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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#211

Post by gspetr »

yiyus wrote: post #52
aquadrop wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes much more sense though, you're changing from something less known to more know, easier for tourists etc. Changing to a less approachable vertical system is different...

While I agree with you, that is a very occidental point of view. I think it is important that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not tourists. If people there is more familiarized with this vertical system than left-to-right with a latin alphabet, I do not think it is fair to call it "less approachable".

>I think it is important that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not tourists.

This very charitably assumes that this is the will of Mongolian people and not just the will of the government.

Nowhere in the article does it mention that there was a referendum on this, and I am certain that almost anyone on HN would agree that one is necessary for a change as serious as this, upheaval of the language itself would have very serious consequences that could potentially last centuries.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#212

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jsjolen wrote: post #196
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not everything has to be useful: you used the same technique there you implicitly criticised me using ;o)

Communication, is for communication. Yes, it's good to have localised codes, domain languages, private communications; quirky ways to make crypto-poetry, or to create artistic expressions.

But we, IMO, should be very wary of placing those above or ability to communicate effectively with as many people as we're able.

In Welsh counties of the UK school children are forced to learn Cymraeg, a language that doesn't help them access any other cultures, not communicate with any other people they can't already (except literally one or two pre-schoolers).

Cymraeg is very interesting and holds together part of the story of UK, my home country, but for communication it's a bad choice.

I've no problem with people choosing to learn languages for purposes other than communication; but forcing schoolchildren to learn a second language that's near useless [compared to global modern languages] as a communication tool, that's awful.

Yes to historic languages; no to forcibly separating peoples through choosing purposeful separation via language.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#213

Post by reaperducer »

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/

The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/

I found that surprisingly interesting.

Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#214

Post by lotsofpulp »

jsjolen wrote: post #186
lotsofpulp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if being more fluent in English leads to better economic outcomes for Mongolians, and hence more secure access to resources? I notice that in our family and friends of immigrants, the parents who were fluent in English and able to access all the resources in English, were able to provide their children better advice and their kids are more economically successful than those who didn’t have that resource.

1. They can do both, learning a separate script that's as simple as the Latin one is not a huge investment. 2. You're talking about people who immigrate to an English speaking country, correct? Good advice for people living in Mongolia surely is available in Mongolian. Mongolians today learn English, at least the guy who went to Sweden to work as a chef that I talked to a couple of years ago did.

Within the last 50 years, the language of the place where my grandparents and parents came from lost pretty much all of its economic significance, and that place has 100 million+ people. As the child of an immigrant in the US who was taught the alphabet and characters and raised completely in the US, I am more literate in the native language than the children who grew up there!

All of their parents sent them to English schools, and all business is done in English. You use the native language to talk to old or poor people, but nothing that can make you a living.

So in my experience, all that time I spent learning that native language more than what I needed to for casual conversation was a waste of time.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#215

Post by black_puppydog »

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/

Wow this is one of the very few websites I've seen in recent years that makes good use of the huge horizontal screen estate on modern displays. Love it!

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#216

Post by yiyus »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #214
jsjolen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. They can do both, learning a separate script that's as simple as the Latin one is not a huge investment. 2. You're talking about people who immigrate to an English speaking country, correct? Good advice for people living in Mongolia surely is available in Mongolian. Mongolians today learn English, at least the guy who went to Sweden to work as a chef that I talked to a couple of years ago did.

Within the last 50 years, the language of the place where my grandparents and parents came from lost pretty much all of its economic significance, and that place has 100 million+ people. As the child of an immigrant in the US who was taught the alphabet and characters and raised completely in the US, I am more literate in the native language than the children who grew up there! All of their parents sent them to Engli…

An economic compensation is not the only reason to learn something.

Your comment is the less human thing I have read in a while, and I spend a huge amount of time reading generated code!

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#217

Post by adrianN »

madhadron wrote: post #191
adrianN wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it's easy to learn and very useful as an international language.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#218

Post by billfruit »

madhadron wrote: post #190
billfruit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but this is about script. Some languages like Turkish and Vietnamese are doing fine adopting the foreign Latin script as Languages. Sometimes people want/demand change in the direction of modernity too. I think during 1911 revolution in China, the people were really fed up with the system in place for centuries that they wanted it totally rid off; there was very serious discussion about adopting Esperanto as the…

Esperanto, no, but there were several attempts at an alphabet. They all foundered because "Chinese" is actually a language family as diverse as the Romance languages, but that use Mandarin in ideograms as their writing system.

Vietnamese seems fine using the Latin script.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#219

Post by adequateness »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #153
theandrewbailey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you propose adopting the shavian alphabet or just modifying spelling with the latin alphabet?

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#220

Post by danans »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #209
danans wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first

The Sanskrit language (exemplifying the "Hindu system") had the same pattern as English for the teens, i.e:

11: ekadaśa = eka (1) + daśa (10)

12: dvadaśa = dva (2) + daśa (10)

13: tridaśa = tri (3) + daśa (10)

etc ..

In Sanskrit this pattern (least significant non-zero digit spoken first) continues through to larger numbers. so:

20: vimśati

21: ekavimśati

120: vimśati-śatam

1121: ekavimśati-śatam-sahasra

etc.

But it's important to remember that the spoken rendering of numbers in all these languages precedes the written representation by millenia. People have been counting much longer than they have been writing. Of course later ways of speaking the numbers may have been influenced by writing systems, but the spoken rendering of basic smaller numbers tend to be relatively stable over time.

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