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Does this indicate a potential change of sphere of influence, like Turkish not choosing Arabic script and Vietnamese not choosing Chinese.
by supahfly_remix 9y ago
Does 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) :)
- danielam 9y agoPrecisely. Besides, the West Slavic and half of the South Slavic languages are written using Latin script. The choice of script was very much bound up with the matter of which civilization (and religion) the respective peoples chose to align with. At the time these scripts were being adopted, it meant choosing between Rome or Constantinople. So, if anything, a switch to Latin script is a signal of choosing to align with the West, and perhaps technological convenience.
- dragandj 9y agoI think it is also a historical coincidence. Cyrillic is an original Slavic thing and its early variant Glagolitic srcipt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script) was actually created for West Slavic "customers". It was later replaced there by Latin script simply because early Slavic states there lost their independence to Germanic states. Since early literacy was a rare thing reserved for small clergy and state official circles, and since Slavic population has limited access to those, it was a natural thing that it died down in favor of Latin alphabet.
- linksnapzz 9y agoAsk Mustafa Kemal; IIRC he put the Turks through a similar process (arabic script to latin alphabet) in the 1920s....
- int_19h 9y agoIt gains linguistically from using the same script as Turkish and other Turkic languages. These enjoy a considerable degree of mutual intelligibility (similar to, and in some cases closer than, Spanish and Italian, for example), so using a shared alphabet would help. However, looking at the draft, they did their own thing, instead of taking e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_Alphabet, or at least using something similar to it. In particular, they decided to use letter combinations instead of diacritics. Their mapping for regular Latin letters is also very different (e.g. U/Y/W).
- Markoff 9y agomost slavic languages use latin alphabet and not script