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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#121

Post by pbhjpbhj »

flyinghamster wrote: post #111
sametmax wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sen…

One thing that I've noticed over the years is that foreign words readily slide into English, yet English words look and sound very jarring in other languages. My second language is Spanish, and seeing an English word in Spanish text just looks wrong to me, never mind that Spanish is full of Arabic loanwords.

Can you give examples?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#122

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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?

Sounds great, can we decolonialize away from the Norman conquest and get back the old Anglo-Saxon orthography?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#123

Post by lotsofpulp »

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".

What if being more fluent in English leads to better economic outcomes for Mongolians, and hence more secure access to resources?

I notice that in our family and friends of immigrants, the parents who were fluent in English and able to access all the resources in English, were able to provide their children better advice and their kids are more economically successful than those who didn’t have that resource.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#124

Post by pbhjpbhj »

zeotroph wrote: post #72
lonesword wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ap…

If there's no word for the colour you're perceiving then surely you make one or transliterate one? That's going to tend to create linguistic enclaves but mutual intelligibility should survive.

You can place where I grew up in the UK to within about 20 miles based on the word we used for lunch. Like the difference between bagged lunch (en-us) and packed lunch (en-gb) I suppose.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#125

Post by kouteiheika »

chrismorgan wrote: post #67
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.

On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom, &c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-orientation. Browser support for the complete set of this stuff is still a tad patchy; Firefox is best in general, but all the bro…

> On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom, &c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-orientation.

Yeah... even if CSS itself is, the browsers are not at all, not even close. Recently I tried to use a vertical `writing-mode` in a relatively simple application and encountered a massive amount of layout bugs and issues; it's pretty much totally broken in both Chrome and Firefox (unless maybe if you set everything to a vertical writing mode then it might kinda work?), and no one seems to care.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#126

Post by detritus »

mehdix wrote: post #74

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 interesti…

From the date, in Arabic numerals, on the president of Mongolia's website, it looks like they solve that by simply rotating lengths of none Mongolian-content 90° to fit.

If you're learning to read Latin (etc) script for the first time, it doesn't much matter what it's orientation is - they're just symbols.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#127

Post by knolax »

I'm glad they made the correct decision of moving back to a script actually suitable to their language. I always found it ironic that Mongolia the country used Cyrillic despite the significance the creation of the Mongolian Script under Ghengis Khan had to their ethnogenesis.

I find it worrying that some in this thread oppose this move on technical grounds. As an industry, software has to acknowledge that technology is subordinate to the needs of people, not the other way around. Especially in this case where the technical barriers are wholely artificial.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#128

Post by pbhjpbhj »

WilTimSon wrote: post #97
okasaki wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why is it good?

Because it helps preserve the country's unique culture and history, freeing it of the influence of a state that imposed its rule on them. I know some people prefer languages to be uniform but I don't see 'everyone speaks the same language' as a good thing. As a secondary option, yeah, it would be nice if everyone spoke English or whatever becomes the choice eventually. But I want culture to flourish and this is part…

Why don't you consider mutual intelligibility across nations to be good? I love the diversity of the many languages we have, but that's not really a useful aspect of the World - greater cooperation seems to me to be a noble target for the human race and commonality of language seems to aid that. People can share their unique culture with me because they speak a language (native, domestic, or otherwise learnt) that I can understand.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#129

Post by kouteiheika »

robin_reala wrote: post #43
thaumasiotes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

In theory, yes, in practice (I speak from experience) it has a massive amount of bugs when you actually try to use it for something that is not completely trivial. And the bugs are different for every browser, so working around them is pretty much intractable.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#130

Post by bmn__ »

oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #14
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.

Read more about Hangul, it was never designed to look like Chinese. It has many interesting design decisions which are unique and not found in any other script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul Its history will also tell you what it meant for Chinese characters to be adopted by China's neighbors.

> it was never designed to look like Chinese

Not so quick, there are design decisions that deliberately carry over certain fundamental features from Chinese:

1. The script is not linear at its unit of writing, but fills a square with its base components from left to right, top to bottom (「한글」, not 「ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ」; analogue 「韓字」, not 「十早韋宀子」). 2. One unit represents precisely one syllable. 3. Vertical writing retains the orientation of units (not rotating 90°).

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