One weird way of fighting the Communism! They may also start looking suspicious to Chinese, since vertical script is also used in Taiwan.
Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
261–270 of 292 posts
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.
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…
In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#263Earlier 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.
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.
Indeed, mixing different shapes as letters makes reading text much easier. Blackletter, on the other hand, while beautiful in its uniformity, is notoriously hard on the eyes.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#264UI 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…
> we have such a terrible ability to speak english
Curiously, native English speakers have a terrible ability to speak French (even though they are not as protective of their language). Personally, I think that this is because these two languages, despite being “neighbors” and in some respects related, are at different extremes of some kind of phonetic spectrum. (Learning the written language, on the other hand, is a breeze and fun.)
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just like in Chinese languages/dialects.
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#266Earlier 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.
I’d say Spanish would be a much better fit. Much easier to learn than many other languages. (Another good candidate would be Malaysian.)
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 lit…
On the other hand, when I am reading a book in Classical Greek with accompanying translation to English, I more often than I would like to catch myself reading the translation - not because I do not understand the Greek text but because the translation is so delicious!
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#268If you're not familiar with Mongolian (and I dare say most people aren't), give this a listen: https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or "thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at le…
Sounds like a dialect of Portuguese to me...
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it will have the opposite effect. Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and dialect? Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work…
Waves of nationalism come and go. If you've got a big enough population, you can easily promote your native language as superior to others because it can express X, Y, and Z beautiful concepts easily while filthy foreign languages can't. There were a few campaigns where various western countries tried promoting their alphabets over native writing systems. Some succeeded (e.g. Vietnamese) and many others failed. Tryin…
> perfectly pronounced
Doesn’t India have its own English dialect - similar to the US, Australia, etc.?
Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear what you're saying, but at the same time - coming from an area with its own relatively small language (<500K speakers) - there is a definite need or interest in websites and media in one's "own language", in our case it's things like local news websites (with comment sections of course), newspapers and a TV channel. Said TV channel, like all the other regional channels, get some shared time on the public netwo…
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu_ R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Exactly.