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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

#381

Post by madeel »

kingofhdds wrote: post #367
madeel wrote: post #356

Adopting a consistent/stable writing system is more important standardizing on Latin. Main goal is to be phonetically consistent with reading. I highly doubt the beauty of expression in Arabic/Hebrew can be represented outside their respective scripts. Bastardizing on Latin does not give Kazaks anything more than Turkey getting the EU membership.

>Bastardizing on Latin It's ugly, and emotionally loaded language which doesn't bring us towards any bright idea. In majority of languages where Latin is the base for their writing systems, there are diacritics, or other graphical changes. I wonder if you want also to tell French, and German guys that they 'bastardized' Latin, or is it only Kazakh who are not allowed to use the script with additions? Besides, Cyrilli…

It's how it is. Chinese/Japanese regardless of it's character hasn't stopped them from carving our respect or economic might the world. So liberalization on an idea for the sake of liberalization is deem to go nowhere.

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

#382

Post by kingofhdds »

fusiongyro wrote: post #379
kingofhdds wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Debugging.

How, btw, did this question follow from your point in the starting commentary?

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

#383

Post by kingofhdds »

madeel wrote: post #381
kingofhdds wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bastardizing on Latin It's ugly, and emotionally loaded language which doesn't bring us towards any bright idea. In majority of languages where Latin is the base for their writing systems, there are diacritics, or other graphical changes. I wonder if you want also to tell French, and German guys that they 'bastardized' Latin, or is it only Kazakh who are not allowed to use the script with additions? Besides, Cyrilli…

It's how it is. Chinese/Japanese regardless of it's character hasn't stopped them from carving our respect or economic might the world. So liberalization on an idea for the sake of liberalization is deem to go nowhere.

Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to communicate. What liberalization? This comment is neither answer to the mine, nor continuation of your own above.

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

#384

Post by vkou »

gandhium wrote: post #375
FRex wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Crimea happened, in large part because Ukraine was moving away from Russia.

This is playing with fire.

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

#385

Post by kwoff »

azangru wrote: post #191
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.

> The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans. It may be a barrier, sure, but it is a microscopic barrier (33 letters, mostly Greek-based, many in common with the Latin alphabet) compared to the complexity of a language (any language) itself. Would you say that Americans would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish? Or Latvian? Or Polish? Just as a side note: I once had to take a cours…

I think the Cyrillic alphabet has enough overlapping letters with the Latin alphabet, that it's relatively easy to learn the other. Possibly the Greek alphabet even overlaps better with Cyrillic than Latin?

Try Arabic, though. I took a relatively intensive four-week Arabic class one summer, and we spent the first week or two on the alphabet.

Anecdote: when I was little (in the USA), our family had a big dictionary, and in the back was, among others, the Cyrillic alphabet along with how to pronounce the letters. I would write out English words in Cyrillic letters, thinking that I was writing Russian words. :)

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

#386

Post by blattimwind »

FRex wrote: post #167
blattimwind wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic German uses a thirty letter alphabet, but no one says so.

Are you really telling us Slavs that we are wrong in what we (and our governments, educational systems and language authorities) consider a letter in our native languages and should stop saying our alphabets have however many letters we say they do for decades now because Germans happen to use different logic when counting their letters..? I mean.. really? I'm so astonished by that logic I don't even know what to tel…

> Are you really

No.

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

#387

Post by Fins »

Asooka wrote: post #316
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 does…

There is a phonetic Russian keyboard, but i don't know of anyone other than foreigners who can't be bothered to actually learn anything using it. Everybody else uses typewriter layout. I would be very surprised if it were any different in Bulgarian.

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

#388

Post by kwoff »

kbenson wrote: post #279
azangru wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans. It may be a barrier, sure, but it is a microscopic barrier (33 letters, mostly Greek-based, many in common with the Latin alphabet) compared to the complexity of a language (any language) itself. Would you say that Americans would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish? Or Latvian? Or Polish? Just as a side note: I once had to take a cours…

> Would you say that Americans would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish? Or Latvian? Or Polish? I would say that Americans (and people in general) are more likely to attempt taking up those languages, if given a fairly equal choice between them and others that also require learning a new alphabet. For the same reason (although on a lesser scale) that they might shy away from Chinese or Japanese. It's one more hu…

In terms of hurdles, of those four I think Danish is a clear winner there. Finnish is "ah, hell no" as far I know. :) In terms of usefulness, I'm not sure - maybe Polish. (That seems quite complicated grammatically, like other Slavic languages.)

Chinese, if you don't care about writing it, is simple grammatically (though a few concepts are hard to wrap your head around).

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

#389

Post by jaclaz »

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…

Just to provide a reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d'Heures

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

#390

Post by Fins »

mantas wrote: post #263
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.

Come to Baltic states. Some people went as far as refusing to speak Russian during Soviet times. Now many young people don't speak Russian and don't even try to because of anti-Russian position. Personally I don't respond in Russian if I'm sure the person was born or lived here for decades. If they look like tourists, I try to help with few Russian words I know or ask if they speak English... Old good pointing at the…

Funny, I know at least one Mantas in Vilnius.

While I prefer speaking English when I am there (which happens pretty regularly), it seems that people are actually more willing to speak Russian. Probably because they are trying to sell you something...

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