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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

#371

Post by mantas »

markvdb wrote: post #355
mantas wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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"... Depends on how you define recent history. Discrimination of the Dutch speaking population was very outspoken until the 1920's (canon fodder in WW I...), common until the 1930's (difficult to get secondary education in Dutch, ...), and in some areas quite a bit longer.…

> Depends on how you define recent history. Discrimination of the Dutch speaking population was very outspoken until the 1920's (canon fodder in WW I...), common until the 1930's (difficult to get secondary education in Dutch, ...), and in some areas quite a bit longer.

Got any recommended articles on that? Maybe once things settle down for several decades, Russian language will be more acceptable in Russia's neighbours too. And local Russians will accept they're no longer living in Russia/SU.

Few more personal anecdotes for your collection:

* I was walking random streets in Riga. I'm Lithuanian and I understand both Latvian and Russian about the same. Random older lady comes up to me and asks something in Russian. I answer in Russian that I don't understand Russian. She starts shouting along the lines of latviešu fashisty :/

* A friend of mine was managing a Lithuanian company's branch in Latvia. They had to keep at least 2 salesperson on the floor all the time. One ethnic Latvian and one ethnic Russian. Otherwise either client could get pissed off by the accent.

* Tallinn townhall square on a warm summer day. Everybody minding their own business and beer. A bunch of chavs/maroz/etc comes with Russian flags, shouting "slava Rosija" and do a couple circles around the square. Nobody gives a damn.

* There's a kebab joint in Vilnius run by Turkish (?) dude. He knows some Russian, but refuses to speak it with non-tourists and answers them in Lithuanian on principle. "If I learned it in few years, why can't they learn it in few decades?"

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

#372

Post by simias »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #365
simias wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Ask a French speaker with no knowledge of English to read this comment aloud "phonetically" and see if you can even recognize the words. As a practical joke, I once asked a French speaker (who spoke English well) to read this aloud: Un petit d'un petit S'étonne aux Halles Un petit d'un petit Ah! degrés te fallent Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se mène Qu'importe un petit Tout gai de Reguennes. He was th…

That's pretty great. I don't get the "indolent" part though, what is is supposed to be? Please answer quickly as my coworkers are starting to look at me weirdly as I repeat "indolent qui ne sort cesse" aloud again and again.

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

#373

Post by M_Bakhtiari »

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.

You don't always have the luxury of knowing the language of the text you're processing. You may well encounter both English and Turkish words in the same text stream, and you don't always have the means to distinguish between them.

It's the same problem with Han unification. It's fine if you have 100% Japanese, Chinese or Korean and set your font accordingly. But it all breaks down when you try to mix two or more languages in the same stream, unless you have some external means of distinguishing between them.

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

#374

Post by Lionsion »

jsgo wrote: post #163
Lionsion wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler. Not really, and you'd have to do it more frequently. The US already has a standard, and a lot of existing stuff built to it. Adopting the metric system isn't going to change the size of the pipes in my house's plumbing, the units in my recipes and cookbooks, etc.

at the most basic: 1 kilometer is 1000 meters 1 kiloliter is 1000 liters etc. 1 mile is 1760 yards 1 foot is 12 inches 1 gallon is 4 quarts etc. dunno, seems simpler to me.

> dunno, seems simpler to me.

Cheeky.

You're missing the point. When you change between systems you're going to have to do conversions like:

1 mile is ~1.61 kilometers

1 foot is 0.3048 meters

1 gallon is ~3.79 liters

Doesn't seem all that much simpler. Switching doesn't improve conversions as much as you'd think. If the US metricated, I'd have to do a lot more conversions in my everyday life, because, at present, I hardly do any between US units.

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

#375

Post by gandhium »

FRex wrote: post #127
gandhium wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the benefit of this change? Protecting themselves from Russian insurgency, among other reasons. Kazakhstan had protected themselves before, shutting down Russian-inspired "People Republic".

How would this help with any kind of Russian insurgency, espionage, etc. at all? According to the article there is 20% of ethnic Russians and more fluent Russian speakers (94%) than Kazakh speakers (74%). Russian is also a co-official language in Kazkhstan and I can't find anything about getting rid of that. Latin (and Cyrillic) alphabet is also no cipher. It's easy to learn one when you know the other, the shapes ar…

> How would this help with any kind of Russian insurgency, espionage, etc. at all? According to the article there is 20% of ethnic Russians and more fluent Russian speakers (94%) than Kazakh speakers (74%).

Look at the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Russia was succeeded to instigate an insurgency there mostly because people there were heavily influenced by Russian propaganda.

And I assume after those events Kazakhstan had additional incentive to go further away from Russia.

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

#376

Post by Symbiote »

ethelward wrote: post #161
Symbiote wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried using my phone to type words into Google Translate while in Armenia. Typing Armenian was a non-starter. I'm not dyslexic, but felt it when faced with words that looked like "արարողակարգը" (random copy-paste from Wikipedia[1]). The second language was often Russian, and typing in Cyrillic was a little better, especially once I found the alphabet is derived from Greek rather than Latin -- so р is r, and н is e,…

н is n.

Thanks, I'm thinking of и.

https://design.canonical.com/2011/08/alphabet-development/ has a small diagram including Greek, Cyrillic and Latin.

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

#377

Post by DonaldFisk »

simias wrote: post #372
DonaldFisk wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask a French speaker with no knowledge of English to read this comment aloud "phonetically" and see if you can even recognize the words. As a practical joke, I once asked a French speaker (who spoke English well) to read this aloud: Un petit d'un petit S'étonne aux Halles Un petit d'un petit Ah! degrés te fallent Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se mène Qu'importe un petit Tout gai de Reguennes. He was th…

That's pretty great. I don't get the "indolent" part though, what is is supposed to be? Please answer quickly as my coworkers are starting to look at me weirdly as I repeat "indolent qui ne sort cesse" aloud again and again.

    Indolent qui ne sort cesse
indolent = and all 'e

qui ne s- = king's

-ort cesse = 'orses

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

#378

Post by merinowool »

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 find your post very rude. Russia essentially destroyed Kazakh identity and you have guts to say, "well since we already did it let's keep it that way". Really Russian influence is like a cancer. I feel happy for Kazakh for trying to cut it off.

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

#379

Post by fusiongyro »

kingofhdds wrote: post #320
fusiongyro wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Then why are they recreating the work rather than reverting to that version alphabet?

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

#380

Post by cbluth »

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…

I know Mongolian, and I can read and write Mongolian ancient script, Монгол Босоо Бичиг, and it uses a very similar vowel harmony structure. Mongolian has been seriously bungled by Cyrillic, reducing a natural set of vowels to something impossible to represent in Cyrillic.

I think the ancient Mongolian script possibly worked well because you could write something in a standard way, and the same script worked for any dialect that would read it.

Perhaps modeling your alphabet after the mechanics of a "vowel harmony structure" with a modern facade like Latin characters might work, dunno, I don't know Казак.

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