I wonder if China will interpret this as an agressive act with the intent to extend influence over inner Mongolia.
Mongolian script is already on every piece of Chinese legal tender while Cyrillic is not. So it's quite the reverse.
Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
231–240 of 292 posts
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#232Earlier 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…
You precisely made a point, it's easier and natural to say "⅏⁝⏏⌸" rather then "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." It is the nuances and connotations in a particular language the bring out the 'true' meaning.
In one of the languages I speak, "hucci" means stupid, but in fun, loving way. Stupid just doesn't cut it.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#234The 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/
Curious. Left-right scrolling works as expected, however up down turns into left-right but with vertical overscroll. seems like they need an extra "overscroll-behavior-y: none;"
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#235Interesting news. I hope that Unicode will accommodate this change effectively. There have for instance been some issues with the unicode encoding of the similar Uyghur script.
One thing to note is that Mongolia does not use standard Cyrillic - they use a variant that has a few differences in letters and accents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet
I once learned this the hard way while trying to help a Mongolian person navigate the bus system of Los Angeles in the era before ubiquitous smartphones.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#236Earlier 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) 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.
The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
It wasn’t such a bad fit for Vietnamese, whose syllabic structure is basically the same as Chinese languages. Actually Han and Chu Nom were used for a way longer time than Quoc Ngu is. And the change to a latin based alphabet is more due to colonization than anything. For Korean you right though.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
Ridiculous comment. The Japanese writing system as a lot of issues, but visual elegance is not one of them. On the contrary the mix of different kind of characters is really convenient to easily parse sentences and give limited information about word origins. It also provides endless possibilities of word plays.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#238Earlier 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.
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 s…
Could be inherited from arabic as cited by another (does all western numbering system derive from hindu-arabic?). What really intrigues me is why specially the tens are reversed. If it were some practical utility or reliability feature (saying the most important first/last?) I'd expect a fixed order throughout. Maybe it's just a random irregularity.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic…
> There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script
No, actually there was two pushes in modern times. One advocating the use of romaji (or even French) which did not succeed.
Then there was a set a post-WWII reforms that aimed to simplify the script by: standardizing kanji use (eg 言う instead of 言う or 云う), standardization of kanji readings (当用漢字), kanji stroke simplification (新字体), dropping the old kana usage (旧仮名遣), standardization of kanas themselves to get rid of 変体仮名. The convention also shifted from using katakana everywhere where kanji are not used to the mix of kanji/hiragana/katakana of today. So yes, the Japanese script changed quite a lot recently.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
You precisely made a point, it's easier and natural to say "⅏⁝⏏⌸" rather then "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." It is the nuances and connotations in a particular language the bring out the 'true' meaning. In one of the languages I speak, "hucci" means stupid, but in fun, loving way. Stupid just doesn't cut it.
What about silly?