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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#131

Post by pbhjpbhj »

detritus wrote: post #126
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.

If you're learning letters then orientation matters unless you have extremely strict orthography. E M W 3 can all be written the same but have different orientations, for example.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#133

Post by pbhjpbhj »

knolax wrote: post #127

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…

The desired use of technology by the people is exactly the reason to adopt an alphabet that enables ready access to technology though. If you impose a difficult, or unique script you impose a barrier to use of, and development of technology.

These moves seem to me like an aspect of the greater separatism and nationalism that has been infecting many nations.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#134

Post by onetimemanytime »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #30

I wonder if China will interpret this as an agressive act with the intent to extend influence over inner Mongolia.

China should be happy at this, if anything, they're abandoning the Russian style.

Poor Mongolia, it aligned with USSR and now has to deal with China's rise as well. Long term prognosis is not good, as a nice chunk of "Mongolia" is already within China. Can't change geography

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#135

Post by onetimemanytime »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #133
knolax wrote: post #127

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…

The desired use of technology by the people is exactly the reason to adopt an alphabet that enables ready access to technology though. If you impose a difficult, or unique script you impose a barrier to use of, and development of technology. These moves seem to me like an aspect of the greater separatism and nationalism that has been infecting many nations.

The young will revert to English when online, this becoming a net loss for Mongolia

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#136

Post by dangerbird2 »

L_Rahman wrote: post #64
LeonidasXIV wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.

Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#137

Post by Symbiote »

robocat wrote: post #107
pas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It would be interesting to compare Khmer script with Vietnamese.

The Khmer alphabet seems to have 33 consonant letters, 15 vowels, 16 "dependent vowels" (which look to attach like an accent to a consonant), and 12 diacritics.

Since I don't have any knowledge of either language, I don't know if this is better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_script

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#138

Post by detritus »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #131
detritus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're learning letters then orientation matters unless you have extremely strict orthography. E M W 3 can all be written the same but have different orientations, for example.

Those four glyphs look entirely different to each other to me, no matter which way around I orient my head... :)

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#139

Post by tapirl »

robocat wrote: post #77
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.“

A combined influence result of ancient Chinese writing style and Arabic?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#140

Post by notechback »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #117
torben-friis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't take this the wrong way, but it's funny to read a post complaining of the bad relation between written word and pronunciation of a language when said post is written in English :)

Roughly, through what means should we fix it though? :)

I don't know about English but other languages have a central body that manages the language, eg implementing spelling reforms.

Eg German and French have a simplification every few decades (done by a central process) and a regular process for introducing/recognising new words. In German the words are based on common usage; in French more by committee decision as they want to avoid too many loan words - so "digital" in German is "digital", in French it's "numérique" which was invented specifically to avoid "digital" being the main word, but either way the spelling was normalised at some point).

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