity, were there attempts/proposals for adopting the Orkhon script (or variant)? Wouldn't it be more natural/easier to use for a turkic language? Link to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet

Edit: spelling

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

#337

Post by throwaway84742 »

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…

Look at the map. There’s no way for them to “build a moat” or otherwise remove themselves from Russia’s sphere of interest and geopolitical influence. This switch will be undone by the very next Kazakh dictator once the current one (in office since 1990!) kicks the bucket.

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

#338

Post by krzyk »

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.

I tried once to learn just the alphabet (when I was planing a trip to Crimea > 10 years ago) because we have a lot of words similar to Polish ones so I thought how hard can it be. But I failed, maybe it was my to Cyrillic that was always considered an alphabet of the invaders.

In comparison I was able to learn Korean alphabet quite easily.

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

#339

Post by ajuc »

fusiongyro wrote: post #267
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

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.

DISCLAIMER - rant below.

The problem isn't Latin, the problem is how you use it. Nobody forced you to sometimes use C when you mean K. There are many languages where these letters don't overlap.

Nobody forced you to use both PH and F for the same sound. Why even use PH? It's not like anybody cares if that particular word was stolen from Greek or not. And if some people do - they can check it on wikipedia. Make it all use f and be done with it.

The whole too/two/to situation is ridiculous. Ridiculous spelling is also ridiculous. Why put "o" before only one of these "u"? Either put it before both or none... Also - beautiful. Really? Eau?

And why sometimes there's one "l" and sometimes there are two? Full, but plentiful. WTF?

If you bothered to refactor the language every century - English would be perfectly reasonable now. Instead the whole world is stuck with learning centuries of design debt to communicate.

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

#340

Post by kislotnik »

smcl wrote: post #292
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?

I was surprised when a normally-Russian-speaking Ukrainian colleague of mine mixed up months when trying to communicate in Ukrainian with another normally-Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainian - talking about something occurring in October but using "Listopad" (which I figured from Czech was actually November). I'd guess that there's enough similarities that you could have a reasonable conversation with someone when you know…

Listopad is a Ukrainian word for October
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