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Draft of new Latin-based Kazakh alphabet revealed
- desireco42 9y agoSeems you already have cyrillic alphabet everyone uses.
- yladiz 9y agoCyrillic can't represent all of the sounds that Kazakh has. It borrows some symbols but even now it uses symbols that don't exist in Cyrillic. If you ever go to Kazakhstan you'll see that each official sign, such as in the Almaty metro, has 2-3 languages: Kazakh, Russian, and sometimes English.
- miaklesp 9y agoBut 25 characters of Latin alphabet would represent it better?
- int_19h 9y ago> even now it uses symbols that don't exist in Cyrillic To be precise, it uses symbols that don't exist in Russian. Cyrillic is much broader than Russian, though. Ukrainian and Serbian use their own letters, too. In USSR, there was actually a standard called the "common alphabet", that combined all letters of all languages spoken in COMECON, both Cyrillic and Latin. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Ob-alfavit-1.png https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Ob-al...
- supahfly_remix 9y agoDoes this indicate a potential change of sphere of influence, like Turkish not choosing Arabic script and Vietnamese not choosing Chinese.
- dmurray 9y agoVery much. The Kazakh president pushes the Kazakh language and Kazakh culture and stresses the distinctions with those of Russia. It's also a practical modern choice though, as the Latin alphabet is more widely used worldwide and Kazakh is not a Slavic language so it gains little from being written in the same script as Russian.
- cat199 9y ago"not a Slavic language so it gains little from being written in the same script as Russian" So, by this thinking, what exactly does it gain linguistically from being written in the same script as italian?
- dmurray 9y agoIt gains international recognizability from being written, like Italian, in the world's most internationally used script.
- pm90 9y agoIs this really of any benefit though? I mean, the Slavic script is pretty well supported by most modern browsers and phones etc. Seems like they are focusing on an utterly stupid problem.
- dragandj 9y agoI am not sure people around the world will start being crazy about all thing Kazakh now that those are written with a Latin alphabet. As far as popular culture goes, Borat is the only thing most people recognize Kazakhtan for (besides it being No. 2 potassium producer in the world, of course) :)
- kmm 9y ago25 can't be enough, Kazakh has 9 phonemic vowels. I presume the six Latin vowel signs will still get diacritics?
- messe 9y agoLooks like they're using digraphs instead: To ensure fullness of the Kazakh language sound system, the scientists included 8 digraphs, [...] The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks
- akavi 9y agoAm I crazy, or does the article only list 4 digraphs? I don't see any vowel ones
- bmn__ 9y agoApart from the digraphs, both Һ and Х are mapped to H. That makes the Latin proposal not round-trip safe.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoDidn't German deal with something similar with S and ß?
- spaced-out 9y agoMaybe they did that because Һ and X are pronounced the same in Kazakh?
- forinti 9y agoOne of the things I like about the cyrillic alphabet is that it has symbols for diphtongs. Portuguese (my native toungue) fixes this with diacritics (melancia, and distância - the diacritic wouldn't be necessary if the 'ia' in distância used a symbol to indicate it is a diphtong). French mixes vowels up in lots of different ways and English spelling is a mess. Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. Mind you, I am not a linguist.
- teilo 9y agoTechnically Latin has had many symbols for dipthongs, but in practice only two became common: Æ and Œ. They are usually classified as ligatures, but that's not technically correct in this case.
- munificent 9y ago> Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. That is also challenging though because you run into a lot of cases where a syllable is a diphthong in one regional accent, but not another. For example, in Southern US English, "ride" is often pronounced something like "rahd". In the former, the "i" is a diphthong, but in the latter, the "ah" is not. Conversely, some vowels become dipthongs. A short "i" in Southern accents often gets pronounced more like "ee-uh". Imagine Foghorn Leghorn saying "pin" as "pi-uhn" and you've got the idea.
