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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#201

Post by bloak »

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

But I thought they originated in India, where left-to-right scripts were in use, which is why Arabic is bidirectional with the digits written left-to-right.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#202

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

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.

If you are referring to the idea that children need to spend their precious school hours only on "useful subjects", then you ought to consider that many young people these days mainly learn English through osmosis while watching television programs etc. at home. So, whether time during their school day is spent focusing on aspects of their native language or not doesn’t make a difference for their ability to communicate internationally.

As for "Efficient communication is probably the most important factor in peace", that kind of idealism doesn't hold in practice. The peoples of Yugoslavia could efficiently communicate with each other because they shared essentially the same language, but it still didn't stop them from descending into brutal warfare. Even today, peoples of two antagonistic countries can often communicate with one another in English, but they go on despising each other nevertheless.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#203

Post by LatteLazy »

A similar plan was abandoned after it was launched in 1994. Government documents and media have been available in both versions since 2011.

So presumably this new announcement is actually banning the modern alphabet? The article isn't clear but that's implied as apparently supporting both will end in 2024. Adding an option is a very different proposition to removing all other options in my option but maybe the government are just announcing a plan to keep both and doing a really bad job at communicating that?

https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mon...

Per wikipedia, the script is not well supported. This is partly because letters have different forms depending on their position in a word. So "academia" would need to use 3 different symbols for all those "a"s. It has 26 actual letters but a lot more symbols to learn to allow for that. And (like a lot of alphabets) it's actually based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. So it's an import too!

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

Per the article, 3m (of Mongolia's 3.17m) people use the modern alphabet. So this will be a huge disruption for 95% of the population of Mongolia.

There is no current way to translate (transliterate?) names directly from one to the other. So that will make ID documents either insecure or useless if they're in different languages, which they will have to be since we are talking about documents already printed...

Plus the time and effort to learn the new alphabet is time and effort spent NOT learning useful skills in a modern economy.

The only advantage seems to be to communicate with Mongolian Ethnicity people in China who are more likely to still use the old alphabet. Oh and something about throwing off the USSR?

I really hope this is just a badly translated announcement that no action will be taken...

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#204

Post by gspetr »

ken wrote: post #156
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…

> 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 comput…

>Why not architecture, or dress, or food

All of these have a very limited use as a means of conveying information, mostly because the medium itself is static.

> or religion?

Funny you would mention religion. Christianity, Islam and Judaism mention the tower of Babel or something similar to it, implying that splitting the humanity into many languages was God's punishment for defiance.

"6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."

If we are to believe this, then returning to one language for the entire humanity would simply be a return to our most natural, original state as was meant by our creator.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#205

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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... :)

My comment was about orthography, how letters are manually written; the context was learners who don't already know an alphabet.

It's not uncommon to write capital-E with cursive strokes so it's a reflected or rotated 3, and lower case m and w are sometimes written similarly - so as to be very close to rotated versions of the same character.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#206

Post by jdmichal »

bmn__ wrote: post #130
oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read more about Hangul, it was never designed to look like Chinese. It has many interesting design decisions which are unique and not found in any other script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul Its history will also tell you what it meant for Chinese characters to be adopted by China's neighbors.

> it was never designed to look like Chinese Not so quick, there are design decisions that deliberately carry over certain fundamental features from Chinese: 1. The script is not linear at its unit of writing, but fills a square with its base components from left to right, top to bottom (「한글」, not 「ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ」; analogue 「韓字」, not 「十早韋宀子」). 2. One unit represents precisely one syllable. 3. Vertical writing retains the ori…

(1) and (3) also apply to Egyptian hieroglyphics... They're pretty generic design decisions for languages with composing characters. And (2) is just a syllabary, which is certainly not unique. Any composed syllabary that is meant to read left-to-right, top-to-bottom will likely meet (1) and (2).

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#207

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mmm_grayons wrote: post #144
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks.

I was really curious how "red" [es] came about for "internet" [en], but I see it's from Latin word for web/net.

Also, I've not studied Spanish at all this just made me view "retina" in a new way, cool.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#208

Post by bloak »

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…

> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.

So when Latin evolved into French, Italian, Spanish, ... we gained uniformity? I'm not convinced!

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#209

Post by bangonkeyboard »

danans wrote: post #194
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.

> 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…

That's fair. As you note by drawing a distinction, modern Arabic and formal/historical Arabic differ in their digit reading order: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-numerals-written-left-to-right...

I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first, but if it did then the historical transmission into Europe may have entailed two flips of numeric endianness.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#210

Post by frank2 »

rcatcher wrote: post #197
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%...

According to Wikipedia, the territory now called Mongolia was conquered by White Russians in 1920. Before then it was controlled by the Chinese Republic and before that the Qing dynasty (the rulers of which were ethnically neither Chinese nor Mongolian). In response, the Red Russians assisted Mongolian communists in conquering the country. The assistance included the sending of Russian troops.
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