7 ms·

Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes

cantrevealname 9y ago
It's funny that the objections from both sides have to do with ease of use on computers: - The President wants letters that occur only on a standard keyboard, hence the use of apostrophes to modify the sounds of letters as opposed to accented letters. - Others prefer accented letters because apostrophes would interfere with Google searches and Twitter hashtags.
- my_first_acct 9y ago
  Desktop keyboards contain apostrophes, but smartphone keyboards generally don't. And one proposal (the best, IMHO) used digraphs rather than accented letters. This would work very nicely with computers, smart phones, Twitter, Google, etc.
  - tlholaday 9y ago
    > ... digraphs ... I wonder who to credit for encouraging the English to use th instead of thorn. It turned out ok.
    - gerdesj 9y ago
      True but we now have pretty much the world plus dog thinking that "Ye olde shoppe" sounds very different to "The old shop". Note that I did not put in a real thorn and instead substituted a Y. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
- mc32 9y ago
  Yeah, why not use the Slovene alphabet and add some carons to short vowels and be done? The way it's been proposed reminds me of the old Wade-Giles custom of adding apostrophes, breves and other diacritical marks. Pinyin is so much cleaner (except a few umlauts).
  - geowwy 9y ago
    Pinyin is cleaner but really misleading if you’re trying to pronounce a word just with your knowledge of other Latin based writing systems. X- is pronounced like sh Q- is pronounced like ch C- is pronounced like ts -iu is pronounced like yo -ian is pronounced like yen etc In this regard even Wade-Giles does a better job in my opinion.
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      "Pronounced like" in this context really means "vaguely similar, but actually fundamentally different". There is no English equivalent to the phonemes represented in pinyin by j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r or z. English simply doesn't have alveolo-palatal or retroflex consonants. If anything, I think that pinyin is less misleading than Wade-Giles, because it doesn't lull you into false confidence. I have a weak preference for bopomofo, but that's another argument entirely.
      - mc32 9y ago
        I think you're right about highlighting the quality of the consonants when it comes to official mandarin, but those characteristics fade when it comes to regional variants. Yo be clear, mandarin is of the most concern, just want to raise the issue that while true, it's not uniform throughout the language.
        jdietrich 9y ago
        It's a fair point, but a pretty niche one - I expect that the overwhelming majority of foreign-language pinyin users are learning standard Mandarin. If you're learning Min or Wu as a second language, you've got bigger problems than the quirks of your transliteration scheme. For native users of pinyin, the consistency with English pronunciation is essentially irrelevant.
        mc32 9y ago
        Sorry, I didn't make myself clear and also for belaboring the point. I wasn't referring to separate dialects, but local non northern mandarin which gets pronounced slightly differently than received pronunciation. A brief example, yes/is, approx [shi], might be pronounced approx [si], etc. But it's mandarin and not hakka, min, etc.
- pintxo 9y ago
  What is a standard keyboard, anyway? As a native German, I am accustomed to my local „standard“ keyboard. So, no one prevents them from defining a standard keyboard for their new language. And, as someone brought it up, on smartphones your options are basically limmitless, with the option to fully customize the keyboard as it‘s all virtual.
  - tom_mellior 9y ago
    > What is a standard keyboard, anyway? One that has exactly the letters that can appear in a passport's machine-readable field. I have lots of funny accented characters in my name, and I have lived in several countries under several different names adjusted to the local officials' keyboards. And don't even get me started on forms saying "your name exactly as in your passport, but also without any funny letters". If there is a realistic chance of writing Kazakh (names) in 7-bit-ASCII-only letters, they should go for it. They could also use two different but equally valid writing systems. Norway has two different official written languages that both sort of correspond to the same spoken language. AFAIR in former Yugoslavia both Latin and Cyrillic were written, I remember a friend telling me that in school they alternated between Latin and Cyrillic weeks.
