Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
1–10 of 292 posts
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#2The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#3That will be cool- we are waiting
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#4The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/
Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#5The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/
Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.
Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system.
This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#6Ouch! imagine trying to re-write your gui for this, I cant even think how I would adapt one of my business programs to vertical orientation, except for maybe turning the screen by 90degrees.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#7As a web developer I reject that change :P
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#8UI issues aside, I think this is quite fabulous. Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it. Although I do wonder how easy it will be for the whole nation to switch from one alphabet to another when they're so drastically different. I don't suppose any Mongolians are here to give their input?
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.
Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a…
> Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese)
What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#10I think (and hope) that as translation tech gets better, we'll see a renewed interest in local languages and dialects.