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Kazakhstan spells out plans for alphabet swap
- avodonosov 10y agoIt's not something new, Kazakhstan plans this for several years already. BTW, in USSR in 1920s-1930s 66 languages were latinised (including Kazakh): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Uni... Latinization of Russian language was also planned, (wikipedia in Russian): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA... Later all that was canceled and Cyrillic was used instead.
- donatj 10y ago> Later all that was canceled and Cyrillic was used instead. Was something else used for Russian prior to Cyrillic? Also here is an English language version of your Wikipedia link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_U...
- patrickg_zill 10y agoThere is standard Cyrillic of today. Earlier versions had a few more characters, and Old Slavonic / Church Slavonic has different vocabulary and verb forms vs. today's Russian. Similar to the differences between Olde English and today's English.
- wtbob 10y ago> Similar to the differences between Olde English and today's English. I think that you're thinking of the Modern English of Shakespeare's era or Middle English (e.g. 'Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote'), not Old English (e.g. 'Hwæt we Gar-dena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon'). Middle English is very similar to Modern English, and can be read with relative ease. Old English has to be studied as a foreign language.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rz2k 10y ago> Earlier versions had a few more characters The comparison to Old English with ash ⟨æ⟩, eth ⟨ð⟩, thorn ⟨þ⟩ and wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ sounds appropriate.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoMy understanding is that Church Slavonic is nearly indecipherable to someone who knows modern Russian, which would make Old English the correct comparison. However, I am not fluent in Russian and am relying on others' characterization.
- yaakov34 10y agoOCS is not as completely foreign to Russian speakers as Old English is to English speakers; I would compare it more to Chaucer than to Beowulf, although whether you can understand a specific text depends very much on the subject and the context. Since Biblical quotes and expressions are so common, OCS terms may be familiar to even secular Russians. Note, however, that OCS does not have an ancestral relationship to Russian - it is a Southern Slavic language, most similar to ancestors of today's Bulgarian. Old Russian texts (such as The Tale of Igor) are written in a different language - Old Russian (which existed long before the split into Russian, Ukrainian and so on, so the name "Old East Slavic" is sometimes used).
- avodonosov 10y ago> Also here is an English language version of your Wikipedia link: .. No, it's a different article, and I link to it too. > Was something else used for Russian prior to Cyrillic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script It's elder than Cyrillic, but it was very little used in ancient Rus and was mostly used by south and western Slavs where Slavic writing was originally created.
- int_19h 10y agoIt was always Cyrillic. What OP meant is that there were plans to switch all Soviet languages, including Russian, to Latin at one point - this was considered beneficial by "first wave" Bolsheviks, who believed in worldwide communist revolution in near future, and unification in a single world state, and assumed that Latin would be the common script of that state. Later, when Stalin ditched all that, and came up with "socialism in one country" and revival of imperial patriotism, these attempts were scrapped, and Cyrillic became the common script for all Soviet languages instead (even those that were already Latinized). This was in line with the new national policy, which presented the Russian nation as the "bigger brother" of other ethnicities, e.g.: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945/05/24.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945...
- bonzini 10y agoNot exactly all of them. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia retained Latin script for their languages, and I think Armenia (which is now using its own alphabet) used it during Soviet times too, though I am not 100% sure.
- oblio 10y agoArmenia and Georgia.
- pandaman 10y agoArmenian and Georgian had their scripts. So at least 5 SSRs out of 15 had their official language in non-Cyrillic script, who knows how many other languages did too.
- int_19h 10y agoI stand corrected. I believe that my assertion is still valid, if confined specifically to RSFSR.