    - moltar 9y ago
      Yes, in YU they used both. It was localized to member states tho. Croatia used mostly Latin, and Serbs used mostly Cyrillic. They often were able to read and write both non the less.
    - lb1lf 9y ago
      -As for the two written Norwegian languages, they both utilize the same letters and are, by and large, more like two different accents than distinct languages. One (Bokmål) is loosely based on Danish (language of the ruling elite up until 1814), adapted to resemble the way Norwegians for the most part spoke, while the other (Nynorsk) was pretty much based on rural dialects. Nynorsk does make (slightly!) more use of diacritics than bokmål, but most current nynorsk users skip them in daily correspondence; their use is not mandatory. ('too', for instance, being written 'også' in bokmål and 'ôg' in nynorsk.) Also, both versions of Norwegian uses our funny letters æ/Æ (ae, similar-sounding to a in 'bad'), ø/Ø (oe, similar-sounding to ea in 'heard') and å/Å (aa, similar to 'a' in saw). Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a linguist. There are probably some inaccuracies in the above, but it should get you through the next linguist pub quiz without causing embarrassment.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It's cheaper to fix Google and Twitter than it is to change keyboards, so I think the President has a stronger point here.
Freak_NL 9y ago
> Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e […] Ouch. That's just plain horrible.
- Grue3 9y ago
  Yet a lot of, say, Hawaiian words are written like that and nobody cares. Seems like Nazarbaev wants to keep the language ASCII instead of adding diacritics which would make it hard to type.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jablan 9y ago
    Why would it make it hard to type? There are probably hundreds of different keyboard layouts so far. That is a long ago solved problem.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    There are a lot less people to complain about that, though. 25 thousand speakers versus 10 million speakers.
geowwy 9y ago
English and lots of other languages have word with apostrophes in the middle, seems like Google would have worked out the technical issues. And for hashtags you just omit the apostrophes. It doesn’t even look that inelegant to me: Barlyq adamdar ty’mysynan azat ja’ne qadir-qasi’eti men quqyqtary ten’ bolyp du’ni’ege keledi. Adamdarg’a aqyl-parasat, ar-ojdan berilgen, sondyqtan olar bir-birimen ty’ystyq, bay’yrmaldyq qarym-qatynas jasay’lary ti‘is.
- ithkuil 9y ago
  your quotation has two version of the apostrophe (’ and ‘, two different unicode points); is that intentional? I wonder if people would complain less if instead of the apostrophe another unused letter was used, such as "x" (or something else?) Barlyq adamdar tyxmysynan azat jaxne qadir-qasixeti men quqyqtary tenx bolyp duxnixege keledi. Adamdargxa aqyl-parasat, ar-ojdan berilgen, sondyqtan olar bir-birimen tyxystyq, bayxyrmaldyq qarym-qatynas jasayxlary tixis.
  - smcl 9y ago
    I wonder why they did it - perhaps they were trying to avoid having digraphs mapping to a single sound. An alternative might be carons + acute accents to modify the letter like the Czech, Slovak and in the Balkans so in the example from the article below... > Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e, and pronounced she-ee-ye. You could define the alphabet so that this is written "šííě". To be honest it seems like this is a tricky example to map to any latin-based alphabet. Maybe diacritics were avoided to avoid internationalisation issues (i.e. you could easily fall back to the locale "en-us" and your Kazakh doc still looks alright)
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
      > Maybe diacritics were avoided to avoid internationalisation issues Yes, the article quotes the president as saying: "There should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer."
tomsmeding 9y ago
The alphabet used for a language is bound to be a significant part of the culture belonging to that language. It's going to appear everywhere, absolutely everywhere, all children will have to learn it, all people will have to use it daily, etc. It's not something you can just fuck up and be done with it. And I get the feeling that this president, how great he may have been for the country in the past and present, is on the brink of defacing it now. You may be an authoritarian leader, but if you first collect a commission of experts to form a new alphabet, then suddenly push your own idea (ignoring pushback from those experts you selected in the first place) and apparently are not willing to modify your proposal according to what your experts and the public want, you are being a dictator that's making wrong decisions. I do find it promising that even though a quote in the article mentions that usually all that the president does shall be cheered, this proposal is getting friction from the public. I hope, for the sake of the Kazakh people, that the president will realise that he is in the wrong and will listen more to his people.
