Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

news.mn

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 292 posts

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#81

Post by azangru »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #33
eps wrote: post #22

I once saw a Mongolian book (written in Cyrillic alphabet) and it was very jarring. It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a…

> always at the front of a word. That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they…

> For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English

Apparently, as recently as in the 1950s, both palatalized ("soft") and non-palatalized ("hard") /n/ in the second syllable of this word were recognized as variants of the normal pronunciation in Russian dictionaries.

This has and always will be the case with spelling vs pronunciation. Pronunciation tends to change much faster over time than does spelling.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#82

Post by allendoerfer »

fiblye wrote: post #69
sametmax wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

> English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so many people.

With electing Trump or voting for Brexit native English speakers do not seem to care much.

Ireland now has the biggest natively English speaking population inside the EU. More than ever the EU is a German-French organization.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#83

Post by Freak_NL »

eukgoekoko wrote: post #65
Freak_NL wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If you were designing a website with Mongolian as a language option you would choose a font that has support for Mongolian, not something completely unsuitable like Helvetica. The same goes for any language not written with a Latin alphabet. If you don't want to provide a font and just want whatever passes for sans-serif on a computer with Mongolian fonts installed, use font-family: sans-serif; in your CSS and l…

Sure, I can go with font-family: sans-serif But what if I have to add Mongolian support for a website using Helvetica typeface for the currently used Cyrillic script?

You can't, but this is nothing new. Fonts tend to support a subset of scripts. You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.

Here you would choose a Mongolian font and add it to the font-stack in CSS for that language, just as you would for Arabic or Chinese. If you want a grotesque typeface that matches Helvetica in style for Mongolian, use one.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#84

Post by mhotchen »

simonh wrote: post #25
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's beautiful, thanks. My wife is Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script is used widely in signage, posters, dual-language leaflets and such so I'm quite familiar with the look of traditional Mongolian script. In fact until now I had no idea Mongolia itself largely used a different script.

Mongolia adopted Cyrillic during its early communist years which saw heavy influence from the USSR. They started adopting their traditional script in schools again a few years ago, but the older people didn't know how to read or write it unfortunately. I saw the traditional script being used sparingly in Ulaanbator around 2017 but as for the rest of the country I don't think I saw it at all, except in Buddhist temples (which were also mostly destroyed during the communist era unfortunately).

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#85

Post by mytailorisrich »

simonh wrote: post #25
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's beautiful, thanks. My wife is Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script is used widely in signage, posters, dual-language leaflets and such so I'm quite familiar with the look of traditional Mongolian script. In fact until now I had no idea Mongolia itself largely used a different script.

Mongolian is also one of the scripts on Chinese bank notes, along with Tibetan and Uyghur, in addition to Chinese characters.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#86

Post by mytailorisrich »

ah-ha wrote: post #4
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/

Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.

Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet.

The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#87

Post by petters »

h91wka wrote: post #80
qwerty456127 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. Look at Czech or Korean. Nothing is 100% perfect but these are pretty close to. > For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system? Use å ;-)

As far as I know, in Swedish å does not have any ambiguity and is always read as "o" (as in "ocean"). My point is that different people pronounce things as they are used to, reflecting it in a writing system leads to complexity and inconsistency.

It is a distinct vowel sound.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#88

Post by pas »

riffraff wrote: post #79
mehrdadn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vietnamese only became Latin alphabet recently (100 years ago). In fact it's always completely jarring for me to see Latin or Cyrillic characters for languages like Vietnamese [1] or Turkish [2]—about as jarring as it would be to see English written in Arabic characters. So much that, if you asked me what alphabets these languages use without giving me much of a chance to think, I would probably still intuitively rep…

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.

Why does it make latin glyphs pointless? Isn't it better to have a closer match to the phonemes that one actually has to say than having ideoglyphs? (Which are harder to learn, because writing and speaking becomes only loosely coupled.)

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#89

Post by _-___________-_ »

h91wka wrote: post #76
qwerty456127 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases and you should not. What I mean is using "э" where you can, phonetically. Using "е" in those cases actually is "changing" although has made it into the standard.

That's not what you said in the original post. Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts, as I believe input from a native speaker may be valuable to someone.

For what it's worth, it was my understanding of their original post.

Re: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

#90

Post by dntbnmpls »

sametmax wrote: post #13
WilTimSon wrote: post #8

UI 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…

> - 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 peculiar than any other culture. But I'm guessing you meant it's a unique culture. But even then, it's not. It's part of the greater nomadic central asian culture.

> Language preservation is overrated.

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. Think about all the art, history, culture, value that would have been lost had people like you succeeded in the past.

> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.

Simply not true. The "death" of latin brought linguistic/cultural/etc diversity. When european nations started teaching in their own national languages and when they started worshipping in their national languages rather than latin, it created more diversity.

> We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.

Why doesn't it benefit our species? You act like if we all used the same alphabet and spoke the same language, we'd have some kind of utopia. You act like people who speak the same language don't have wars with each other, don't brutalize each other and have cultural differences.

It seems like you've bought into the globalist monoculture nonsense. Where we all think alike, talk alike, eat in the same fast food joints and live alike in cities that all look alike. For our species sakes, I hope not.

Post reply on HN