- PeanutNore 9y agoHere (Pittsburgh) the vowel in "down" or "town" is a monophthong instead of a diphthong like it is pretty much everywhere else. I wonder if part of the reason for the diversity of regional accents in English is because pronunciation is more loosely encoded than in languages that have more vowel symbols or modifying marks, or strict phonetic pronunciation. Written English doesn't really provide many strong indicators that a particular pronunciation isn't standard.
- int_19h 9y agoIt's a problem with phonetic spelling in general, not specifically with diphthongs.
- guelo 9y agoIs this a political act intended to reduce Russian influence?
- lightbyte 9y agoPerhaps they just want to have a greater choice in keyboard selection?
- thaumasiotes 9y agoOf course.
- gumby 9y agoThis is clever: > The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks (glyphs added to a letter, or basic glyphs) as they suppose that because of rare use, the specific sounds of the Kazakh language can disappear. I see nothing wrong in principle with diacritics (I use two languages that require them daily, in addition to English) but given the dire state of internationalization this makes it easier for foreign software to support Kazakh, and fits their entire language in the ASCII plane.
- yongjik 9y agoI guess not using diacriticals makes computing easier, but it's silly to claim that use (or non-use) of diacritical marks can make sounds disappear. If specific sounds in Kazakh disappear because "they were written the same", it merely means that the particular sound distinction was already being phased out in the spoken language. If the sound distinction is gone, separate symbols won't save them. It will merely become yet another opaque spelling rule for children to memorize. English "th" represents two different sounds, and English speakers manage just fine, because in its sound system they are totally distinct and never confused with each other.
- munificent 9y agoThe sentence from the article is ambiguous. It's not clear that "rare use" refers to rare use of the diacriticals or of the sounds themselves. If the latter, their claim makes sense — the sounds are already rarely used, so aren't worth enshrining in the alphabet.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> English "th" represents two different sounds Three main ones (excluding compounds where it's really a “t” next to an “h” that aren't related): in IPA terms, they are θ,ð, and t. > and English speakers manage just fine, because in its sound system they are totally distinct and never confused with each other. English speakers do okay because they learn fairly quickly that written English isn't phonetic and you just have to memorize spelling, not because of a lack of ambiguity. Nothing about “Thai” vs. “thigh” vs. “thy” tells you which “th” sound each uses (and in pronunciation, the “th” sound is the only difference between them) except knowing what each word is as a rule unto itself.
- hal9000xp 9y agoI've born in Uzbekistan. In 1990s Uzbekistan moved their entire language to Latin-based alphabet. Even I was small kid I knew it's just a stupid sign of nationalism. Changing your official language to a new alphabet is pretty expensive thing (especially when your country's economy is collapsed and your country has extreme inflation). You have to change all official signs, texts and reteach whole population. Another stupid thing Uzbekistan did is to publicly burn (literally) soviet school books while not having a good replacement. I remember looking at those burning soviet math books in my school's backyard. And it's all done instead of what? Instead of: 1. Teach population of proper fluent English as a second/third language along with Russian; 2. Making competitive free-market economy without clan-type quasi-government monopolies which run by top government official's relatives; 3. Attracting and protecting western investors;
- Sommersonn 9y agoOr they've simply wanted to finish what was started in 1920, but was halted by Russian nationalism?
- pm90 9y agoStill seems rather anachronistic and stupid, to say the least. When India became independent, there was a similar nativist drive: you can see how many of the major cities were renamed and such. Luckily people realized there was no real benefit to get rid of the English based education that was already in place. Something which I am personally immensely thankful for.
- int_19h 9y agoIt's worth noting that Russia (then USSR) was the one that introduced the Latin alphabet in 1927 in the first place. Before that, it was Arabic. So, arguably, if they wanted to fully reverse the effects of imperialism, no matter the cost, they should go for Arabic. From a practical standpoint, though, Arabic doesn't make sense - it's more complicated to learn, vastly more different from the alphabets of all neighboring languages (starting with the whole right-to-left thing), and most other Turkic languages use Latin-based alphabets these days. But if the choice of Latin is dictated by pragmatic considerations, then it's reasonable to compare it to Cyrillic on the same grounds.