- baybal2 9y ago
  Hardly anybody will wonder to yet another "what a joke of a man he is" when this will fly into Nazarbayev's face. Locals are kinda accustomed to it. The man was so infuriated with Kohen's "Borat" not for it taking an insult on the nation, but him himself, personally (or so he keeps thinking) lol. A so so dictator he is, not much of an issue he is. Ones who are the dangerous people in the country are his lieutenants: sharp guys who actually run the country, all waiting for him to finally die. To locals, him being an unscrupulous buffoon gives much elation, as many see that they will fare much worse were he to be as sharp as leaders of neighboring gangsterlandias
- batter 9y ago
  If you don't want Russians to come 'protecting' russian-speaking people and stealing part of you territory (like in case of Ukraine/Georgia) you should be as far from them as possible. This tactic worked fine for Hitler when invading Austria and still working. As for me president done more long-term decision which should protect country. Even if that's harsh.
  - 9y ago
moltar 9y ago
Not invented here syndrome IRL
- unwind 9y ago
  Where else does it occur?
zuppy 9y ago
We have adopted a different approach in Romania: we usually don't use diacritics at all on the internet. It's not that hard to read the original word (though, I've heard it's pretty hard for foreigners that try to learn the language to understand what are we writing without them). Of course there are few words where it's harder to understand the original meaning, but the advantage of using plain ascii outnumbers it. We do have a local keyboard standard, just most of us don't use it when typing something that's not official. edit: I'm looking at my driving license and car registration certificate, there are no diacritics and they are official documents.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  Same with Czech on the internet. Sometimes there is confusion but 99% of time it works. We use diacritics on official documents though.
donatj 9y ago
To me non-accented Latin characters + apostrophes seems way more computer friendly than accented characters. Sure, Unicode is supposed to be everywhere, but in practice it’s simply not. On top of that a more limited character set not requiring any sort of IME or special layer shift keys is way way easier to type.
- abrowne 9y ago
  But better than diagraphs? It may be my bias as an English speaker/writer, but I'd pick sh over s’, for example. The vowels are trickier, and just doubling them like Finnish would turn s’i’i’e into shiiiie, so you might need something (an apostrophe ;-) ?) to divide the syllables. I still like shii’iie better, but that's just one word.
- jablan 9y ago
  So, when deciding an alphabet for a language, you would go with computer-friendliness as a key metric? Also, what does "computer friendly" mean? How would you break the word "s’i’i’e" into graphemes? "s’" is a single phoneme, but is it a single letter? Does "s’i’i’e" contain letter "s"? If so, why don't we hear it? If the Kazakhs already have the unique opportunity to reform their alphabet, they should do it right and make it phonetic. Introducing apostrophes is simply stupid, and, if not now, they will get rid of them immediately after the emperor dies.
Halian 9y ago
I can't even find a simple listing of the new Kazakh alphabet anywhere, nevermind the experts' recommendation(s)…
- jwilk 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Kazakh_Latin_Alphabet.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Kazakh_Latin_Alphabe...

It's funny that the objections from both sides have to do with ease of use on computers: - The President wants letters that occur only on a standard keyboard, hence the use of apostrophes to modify the sounds of letters as opposed to accented letters. - Others prefer accented letters because apostrophes would interfere with Google searches and Twitter hashtags.

my_first_acct 9y ago
Desktop keyboards contain apostrophes, but smartphone keyboards generally don't. And one proposal (the best, IMHO) used digraphs rather than accented letters. This would work very nicely with computers, smart phones, Twitter, Google, etc.
