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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#71

Post by keiferski »

fastball wrote: post #56
keiferski wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the opposite will happen, personally. Imagine that you can speak and understand any language known to man. Furthermore, you can create any language fairly easily, and in order for others to understand this language, they simply need to download a file. It seems like the choice of language would then become an aesthetic, political or simply personal choice. Certain human languages are definitely more suited fo…

Having amazing machine translation capability doesn't make it any easier for humans to learn a language. And the "richness of expression" argument doesn't really hold water in such a reality – if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese", then your magical auto-translator presumably won't be able to actually convey what you're trying to convey if you say it in Chine…

> if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese"

I didn't say that there are things that can't be easily expressed, but rather that certain languages are better suited for expressing certain things, or at the very least, opinionated in particular desirable ways. We're talking about the form, not the content.

In any case, yeah, I might be mixing the idea of a cyborg that speaks/understands all languages with a universal translator machine. It seems like these two things will eventually coalesce, though.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#72

Post by zeotroph »

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…

> affect the way they think

That is linguistic relativity / Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1], and intuitively I think it does hold. On the most simple level, there are groups of people who do not have a name for a certain color and they simply can not distinguish them from a related color which may be very obvious to us. And in fiction there is of course Newspeak from 1984.

So yes, I think killing off all other languages apart from English / Mandarin / Esperanto is a bad way to go, I'd rather go for early bi- or triligualism.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#73

Post by qwerty456127 »

h91wka wrote: post #68
qwerty456127 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

usually makes - so why not use 'e' only in the cases when it actually does? I don't say 'э' should always be used in place of 'е'. I mean why not use 'э' when it sounds 'э' (without the preceding letter softening) and 'е' when it really sounds 'е'? The Russian writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.

> The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way. It does not? Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?

> Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task.

Look at Czech or Korean. Nothing is 100% perfect but these are pretty close to.

> For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?

Use å ;-)

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#74

Post by mehdix »

Based on my experience producing right-to-left content and fixing related software bugs, I'd say they are mostly unaware of the complexities involved.

Any software they use today should be adapted to work with the traditional script. How are they going to mix their new script with Latin-based or Cyrillic scripts? What about adding math to the mix? I hope they invest in solving these issues, it would be very interesting to see the outcome.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#75

Post by chrismorgan »

yorwba wrote: post #2

The 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/

That website confirms one of my greatest fears about this sort of thing (which I am otherwise moderately thrilled about): that scrolljacking is going to be widely employed. And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right (whatever “right” means), though I have encountered two in the last decade that were quite close, but still definitely failed.

I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure.

With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it.

With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.)

It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge.

I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#76

Post by h91wka »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #62
h91wka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases and you should not. What I mean is using "э" where you can, phonetically. Using "е" in those cases actually is "changing" although has made it into the standard.

That's not what you said in the original post. Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts, as I believe input from a native speaker may be valuable to someone.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#77

Post by robocat »

yorwba wrote: post #2

The 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/

Here’s an example of a form: https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72

It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#79

Post by riffraff »

mehrdadn wrote: post #48
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.

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 rep…

I understand the feeling for Vietnamese which is a tonal language, and indeed has a ton of "weird" annotations on the basic characters which make the usage of the latin glyphs pointless.

But Turkish seems to fit a latin script quite well, and the previous Arabic/Persian wasn't a "native" script for a Turkic language either, I think.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#80

Post by h91wka »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #73
h91wka wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way. It does not? Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?

> Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. Look at Czech or Korean. Nothing is 100% perfect but these are pretty close to. > For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system? Use å ;-)

As far as I know, in Swedish å does not have any ambiguity and is always read as "o" (as in "ocean").

My point is that different people pronounce things as they are used to, reflecting it in a writing system leads to complexity and inconsistency.

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