Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet • Hacker News Board

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#251

Post by huhtenberg » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

cmehdy wrote: post #168

notechback wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about English but other languages have a central body that manages the language, eg implementing spelling reforms. Eg German and French have a simplification every few decades (done by a central process) and a regular process for introducing/recognising new words. In German the words are based on common usage; in French more by committee decision as they want to avoid too many loan words - so "digital" i…

The Académie Française tries really hard to be prescriptive, and perhaps that works for the handful of elitist writers hanging out around Saint-Germain-des-Prés but it definitely can't keep up with the connected world, the language that is actually spoken and used by everyone, and often gives in by being descriptive with a noticeable lag and awkwardness. It is more of a self-congratulatory circle of elites trying to…

It also happens a (400 year-old) tradition that was quite intentionally set up to be overly complex so to prevent unwashed gray masses from learning "proper" written French and to keep it reserved for the elite.

I can't find a link right now, but there was an interview with a French linguist who explained the history of the grammar and how it came about. Was quite an eye opener and helped making some sense of why it is so bizarre.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#252

Post by novok » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #185

bmn__ wrote: post #142

Earlier 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…

Obviously it's not literally "untranslatable" meaning "unexplainable". But it's about how certain concepts are easy to say in one language -- they fit like a glove -- and hard to say in another. So if they're hard to say, you wind up not saying them, and it changes what people communicate, which changes the culture. In Brazilian Portuguese you can say "ai que saudades!" or "que malandragem!" which, poorly translated…

Maybe on the surface, but different words have different contexts and emotional attachments in different regions even with the same language. If the world spoke english, a combo of loan words and different words having different meanings in different places would naturally emerge I'm guessing.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#253

Post by aasasd » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

That's nice and all, but it will have a downside: after Nazi Germany banned the cursive Sütterlinschrift along with the printed Fraktur in favor of ‘deutsche Normalschrift’ and antiqua, the result was that people growing up after the war couldn't read their grandparents' old letters and notes.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#254

Post by rckoepke » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #75

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/

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…

I primarily interact with the web on desktop clients. This solution has been implemented perfectly for me. While I agree with your ideal, my guess is that it may take at least another decade for user agents to adopt a good solution for this, and until then, some scrolljacking will be necessary to improve my user experience.

Obviously it shouldn't interfere with touch scrolling, which is sometimes also done on laptop device screens (which typically conform to the desktop experience by default).

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#255

Post by thefringthing » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

tasogare wrote: post #236

yorwba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The absurd number of diacritics one must append to Latin letters in order to use that alphabet for Vietnamese is the best evidence that Vietnam should have had its own rationally constructed system like Korea.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#256

Post by gryson » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #241

gryson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it ridiculous? Why does it need to be cleaned up? I'm not sure what the problem is (I don't think I would classify you not finding it visually elegant as a problem). If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, the…

Generally writing systems with higher workloads to read/write lead to less native literacy rates due to people with learning disabilities not being able to get over the hump, not to mention less foreigners learning the language due to the higher barrier of entry.

Is there research supporting that (specifically in reference to native literacy rates)? Would be curious to see it.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#257

Post by lopmotr » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 11:18 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #152

lopmotr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a fit of nationalism, a former colonial power takes a step to sever ties with its continental neighbor. Does it still sound good when you look at it that way?

Sounds even better! Is there some example of colonialism which you think is worth preserving, to the destruction of their culture? Should Ireland stop being Irish, should Korea become a Japanese colony again, or should we reunite the USSR?

Not sure if you understood me. Mongolia is the former colonial empire. This script glorifies its heyday of oppressing people all over Asia and the middle east.

But yes, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa obviously benefited hugely from colonialism and nobody would want them to revert to stone-age tribal society.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#258

Post by dntbnmpls » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 11:23 PM UTC

gspetr wrote: post #195

dntbnmpls wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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 cha…

It's not a matter of talent. It's a matter of language. Shakespeare and Twain couldn't write their books in latin because their writings are tied with the language itself not to mention the culture with the language helped to define.

So they might have written great latin literature, but we'd still lose out on great english language literature.

It's stilly to say we should get rid of spanish, german, russian, etc literature since we'd still have great english literature. Nobody in their right mind would say that. Just because if everyone spoke latin and we'd have great latin literature doesn't mean that we don't lose anything. We'd lose english literature.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#259

Post by lopmotr » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

gspetr wrote: post #184

ken wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds even better! Is there some example of colonialism which you think is worth preserving, to the destruction of their culture? Should Ireland stop being Irish, should Korea become a Japanese colony again, or should we reunite the USSR?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Ethiopia "During the Italian rule, infrastructure to connect major cities, railways, public and private companies, and dams providing power and water were built; this along with the influx of Italian settlers and labourers, was the major cause of rapid urbanization growth. Also, the Italian government abolished slavery, a practice that existed in the country for centuries." And t…

Some people seem to see history through a lens of white-man-bad and noble savages. As you showed, it's not nearly that simple.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#260

Post by bane » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #176

KMag wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".

I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script