Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet • Hacker News Board

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#171

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#172

Post by bangonkeyboard » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

rozab wrote: post #119

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/

Fascinating, thank you. It's interesting how the Arabic numerals in the dates are flipped 90°, as opposed to in some right to left scripts where they are just reproduced as is. I've always thought this would hinder the flow of the reading, but I suppose small numbers (for most people) are instantly recognised rather than being parsed left to right.

Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#173

Post by selectodude » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

bmn__ wrote: post #142

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…

> 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…

Not to mention, English is highly elastic and seems to have little issue "borrowing" words from other languages that don't have a reasonable translation in English. Schadenfreude is a good example. It's German, few people could tell you the actual direct translation into English, but generally people know what you mean when you say it.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#174

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:18 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #164

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stat…

> The latter does not inevitably follow from the former. Some subject always loses out when you need to teach something extra. Education is not infinite.

[deleted]

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#175

Post by ComputerGuru » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

It’s a very interesting script! It’s like a top-down (columnar) Arabic without any of the later additions of diacritics and distinguishing dots.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#176

Post by mytailorisrich » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

KMag wrote: post #169

mytailorisrich wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet. The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.

Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#177

Post by snazz » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

detritus wrote: post #138

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... :)

They look more similar when handwritten (in print, not cursive) than they do in Verdana or Liberation Sans (the two fonts used on HN on my devices).

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#178

Post by aeyes » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #145

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 uniq…

One of the few features I like on a Mac is that you can hold a key and it pops up a little menu which lets you chose many common variations of the letter without having your fingers do gymnastics on the keyboard.

This can be done without key combinations or a charmap: aáªàäâãåąæ

Is this possible on Windows or Linux? I constantly toggle between 3 keymaps.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#179

Post by buckminster » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

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? :)

What you need is some guy to make a few half-assed changes to spellings that don't actually come anywhere close to fixing the problem, but are just enough to create incompatibility with other users of the language. :)

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#180

Post by jsjolen » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #164

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stat…

> The latter does not inevitably follow from the former. Some subject always loses out when you need to teach something extra. Education is not infinite.

Interesting! Would you like to expand on that argument?