- int_19h 10y agoThe current script was political, of course, but so is the decision to change it. Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, exposing themselves to Russian cultural dominance); or switching to Latin, and implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Turkey. It's not a question with a single definitive good answer. Different ex-Soviet republics tackled it in different ways. The article points out that Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan switched, for example, but e.g. Kyrgyzstan did not. The other problem with every switch (including the previous ones) is that it affects all existing written materials, especially books and textbooks. When Soviets originally switched most Central Asian republics from Arabic to Latin back in 1920s, they used it to great effect to control what kind of materials the new generations would have access to, very similar to what Ataturk did in Turkey. Same thing applies today: switching the alphabet allows the new governments of these countries to define the majority of the written corpus that their citizens will have ready access to.
- peteretep 10y ago> culturally aligning > themselves with Turkey There are at least some other interesting countries using Latin script from the perspective of every country everywhere. Ability to distinguish between and produce Latin characters is an ability approximately everyone literate I've met in South East Asia has, too, and I suspect that's true of much of South and East Asia.
- avodonosov 10y agoHe probably means that the Kazakh language belongs to the family of Turkic languages.
- niftich 10y agoWell yes, but the reference to Turkey is intentional. Kazakhstan is a founding member of the Turkic Council [1][2], and a sort of pan-Turkic alignment helped by sharing a language family is a strategic goal, to create a camaraderie of states along an oblique axis to the economic union Kazakhstan enjoys with Russia, Belarus, and friends [3]. Russia tends to treat Kazakhstan as a sure ally, but no vastly outnumbered sure ally wants to appear like a pushover with no other friends. Definitely, though, the fact that the Latin alphabet eases the consumption of culture, science, commerce from a variety of Latin alphabet countries is a huge plus, but it helps to also understand the local context. [1] http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/general-information/299/308 http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/general-information/299/308 [2] http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/message-of-the-president-of-the-republic-of-kazakhstan/299/311/311/314 http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/message-of-the-president-of-the... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union
- MK_Dev 10y agoOne step closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Turkism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Turkism
- Waterluvian 10y agoIs this a form of rebranding? Has a nation ever undergone a significant attempt at rebranding? I was joking with my colleague about how Russia probably just wants Ukraine to add a buffer between the West and Moscow. He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland." Got me thinking about the seemingly absurd concept of disregarding all national history and focusing exclusively on "brand". Find a great sounding country name, a cool memorable flag, a catchy national anthem, a relatable alphabet. If you look at nations as brands, many (most?) are pretty forgettable. Countless flags that look randomly generated and lots of anthems that don't linger in your ear.
- SerLava 10y ago>He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland." Incidentally, this is why they've been getting people to stop calling it The Ukraine - because Ukraine is more like a normal country name, while "The Ukraine" is like saying "The Borderland (of Russia)"
- Waterluvian 10y agoInteresting! That certainly seems like an act of branding to me, eh?
- pash 10y agoYes, or something like it. It wasn't deliberate enough to suggest "branding" to me, per se, but it did mark a change in self-perception, and a change in how Ukrainians wanted to be perceived by the rest of the world. Slavic languages lack articles, so in Russian and Ukrainian the linguistic phenomenon SerLava describes manifests only as a choice between using the preposition на versus в (which roughly correspond to the English prepostions in and on) to say "in [the] Ukraine". Using на was standard until after Ukrainian independence, but because на connotes being in an open space or in an indeterminate area (as on sometimes does in English , e.g., on Trafalgar square, on the border) whereas в is the usual preposition signifying being inside a definite space, including being inside a country's borders, Ukrainians reacted against the usage of на, feeling it emphasized the "on the borderlands" understanding of what [the] Ukraine was. Using в quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of в versus на became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies. The distinction between using or not using the definite article in English and other languages followed. Interestingly, I always say Ukraine rather than the Ukraine in English, but I tend to use на in Russian.
- pravda 10y agoThis is best idea! Throw Cyrillic down the well. So Kazakhstan can be free. Use the Latin alphabet. And we will have a big party.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoBorat references don't result in a high number of up votes.
- perlgeek 10y agoWhat does the population of Kazakhstan think about that?
