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Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#291
I'm very happy for them! I've always thought Mongolian writing was quite beautiful, and it seemed like a shame to replace it with Cyrillic. The few Mongolian people I talked to said they had to learn it in school at some point, but they considered it difficult and had mostly forgotten it since. We'll see how this goes. The Wikipedia page says there's a lot of work to do to make this work out in the digital world.

Totally separate thing, but I would love to see wider Baybayin use for Tagalog and related languages. I just love these pretty traditional orthographies!

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#292
post #17

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) 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.

To add to what has already been said: Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in the 15th century by King Sejong. However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today, usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong…

Another connection: the modern Korean alphabet shows some Mongolian influences. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
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