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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#271

Post by riffraff »

literallycancer wrote: post #100
riffraff wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the feeling for Vietnamese which is a tonal language, and indeed has a ton of "weird" annotations on the basic characters which make the usage of the latin glyphs pointless. But Turkish seems to fit a latin script quite well, and the previous Arabic/Persian wasn't a "native" script for a Turkic language either, I think.

If weird annotations can work for slightly different phonemes in Orthographia Bohemica and for Zamenhof, I'm sure you would be able to use them for tones as well.

You can, it's how it's done, but it means someone who knows any other language using the Latin script still can't read it.

A speaker of French, Polish, German, Hungarian or Turkish can muddle through trying to pronounce another European language using the Latin script and get 95% of it but will have no idea of how to read Vietnamese.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#274

Post by chrismorgan »

gumby wrote: post #244
chrismorgan wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like you should report the bug to Microsoft.

I’m saying that at a minimum I expect all Windows users to be affected by this.

It’s not a Microsoft problem at all: it’s that the web platform simply doesn’t support getting this type of scrolljacking right. It’s just not possible due to how scrolling is handled in the browser, how wheel events work, and the platform’s propensity to asynchrony (so that not only is it not supported, it can never be supported). The best you can achieve is to detect OS and browser and guess at how it’s going to behave, and emulate its functionality. And quite apart from how such things change over time, that’s not guaranteed to work at any particular time: such configuration is flexible per OS, and hardware (which you can’t detect reliably) can influences how it will do things as well. Inertia is a particularly good example of that: it varies in all of these ways, by hardware, by OS, by browser and by configuration in all three of these places. Now I don’t have macOS handy, so I can’t see how it handles the scrolling there. Perhaps that site’s developers (or some library they use) has done that emulation and tuned it for macOS, but not elsewhere.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#275

Post by chrismorgan »

danans wrote: post #194
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #172

Earlier 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.

> 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…

(And English has historically had more warts than that, e.g. “three score and ten” = 3×20 + 10, “four and twenty” = 4 + 20.)

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#277

Post by chrismorgan »

Koshkin wrote: post #269
fiblye wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

Indian English is very similar to the British English of shortly before India gained independence from the British Empire (1947). That means it often sounds formal or old-fashioned. The reason for this is because linguistic change occurs almost entirely in places where that language is the first language, and English is only ever a second or subsequent language in India.

There has been some synchronisation with other English locales due to the effects of globalisation, but not a great deal. Beyond that, it does have some deviations from British English as it was in the days of the Empire, mostly due to grammatical misunderstandings becoming common and thus standard, or linguistic patterns from local languages making their way into English; the two examples that spring most immediately to my mind (as an Australian currently in Hyderabad): “very less” instead of “very little”, and a gratuitous “only” suffix where other dialects would either omit it or place it earlier in a sentence.

Concerning fiblye’s point: in cities, you’ll hear a fair smattering of English words when people are speaking their local languages. In rural areas this happens much less.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#278

Post by gumby »

chrismorgan wrote: post #274
gumby wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you should report the bug to Microsoft.

I’m saying that at a minimum I expect all Windows users to be affected by this. It’s not a Microsoft problem at all: it’s that the web platform simply doesn’t support getting this type of scrolljacking right. It’s just not possible due to how scrolling is handled in the browser, how wheel events work, and the platform’s propensity to asynchrony (so that not only is it not supported, it can never be supported). The be…

I mean of TTB worked as well as LTR then scrolljacking should not be needed.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#279

Post by adev_ »

tasogare wrote: post #237
L_Rahman wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

> On the contrary the mix of different kind of characters is really convenient to easily parse sentences

There is also an advantage that most foreigners do not realise. The mix of Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana create natural delimiters in the sentence and make spacing useless.

Reading Japanese fully written in Hiragana is currently much harder due to the lack of delimiters between words. The mix of hiragana, katakana and Kanji allow a very high density per character.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#280

Post by yorwba »

Koshkin wrote: post #262
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…

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.

You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji).

If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?

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