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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#221

Post by lotsofpulp »

yiyus wrote: post #216
lotsofpulp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I don't see what's "human" or not about the different rate of return of different languages. If it tickles your fancy, go for it. But language is a tool, one that is almost useless if you have no one to use it with. So I have a tool which I basically can't use anymore.

I'm not blaming my elders or anything, I'm sure they were most well intentioned and they don't know the future, but I think my time could have been better spent. And I know there's many things I've wasted my time on, but I am simply stating my belief the future utility of some languages is not worth the cost of keeping them alive.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#222

Post by yiyus »

gspetr wrote: post #211
yiyus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are reading things I did not write. I said that what it is important is that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not that the system the government is proposing is better. In the next paragraph, you can see that I even used a conditional.

I do not know anything at all about Mongolian writing systems to know what would be better. I was just pointing out that assuming that people in Mongolia could prefer their old system instead of English, and that is the opinion that counts. I agree with you that this opinion is not necessarily the one of their government.

A referendum may be necessary but, again, I do not know enough about the situation to know if this is the case. For example, if the party in power had been elected by a large margin and this was the main point of their program, it may be not so necessary, although I still think it would be the right thing to do according to democratic standards.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#223

Post by cmrdporcupine »

adequateness wrote: post #219
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Latin alphabet but with some accents, and the eth/thorn/yogh/wynn/ash (ð/þ/Ȝ/ƿ/æ) characters that English used to have, and Icelandic still has some of.

[1] http://www.csun.edu/~sk36711/WWW/KAG/ch2.html

I'm sure everyone will start using it because I want them to ;-)

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#224

Post by Nasrudith »

flyinghamster wrote: post #111
sametmax wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's not necessarily a good thing. Nothing is 100% gain or loss. But I believe there is nothing in our current situation that is worth more than having a united humanity, which can only happen if well all can understand each others. > There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live It's ok, you can use the native word in an english sen…

One thing that I've noticed over the years is that foreign words readily slide into English, yet English words look and sound very jarring in other languages. My second language is Spanish, and seeing an English word in Spanish text just looks wrong to me, never mind that Spanish is full of Arabic loanwords.

Perhaps it could also be because English is your first language (if I assumed correctly) and it stands out more as familiar as opposed to say Chinese words in Japanese? I won't deny that English is a Borg of a language though.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#225

Post by yiyus »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #221
yiyus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I don't see what's "human" or not about the different rate of return of different languages. If it tickles your fancy, go for it. But language is a tool, one that is almost useless if you have no one to use it with. So I have a tool which I basically can't use anymore. I'm not blaming my elders or anything, I'm sure they were most well intentioned and they don't know the future, but I think my time could have been be…

What is not human is measuring the "rate of return" of what you learn exclusively in economic terms. Culture is a thing, although not always a very profitable one. There are people (particulars, governments, and even the UN) spending money to conserve languages. Also, I find quite extreme that you consider being able to talk with old and poor people a "waste of time", just because it won't help you to make a living.

A language is a tool, but it is also much more. In particular, it is much more than a tool to make money.

I don't know you, maybe you are a wonderful person. Maybe you could have done better things with your time than learning that language (I do not know how much time you invested or your possibilities to use it), but reading your comment made me feel bad.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#226

Post by madhadron »

adrianN wrote: post #217
madhadron wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Easy to learn? It has gender and number and a lot of inflection which are hardly easy for many of the world's speakers. Pidgin English appears to do a better job at what Esperanto claims to be ideal for.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#227

Post by madhadron »

billfruit wrote: post #218
madhadron wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vietnamese is one language. Imagine that French and Italian decided to agree on a writing system but insisted that the word for "dog" had to be spelled the same way in both.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#228

Post by chrismorgan »

athenot wrote: post #160
chrismorgan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that’s just the thing, and why scrolljacking is so bad—I’m on a platform with excellent horizontal scrolling facilities, and it’s ruining that. Based on my experience in this space, but not their code which I haven’t seen, I guess that this will affect at least all Windows users with precise touchpad scrolling. From my perspective, it’s a terrible trade-off. User agents need to handle this better, urgently.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#229

Post by lotsofpulp »

yiyus wrote: post #225
lotsofpulp wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what's "human" or not about the different rate of return of different languages. If it tickles your fancy, go for it. But language is a tool, one that is almost useless if you have no one to use it with. So I have a tool which I basically can't use anymore. I'm not blaming my elders or anything, I'm sure they were most well intentioned and they don't know the future, but I think my time could have been be…

What is not human is measuring the "rate of return" of what you learn exclusively in economic terms. Culture is a thing, although not always a very profitable one. There are people (particulars, governments, and even the UN) spending money to conserve languages. Also, I find quite extreme that you consider being able to talk with old and poor people a "waste of time", just because it won't help you to make a living.…

>Also, I find quite extreme that you consider being able to talk with old and poor people a "waste of time", just because it won't help you to make a living.

I didn't mean to imply that language is only worthwhile if you make money from it. But time is a finite resource, and unless you really like learning different alphabets or something, there is no utility gained for 99.9% of people in learning one that no one else is going to use.

Learning how to speak a language is orders less time intensive than a reading and writing an alphabet. I'm glad I speak it fluently, and can converse with elders and poor people. But reading and writing it will never come into use for me.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#230

Post by xster »

nordsieck wrote: post #9
yorwba wrote: post #5

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) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a…

> 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.

These are also common ones. It's also transplanted onto a bunch of other less well known non-sinitic languages like Khitan, Jurchen, Okinawan, Zhuang etc.
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