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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#141

Post by gryson »

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.

Why is it ridiculous? Why does it need to be cleaned up? I'm not sure what the problem is (I don't think I would classify you not finding it visually elegant as a problem).

If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, there are many exceptions to that, but the mix of scripts has benefits for parsing text.

Obviously, the Japanese writing system is not a single constructed system like Hangul, but I don't see any reason why it is inefficient (aside from, perhaps, the time required to learn kanji for school children).

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#142

Post by bmn__ »

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…

> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English

I've often seen this claim, for all kinds of languages, sometimes even between two standard varieties of a single language. For a particular reason, I like to dig deeper. Invariably, the people making this claim are not very educated in linguistics, so it's not wonder this statement comes out wrong. And it is wrong. I challenge them to disprove me with a single counter example, and they are eager to do so. Typically the conversation goes like this:

Them: "You see, in my language we have ⅏⁝⏏⌸." Me: "And what does it mean?" Them: "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." Me: "You just translated it perfectly, congratulations."

What they mean is: "there often is not a single corresponding foreign word or phrase for a word or phrase in my language", and that's fine; but very far removed from "untranslatable".

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#143

Post by h91wka »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #95
h91wka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's not what you said in the original post. I obviously failed to communicate that properly yet that's exactly what I meant. > Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts That's not me. For a spectrum of reasons I believe it's great if whoever having a relevant idea/opinion shares it, even if it's wrong, let alone different from mine. So I don't downvote anybody ever (but in some extremely rare excep…

> That's not me. ... So I don't downvote anybody ever

Ok, sorry for false accusations. I, too, never downvote anyone for the same reason.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#144

Post by mmm_grayons »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #121
flyinghamster wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most of the examples are newer words like "internet" or "chat", which are the same or similar in both languages. Spanish does have "proper" equivalents ("la red" and "la charla", respectively), but the loan-words are used pretty often. Because Spanish has fewer loan-words, the examples I gave don't sound like "real Spanish". This is less obvious in English because we have already abandoned any pretense of uniformity.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#145

Post by s_dev »

nemoniac wrote: post #132

The Irish language should consider returning to its tradidional alphabet too. Gaelic type has a certain elegance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type

I used seán as a username once. I gave up after I realised it was fine on my own personal computer but once I jumped on to an azerty keyboard or something simpler tasks just became more difficult -- finding the letter with a fada just results in searching the charmap rather than keyboard.

You can have fadas in URLs e.g. seán.dev using a technique called Punycode.

Ogham is another Irish script and is vertical but unique in Unicode because its space charcter is a line - the only language to do so.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#146

Post by DeathArrow »

sametmax wrote: post #105
dntbnmpls wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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.

I can communicate in English even if it isn't my native language. That's true for many others.

If anything, I see an argument for being bilingual, not for English as the only language.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#147

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

If you're not familiar with Mongolian (and I dare say most people aren't), give this a listen:

https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U

As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or "thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at least sound out words in the current script, but pretending Mongolian is pronounced like Russian won't get you anywhere. The language bears virtually no resemblance to any other major language, and even recognizable loan words seemed to be few and far between.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#148

Post by bmn__ »

Aardwolf wrote: post #42

How well is the script and the verticality supported in Unicode? If not well, that could be an interesting update.

The script is well supported, it was introduced in 1999 with Unicode 3. Vertical writing is a concern of text rendering, so this has nothing to do with Unicode. https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-mode

This is still a bit lacking outside of Web pages, but generally work-arounds are in place which come with their own problems.

HN test: Монгол бичиг ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#149

Post by freddie_mercury »

riffraff wrote: post #79
mehrdadn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "weird" annotations are (almost) all part of regular Latin glyphs, which is unsurprising since the Portuguese who created modern written Vietnamese patterned it after Portuguese.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#150

Post by theandrewbailey »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #122
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?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
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