- my_first_acct 10y agoI don't have any numbers, but it probably depends on whom you ask. According to Wikipedia (in Russian) [1], 84% of the people in Kazakhstan can speak Russian, and 74% can speak Kazakh. Ethnically, 22% of the population is Russian, and 66% is Kazakh [2]. In urban areas, it is not unusual to encounter ethnic Kazakhs who speak Russian but not Kazakh. It is likely that the Russian language will continue to play a strong role in Kazakhstan, so many people will probably need to know both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets, once the transition takes place. [1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AF%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%85%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AF%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B8... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhstan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhsta...
- nathan_f77 10y agoRussian is still the most important language in Kazakhstan, although that could shift in the future. My wife is from Kazakhstan, but her ancestors are from Ukraine, and they moved to Kazakhstan during the USSR. Her family only know a few words of Kazakh, and this is relatively common for people who were born and grew up in the USSR. Right now, you cannot get a good job in the city unless you are fluent in Russian, although there is a lot of pressure to move everything to the Kazakh language. In the past, the pressure was so strong that some official government forms were only made available in Kazakh. But they have reverted that decision, so now everything is still available in both Russian and Kazakh.
- Markoff 10y agoand what exactly has Ukraine to do with Russian language? it may come to you as surprise but Ukrainians speak Ukrainian, not Russian
- seesomesense 10y agoErdoğan must be delighted at this move towards Pan-Turkism
- darkhorn 10y agoErdoğan is not pan-Turkist. He is pan-Ottoman. Today might be the last day of the republic.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoYet while others approach hime as if he was a pan-türkist, with the idea of joining, this is also acceptable for him, I guess.
- low_battery 10y agoOh please, lets not be that dramatic.
- sbmthakur 10y agoPromoting the use of English will be a better option as far as international recognition is concerned.
- johnnydoebk 10y agoWhy is this downvoted? It's true, isn't it? And as far as I know they had plans to make English the 3rd official language (along with Kazakh and Russian).
- gragas 10y agoThat's too bad. Cyrillic, especially in the context of Russian, has always seemed compact and almost cute to me. The alphabet is very regular; it's easy even for non-fluent speakers to perfectly guess the spellings of words.
- davidgay 10y agoPhonetic spelling is not a property of alphabets, eg, both German and Turkish (appropriately) are phonetically spelled.
- zakk 10y agoI don't know about Turkish, but German is not phonetically spelled. Of course it is better than the mess English is, but there are still many exceptions, silent letters, dypthongs, etc. For an almost phonetic language try Italian, for a completely phonetic one try Serbian with the Cyrillic script.
- emanreus 10y agoInterestingly enough English was phonemic during the Middle English stage (11th - 15th century) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography
- bobthepanda 10y agoLatin script doesn't prevent this. Depending on how it's Latinized, it could be just as easy: if you're familiar with how Latin letters are pronounced in Spanish, it's pretty easy to guess the spelling of unknown Spanish words.
- pseingatl 10y agoKe ba.
- BuuQu9hu 10y agoLojban uses the Latin alphabet and is phonetic up to the "audiovisual isomorphism," which is exactly what it says on the tin.
- sAbakumoff 10y agoSo, the alphabet of Kazakh language has 42 letters, 33 of them are borrowed from Russian language and 9 are unique. The modern Latin alphabet has 26 letters. It's quite unclear how they are going to convert between these 2 very different sets.
- my_first_acct 10y agoWikipedia gives the form of romanization currently used on Kazakh government websites [1]. This extends the standard 26-letter Latin alphabet by adding diacritical marks to some of the letters (the way many other languages do, that have more sounds than 26 letters can express). I seem to recall reading that as part of the romanization effort, Kazakhstan will also consider spelling reform, so that there will probably not be an exact one-to-one correspondence between the current Cyrillic spelling and the new Latin spelling. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets#Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets#Latin
- Al-Khwarizmi 10y agoActually most languages have more sounds than letters. Some use diacritical marks, others use multiconsonant groups ("ch" in Spanish, "th" in English), and another option is just not to care (in English most letters can represent various sounds and the mapping is often arbitrary, requiring one to know the word in order to know how it's pronounced).
