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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#191

Post by madhadron »

adrianN wrote: post #20
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…

The French language protection is the reason why the league of nations didn't adopt Esperanto as an official language. I'm quite grumpy about that.

I'm not. Why would someone's conlang project be given status alongside something with millions of speakers and centuries of literature?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#192

Post by bangonkeyboard »

function_seven wrote: post #182
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, so 1,672 in arabic script would have appeared the same way, but would have been read as (something like) "two seventy six hundred and a thousand"?

Historically, yes, exactly. Modern conventions now favor the left-to-right numeric readings for interoperability.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#193

Post by madhadron »

torben-friis wrote: post #63
qwerty456127 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> always at the front of a word. That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they…

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 :)

The sad part is that this is after the spelling reforms of revolutionary America that did improve the mapping.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#194

Post by danans »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #172
rozab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages,

This is incorrect. They originated in the LTR writing systems of India, which is why the full name is Hindu-Arabic Numeral System.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals

If you read Arabic, this is clear because the numbers are written in the opposite direction as the words.

> they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right.

Only the ones and tens place are read from the right - which many languages do, including English in the 'teens' words:

thir-teen == three and ten

four-teen == four and ten

fif-teen == five and ten

In modern Arabic, the hundreds and above are read left to right.

For example:

42: ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)

142: maa'a (100) wa (and) ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#195

Post by gspetr »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #90
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…

> - 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…

>If that was true, we'd all be speaking latin. Thank god for language preservation, otherwise, we wouldn't have shakespeare, mark twain and the world's most productive language.

I'm not sure this is a compelling argument.

We have contemporary musicians who have written and performed songs in different languages, not just their own. Indeed, we have many examples of non-native English speakers doing very well in US charts that have album sales in the millions. Therefore I am pretty confident that Shakespeare and Mark Twain would have been fine if they had to write in Latin.

Even if not these two specifically, who would have the temerity to assert that we would not have had different but equally talented people writing in Latin in their place?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#196

Post by jsjolen »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #128
WilTimSon wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mutual intelligibility for the sake of information exchange is good, but we can have both. Most Europeans already have both. In the EU (the organization) it's Euro English.

The person above you has not said that mutual intelligibility is bad.

You want people to share their culture with you, yet you are fine with them throwing away something which acts as one of the backbones of their cultural history for the sake of an imagined increase in cooperation.

And also, why does everything have to be useful? The useless things in life are often the best. Like ice cream, poetry, wasting an afternoon away, or hacking. In fact that's why I work, to enjoy the useless things in life.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#197

Post by rcatcher »

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?

> de-colonializing their culture

Decolonizing from who? From Russia? Mongolia was never colonized by Russia, it was the other way around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%...

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#198

Post by overheadnoise »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #172
rozab wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So in German the number “21” is spelled “einundzwanzig” which means “one and twenty” compared to “twenty (and) one” in English. If you were to say “einundzwanzig” to me I’d most likely write down the 1 immediately and then put the 2 in front of it, if it’s utmost important to get the number right. This is really common also among the Dutch (they have the same thing) as well.

And one of our most common mistakes when speaking English is saying the number wrong. For example, 85 is pronounced fünfundachtzig, five and eighty, but it would not be uncommon for a German to misspeak in English and say fifty-eight.

I wonder if this has anything to do with what you wrote?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#199

Post by crazygringo »

I'm curious what best UX practices are around vertical alphabets, or if there even are any.

Handling left-to-right localization is "easy" enough with translations and making sure you can handle a little extra text overflow. And right-to-left is fairly "trivial" in simply mirroring the UX wireframe. Extra work, sure, but nothing too conceptually complicated.

But what are best practices for handling vertical scripts? Is it basically just rotating the UX 90° and working around the fact that images (like photos) are going to fit into your layout with a reversed aspect ratio? Because while it seems like that might work OK for some webpages, it won't for apps that are designed specifically for portrait or landscape mode on a phone/tablet...

Also, is Mongolian the only script that can only be written vertically? I can't find any others on Wikipedia. (Chinese was originally vertical, but is easily adapted to horizontal.)

Culturally I celebrate diversity, but from a UX localization standpoint the additional layer of complexity is... yikes.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#200

Post by soperj »

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/

I think it would be because most browsers are made by US based companies. These different modes should be options out of the box, and should have been now for a long time considering the web is international.
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