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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#101

Post by sametmax »

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…

> And that's not necessarily a good thing.

Nothing is 100% gain or loss.

But I believe there is nothing in our current situation that is worth more than having a united humanity, which can only happen if well all can understand each others.

> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live

It's ok, you can use the native word in an english sentence. English does that all the time: "je ne sais quoi" (french), "taxi" (turkish), "pizza" (italien), etc.

> Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture.

Yes. Change is inevitable anyway. But we can choose to change in one direction. I think the direction of uniting the human specie is the best choice.

> preserving a language might help preserve a culture.

I'll exchange my own entire french cultural heritage in a blink if suddently I could make the entire world speak one common language.

But it doesn't have to be.

A culture is not this immutable things we think it is. Most thing we call ancestral are really just the result of a continuous transformation process that have the same flavor, and so that we identify as stable. Even centuries old religions have been changing all the time.

So culture will change as well. It will adapt, and keep what is meant to be kept, then drop the rest.

We will lose some valuable things in the process, but to gain much more.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#102

Post by aquadrop »

yiyus wrote: post #52
aquadrop wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

While I agree with you, that is a very occidental point of view. I think it is important that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not tourists. If people there is more familiarized with this vertical system than left-to-right with a latin alphabet, I do not think it is fair to call it "less approachable".

But people there are already familiarized with left-to-right system they currently use with cyrillic symbols. And I meant not just for tourists, but in more general sense of being part of global world, especially for smaller nation.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#103

Post by keiferski »

sametmax wrote: post #96
robin_reala wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different languages and scripts don’t just convey information, they shape the speaker and reader.[1] Sure, there’s value in a shared communication language (and International English[2] is well on the way to being that), but that mostly communicative medium doesn’t capture everything that language is. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_E…

I know. And I believe it's ok to lose that too. We will develop different ways of thinking or improve the language we use. I don't think there is anything in what we currently have that can compare to a united humanity. And this only can happen if we all can understand each others.

Why does everyone speaking one language somehow result in a united humanity? Plenty of countries speak English and yet there is zero desire or movement to unite them. Language is but one aspect of culture and unfortunately one result of widespread English usage is the destruction of local cultures by Western, specifically American consumeristic, culture.

I also don't particularly see the usefulness or relevance of everyone speaking one language for the overwhelming majority of people. Do a Chilean farmer, a Mongolian oil worker, and an American programmer need to communicate with each other on a regular basis? And if they did, would this be worth replacing thousands of years of local culture and language?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#104

Post by lopmotr »

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?

In a fit of nationalism, a former colonial power takes a step to sever ties with its continental neighbor. Does it still sound good when you look at it that way?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#105

Post by sametmax »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #90
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…

> - adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other Even if it was true, why would this matter? Just because you share an alphabet doesn't mean you can understand each others culture. > It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves. Such as? > Mongolia is a very peculiar culture What's peculiar about it? It's no more…

The only reason we can even have this important debate is because the whole thread can communicate in english.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#106

Post by sametmax »

allendoerfer wrote: post #82
fiblye wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waves of nationalism come and go. If you've got a big enough population, you can easily promote your native language as superior to others because it can express X, Y, and Z beautiful concepts easily while filthy foreign languages can't. There were a few campaigns where various western countries tried promoting their alphabets over native writing systems. Some succeeded (e.g. Vietnamese) and many others failed. Tryin…

> English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so many people. With electing Trump or voting for Brexit native English speakers do not seem to care much. Ireland now has the biggest natively English speaking population inside the EU. More than ever the EU is a German-French organization.

What do you think we speak when interracting with the germans ?

English.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#107

Post by robocat »

pas wrote: post #88
riffraff wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why does it make latin glyphs pointless? Isn't it better to have a closer match to the phonemes that one actually has to say than having ideoglyphs? (Which are harder to learn, because writing and speaking becomes only loosely coupled.)

These are the written vowels:

Aa Ăă Ââ Ee Êê Ii Oo Ôô Ơơ Uu Ưư Yy

On each of which you can add 5 different tone marks: https://vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/

Plus there are diphthongs and triphthongs (look at the zero coda and off glide coda columns): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#ref_Notes

Disclaimer: I know stuff all about Tiếng Việt, but it seemed really hard to learn how to hear and say the sounds when I tried for a few days with private lessons. Using so many diacritics modifies the Latin alphabet so much that it becomes something else...

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#108

Post by 867-5309 »

h91wka wrote: post #80
qwerty456127 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

perhaps in Geordie dialect!

it's actually closer to the "o" in "thought"

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#109

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

sametmax wrote: post #13
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?

> 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…

> In my country, language protection is a big thing. It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english

The latter does not inevitably follow from the former. "Language protection" has been a big thing in Finland inasmuch as the Finnish intelligentsia has historically preferred coining new words from Finnish roots instead of adopting foreign vocabulary (so tietokone for ‘computer’) and there is heavy state subsidy for local cultural productions in Finnish, but Finns nevertheless have great proficiency in English.

> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.

What? Latin died as a native language by splitting up into a large series of dialects across Europe that were no longer mutually intelligible by the late first millennium. Europe did not gain any uniformity by that process.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#110

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #90
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…

> - adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other Even if it was true, why would this matter? Just because you share an alphabet doesn't mean you can understand each others culture. > It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves. Such as? > Mongolia is a very peculiar culture What's peculiar about it? It's no more…

> What's peculiar about it? It's no more peculiar than any other culture. But I'm guessing you meant it's a unique culture. But even then, it's not. It's part of the greater nomadic central asian culture.

Mongolia’s elites adopted Buddhism and their intelligentsia has historically looked to Tibet. That has greatly set Mongolian culture apart from the peoples of Central Asia, who adopted Islam. Also, Mongolic is a completely different language family from Turkic.

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