- ptaipale 10y agoAt this point it may be appropriate to remind of the ortographical reform proposal for English, attributed to Mark Twain (though probably not really written by him). http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm
- darkhorn 10y ago26, you mean English alphabet? I think they might use the Turkish alphabet, which has 29 letters. Ğ, Ş, İ, Ç, Ü, Ö, also you can place a hat on the wovel to make it soft. Moreover, there are other "Latin" letters from German, Spanish and French alphabets.
- esfandia 10y agoI hope this question is relevant enough to the thread to ask here: what language did the people of Turkey, and by extension most of the Turkic-speaking countries, speak before the Mongolian invasion? Are there traces of that former language in their current one? I know that there's definitely plenty of Arabic and Persian words still in use, and since Ataturk there's been a lot of French/other latin languages added as well.
- chr1 10y agoMost of the teritory of turkey was a part of Byzantine empire with Greek being the main language there. Large part on the east was Armenia, and there were many other nations with their own languages, Assyrians, Lazi, Kurds, Yezidis. Turkey successfully got rid of majority of non-muslim nations and their languages by 1920s and works on getting rid of Kurdish since then.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wtbob 10y ago> I hope this question is relevant enough to the thread to ask here: what language did the people of Turkey, and by extension most of the Turkic-speaking countries, speak before the Mongolian invasion? The people of Anatolia spoke Greek before the Turks invaded.
- gkya 10y agoMost of the french loanwords are from 19th century when the french culture was a big influence for the ottoman elite.
- jl6 10y agoLanguage change that shifts populations away from their historical niche and towards global systems conflicts me. One the one hand I find it sad that whole bodies of literature will pass out of understanding. On the other hand this seems like it will make it slightly easier for the Kazakh people to interoperate with the rest of the world. In the end I believe the greater good comes from enabling more people to talk to each other. (I know, it's "just" a script change, not a new language, but I feel the two are sufficiently related that the point stands).
- lacampbell 10y agoI don't think the point does still stand with just a script change. Learning a new alphabet is orders of magnitude easier than learning a new language. Touch typing with an alphabet that's not printed on your physical keyboard can challenging though (I still struggle a bit with that).
- turndown 10y agoAs stated in the article, the script they currently use was forced on them by the Soviets. Before then, they used Latin characters, and before that, Arabic.
- jwilk 10y ago> Before then, they used Latin characters ...which was also forced on them by the Soviets.
- nathan_f77 10y agoThey are actually shifting back to (one of) the original alphabets. > Nazarbayev described the use of the Cyrillic script as "political," noting that the Latin alphabet had previously been used from 1929 until 1940. Prior to 1929, the Arabic script had been used. "In 1940 … a law was adopted transferring the Kazakh language from the Latin alphabet to one based on Russian script," Also: > The Kazakh language belongs to the family of Turkic languages, whereas Russian is a Slavic language. Other countries with Turkic languages, such as Turkey, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, currently use the Latin alphabet. At the end of the day, this is not really about interoperating with the rest of the world. It's about pride and national identity.
- dimitar 10y agoI think the implications of switching a script are fewer than people imagine, especially between Cyrillic and Latin. These two are closely related alphabetical writing systems. People will not lose the ability to read old books, they will not change their political positions. Usually, the "new" and "old" characters correspond one to another perfectly. I think what is more important is the "drive for expanded international recognition for the Central Asian nation that formed part of the Soviet Union until gaining independence in 1991." that is mentioned in the article. As you can see every foreign article still believes its to be necessary to mention the Soviet union, 26 years after it ended. So it might not change people's lives much, but it will change the perception of what Kazakhstan is.
