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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#41

Post by billfruit »

lonesword wrote: post #26
sametmax wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it There are downsides to any situation. E.G: - cost - available resources for education and work - adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing. It's also why we have such a terrible ability to spe…

> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity And that's not necessarily a good thing. It is not just a language that dies, but a part of the culture also dies with the language. I do get the appeal of the world having one language, but attaining it at the cost of diversity would be a _big_ price to pay. I speak a southern Indian language called Malayalam (34 million speakers). There a…

Yes, but this is about script. Some languages like Turkish and Vietnamese are doing fine adopting the foreign Latin script as Languages.

Sometimes people want/demand change in the direction of modernity too. I think during 1911 revolution in China, the people were really fed up with the system in place for centuries that they wanted it totally rid off; there was very serious discussion about adopting Esperanto as the language of the new republic.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#43

Post by robin_reala »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
robin_reala wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.

> CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility I don't think the support is really there for vertical writing systems.

I think we can say it is. writing-mode in particular has full support in all modern browsers, and some support in IE back to version 6: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-writing-mode

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#44

Post by h91wka »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #33
eps wrote: post #22

I once saw a Mongolian book (written in Cyrillic alphabet) and it was very jarring. It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a…

> always at the front of a word. That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they…

> That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word.

This is far from being a general rule. Your example is an exception. Consider "мера", "монета", "обмен" and so on. You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#45

Post by aquadrop »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #36
WilTimSon wrote: post #8

UI 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?

For a recent case, look at Kazakhstan which is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin - https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-ch... .

That makes much more sense though, you're changing from something less known to more know, easier for tourists etc. Changing to a less approachable vertical system is different...

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#46

Post by Symbiote »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
robin_reala wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.

> CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility I don't think the support is really there for vertical writing systems.

Posted earlier in the discussion, the Mongolian President's website works well for me, in Firefox on Linux.

The mouse scroll scrolls right, selecting text works (with a horizontal cursor), the western text (dates, numbers and "Covid-19") embedded in the text are appropriately rotated.

"View source" shows the source text, and it doesn't look like there are any nasty tricks to support this.

Is anything missing?

https://president.mn/mng/

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#47

Post by LeonidasXIV »

yorwba wrote: post #12
nordsieck wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m

> The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later

The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#48

Post by mehrdadn »

nordsieck wrote: post #9
yorwba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vietnamese only became Latin alphabet recently (100 years ago). In fact it's always completely jarring for me to see Latin or Cyrillic characters for languages like Vietnamese [1] or Turkish [2]—about as jarring as it would be to see English written in Arabic characters. So much that, if you asked me what alphabets these languages use without giving me much of a chance to think, I would probably still intuitively reply that they use something close to Chinese or Arabic, completely forgetting the whole story changed a hundred years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#49

Post by robin_reala »

eukgoekoko wrote: post #37
robin_reala wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.

> wide dispersal of compatible fonts Would you please share a link where I can download Mongolian Helvetica?

Why would you need a specific typeface? Your goal is to get characters displaying to the user rather than tofu.

Having said that, the place to look for multiscript support in Helvetica would be Linotype’s Neue Helvetica World: https://www.linotype.com/5553118/neue-helvetica-world-family... . Unfortunately, while they currently support 103 languages, Mongolian isn’t among them. I guess if this restoration takes off it might become part of the next release.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#50

Post by srg0 »

enriquto wrote: post #15
boznz wrote: post #6

Ouch! 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.

I guess if your site/program is well-designed you should only have to edit a single style file, and nothing else.

I guess you need at least one person on your QA team who is proficient in a top-down right-to-left language and can read and use the non-standard layouts. And I believe that exclusively "top-down right-to-left" spells "Mongolian". Common Asian (CJK) languages have an _option_ to write text vertically, but they are usually written left to right in the digital media. So basically the same UI layout works for Japanese and for Norwegian users. Horizontal right-to-left languages like Arabic might flip the layout horizontally, but they don't break vertical scrolling.
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