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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#151

Post by eukgoekoko »

Freak_NL wrote: post #83
eukgoekoko wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I can go with font-family: sans-serif But what if I have to add Mongolian support for a website using Helvetica typeface for the currently used Cyrillic script?

You can't, but this is nothing new. Fonts tend to support a subset of scripts. You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists. Here you would choose a Mongolian font and add it to the font-stack in CSS for that language, just as you would for Arabic or Chinese. If you want a grotesque typeface that matches Helvetica in style for Mongolian, use one.

> You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.

This is hardly a coincedence that Cyrillic alphabet has broader support and adoption among fonts.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#152

Post by ken »

lopmotr wrote: post #104
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?

Sounds even better! Is there some example of colonialism which you think is worth preserving, to the destruction of their culture? Should Ireland stop being Irish, should Korea become a Japanese colony again, or should we reunite the USSR?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#153

Post by cmrdporcupine »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #150
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd be mostly fine with the huge bagload of loanwords if we could at least have a spelling system that made sense for our language, like we used to... 1000 years ago.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#154

Post by tanilama »

tnova wrote: post #17
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.

To add to what has already been said: Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in the 15th century by King Sejong. However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today, usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong…

I don't think that is the still the case anymore.

I navigate from time to time to Korean website, very few occasion they actually uses Chinese characters, except:

1. Some countries names. 中(China)/美(US)/日(Japan)/北(North Korea)

2. Blue House (think of it as Korean's White House, representing the headquarters of the administration), sometimes referred as 青(Blue).

3. The president's surname, sometimes referred as 文(Moon)

Except for those very limited cases, I don't think Korean people are actually using Hanja anymore, it almost feel like some sort of emoji for then, that they probably can't read it, just comprehend the meaning.

As to Korean names, yes I think they still have a Chinese name registered somewhere, but no longer required and not shown on their government ID card.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#155

Post by jgwil2 »

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?

Spanish is fully phonetic from script to speech and very close in the other direction (in some dialects certain consonants have merged).

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#156

Post by ken »

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…

> There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information.

Strongly disagree. Who are we to decide which aspects of someone else’s culture are worth saving, and which can be thrown under the bus in the name of efficiency?

Why not architecture, or dress, or food, or religion? Are you only taking issue because this one has a particular impact on computers?

> We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.

What is our purpose, without culture? We’re not robots.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#158

Post by BossingAround »

While I think the change in and of itself is great, the rise of right-wing nationalism in Mongolia is very frightening (similar to that of Hungary, for example), and I'm afraid this is a result of Mongolian nationalistic views.

As such, it is with a hint of sadness that I view this change.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#159

Post by Geimfari »

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…

They are fully aware of the complexities because six million people in Inner Mongolia in China already use this script.

The current situation is this: "As of 2015 there are no fonts that successfully display all of Mongolian correctly when written in Unicode" [1], meaning that specialized software using Private Use Areas of Unicode are the only way to typeset it.

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

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#160

Post by athenot »

chrismorgan wrote: post #75
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 faile…

Horizontal scrolling seems to work just fine (macOS with Magic Mouse; same with trackpad). The fact that they included a workaround for those who don't have input devices with horizontal scrolling is a nice touch, yet it didn't interfere at all with my horizontal scrolling.

I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.

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