- taylorexpander 10y agoDoes this only affect the Kazakh language or also the Russian language they speak there? I know a small handful of people from Kazakhstan, who identify as "Kazakh" nationally but as "Russian" ethnically, and they only speak Russian (+ English). The general response about Kazakh the language I remember is that they learned it at school, but as they lived in a heavily Russian speaking area they just never cared much about Kazakh and instead focused more on English when they got the chance.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoTheir current alphabet has 42 letters. Transitioning to Latin will either use variable length encoding for some sounds, or will eventually be reduced to the mere 26 letters. Thus I don't see using accent a good direction. In Hungarian I see this a lot, and it is a shame. We have for example o ó ö ő for variations of the sound O in "lonely". We have a mixed model of variable length and accented characters. ASCII and QWERTY are (the unintended) cultural equivalent of the Little Boy and the Fat Boy. Poor globalization throughout the IT industry made people adapt to it, instead of challenging it. This makes only variable length survive the "loss in translation". Now when globalization is better, it became "cool" somehow in some subcultures (eg. UNIX related, programming related), as many ancient tools (Unix, C) lack proper support.
- low_battery 10y agoCurrent Turkish alphabet is mostly enough to convey sounds of Turkic languages (with few exceptions like Ng sound), Azeri alphabet 3 more letters for non Turkic sounds, I am Sure Kazakh people will find a way, there are already working examples.
- gkya 10y agoCurrent turkish alphabet is bad at representing educated Istanbul turkish, and worse at anatolian dialects. For one, palatalisations, which are distinctive in many cases are either not represented or represented by a circumflex on a nearest vowel, but the diacritic also signals long vowels, even though they do not necessitate palatalisation, which is a quality of the consonants anyways.
- low_battery 10y agoWhich alphabet represents local accents and dialects fully?? Lets be realistic here.
- Markoff 10y agobut you can still just use regular O and any Hungarian will understand what you wrote, so i don't see accents as big issue, China should take lesson from Vietnam where anyone visiting can read their writing despite using accents, now good luck with Chinese characters when visiting China
- red-indian 10y agoCyrillic is nice since it has extra letters that were added for central asian sounds. Spelling is more clear than when you use latin letters. With latin letters some single letters get replaced with double letters, or multiple sounds are overloaded onto a single letter. It's a pity they don't switch to Orkhon script instead of Latin given their roots. There's a movement already to learn Orkhon as it's the traditional writing of the area and already developed with the sounds of the Turkic languages. (As an example, here's a Kazakh music video with subtitles in both Orkhon script and Türk alfabesi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUE05sRwrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUE05sRwrA). As long as they are going to the trouble of switching orthographies they should make it more meaningful than simply replacing Russian influenced letters with western european ones.
- flurie 10y agoTurkish written with Latin script nearly has ideal phonemic orthography (the outlier is ğ, which is unvoiced or, sometimes, I believe, like a glottal stop).
- playing_colours 10y agoWith latin letters some single letters get replaced with double letters, or multiple sounds are overloaded onto a single letter. Or you can add diacritical marks to letters: Č/č for "ch", Š/š for "sh", etc.
- wldlyinaccurate 10y agoSome of these old Eastern Bloc countries have had fascinating changes in language and written script in the last hundreds years or so. Uzbekistan is another interesting one, which currently uses Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic (actually Nastaleeq) scripts despite Latin being the official script since the 90's. I had a really fun time building the BBC Uzbek website which had to support all of these: - http://www.bbc.com/uzbek http://www.bbc.com/uzbek (Cyrillic) - http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/lotin http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/lotin (Latin) - http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/afghanistan http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/afghanistan (Arabic)
- ryenus 10y agoWould qwerty become history sometime? I tried Dvorak several times, but it's not that easy as it sounds like.
- Markoff 10y agoand now only if China wish to join a party and went full pinyin with accents like in Vietnam, that would make life in China and tourism much easier for everyone, after all they already simplified characters anyway, so let's not pretend current writing system has some historical value being younger than my grandma
- rangitatanz 10y agoI keep reading 'alphabet soup'