Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

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Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#421

Post by jsgo » Sun, Apr 29, 2018, 12:57 AM UTC

Lionsion wrote: post #374

jsgo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at the most basic: 1 kilometer is 1000 meters 1 kiloliter is 1000 liters etc. 1 mile is 1760 yards 1 foot is 12 inches 1 gallon is 4 quarts etc. dunno, seems simpler to me.

> dunno, seems simpler to me. Cheeky. You're missing the point. When you change between systems you're going to have to do conversions like: 1 mile is ~1.61 kilometers 1 foot is 0.3048 meters 1 gallon is ~3.79 liters Doesn't seem all that much simpler. Switching doesn't improve conversions as much as you'd think. If the US metricated, I'd have to do a lot more conversions in my everyday life, because, at present, I h…

But if the US units went away, you wouldn’t have to worry about those conversions once everything “legacy” was handled. And even then, it wouldn’t require knowledge of both systems beyond having a calculator for the conversions to get them there. Once gallons and the like are gone? Bliss.

I may not have articulated it correctly, but if everyone would go metric, as the majority of the world is already, it’d be better for everyone. Being an outlier with a system that is a bit obtuse serves no one.

Re: Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

#422

Post by dennisgorelik » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #271

dennisgorelik wrote: post #256

Why wouldn't Kazakhstan use pure 26-letter Latin alphabet? There is a big advantage in using the same keyboard that English language uses.

Using pure 26-letter Latin alphabet means using multi-letter combinations to represent particular sounds and/or using same letters to represent very different sounds in different contexts. Both things feel very ugly. I am not really familiar with non-european alphabets but Č (Czech, Croatian, Latvian) looks much better and easier to read than CH (English), CZ (Polish), TCH (French) or TSCH (German, I'm not even sure…

> Both things feel very ugly.

Both things ("multi-letter combinations" and "same letters to represent very different sound") are inevitable anyway -- with or without diacritic characters. After learning the language - I do not notice any of these two problems. But I struggle with switching between keyboard layouts multiple times every day: I frequently forget to switch between English and Russian and start typing in a wrong layout. If Russian used 26 letter latin alphabet - there would be no "layout switch" problem.

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