- tlholaday 9y ago
  > ... digraphs ... I wonder who to credit for encouraging the English to use th instead of thorn. It turned out ok.
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    True but we now have pretty much the world plus dog thinking that "Ye olde shoppe" sounds very different to "The old shop". Note that I did not put in a real thorn and instead substituted a Y. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
mc32 9y ago
Yeah, why not use the Slovene alphabet and add some carons to short vowels and be done? The way it's been proposed reminds me of the old Wade-Giles custom of adding apostrophes, breves and other diacritical marks. Pinyin is so much cleaner (except a few umlauts).
- geowwy 9y ago
  Pinyin is cleaner but really misleading if you’re trying to pronounce a word just with your knowledge of other Latin based writing systems. X- is pronounced like sh Q- is pronounced like ch C- is pronounced like ts -iu is pronounced like yo -ian is pronounced like yen etc In this regard even Wade-Giles does a better job in my opinion.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    "Pronounced like" in this context really means "vaguely similar, but actually fundamentally different". There is no English equivalent to the phonemes represented in pinyin by j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r or z. English simply doesn't have alveolo-palatal or retroflex consonants. If anything, I think that pinyin is less misleading than Wade-Giles, because it doesn't lull you into false confidence. I have a weak preference for bopomofo, but that's another argument entirely.
    - mc32 9y ago
      I think you're right about highlighting the quality of the consonants when it comes to official mandarin, but those characteristics fade when it comes to regional variants. Yo be clear, mandarin is of the most concern, just want to raise the issue that while true, it's not uniform throughout the language.
      - jdietrich 9y ago
        It's a fair point, but a pretty niche one - I expect that the overwhelming majority of foreign-language pinyin users are learning standard Mandarin. If you're learning Min or Wu as a second language, you've got bigger problems than the quirks of your transliteration scheme. For native users of pinyin, the consistency with English pronunciation is essentially irrelevant.
        mc32 9y ago
        Sorry, I didn't make myself clear and also for belaboring the point. I wasn't referring to separate dialects, but local non northern mandarin which gets pronounced slightly differently than received pronunciation. A brief example, yes/is, approx [shi], might be pronounced approx [si], etc. But it's mandarin and not hakka, min, etc.
pintxo 9y ago
What is a standard keyboard, anyway? As a native German, I am accustomed to my local „standard“ keyboard. So, no one prevents them from defining a standard keyboard for their new language. And, as someone brought it up, on smartphones your options are basically limmitless, with the option to fully customize the keyboard as it‘s all virtual.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  > What is a standard keyboard, anyway? One that has exactly the letters that can appear in a passport's machine-readable field. I have lots of funny accented characters in my name, and I have lived in several countries under several different names adjusted to the local officials' keyboards. And don't even get me started on forms saying "your name exactly as in your passport, but also without any funny letters". If there is a realistic chance of writing Kazakh (names) in 7-bit-ASCII-only letters, they should go for it. They could also use two different but equally valid writing systems. Norway has two different official written languages that both sort of correspond to the same spoken language. AFAIR in former Yugoslavia both Latin and Cyrillic were written, I remember a friend telling me that in school they alternated between Latin and Cyrillic weeks.
  - moltar 9y ago
    Yes, in YU they used both. It was localized to member states tho. Croatia used mostly Latin, and Serbs used mostly Cyrillic. They often were able to read and write both non the less.
  - lb1lf 9y ago
    -As for the two written Norwegian languages, they both utilize the same letters and are, by and large, more like two different accents than distinct languages. One (Bokmål) is loosely based on Danish (language of the ruling elite up until 1814), adapted to resemble the way Norwegians for the most part spoke, while the other (Nynorsk) was pretty much based on rural dialects. Nynorsk does make (slightly!) more use of diacritics than bokmål, but most current nynorsk users skip them in daily correspondence; their use is not mandatory. ('too', for instance, being written 'også' in bokmål and 'ôg' in nynorsk.) Also, both versions of Norwegian uses our funny letters æ/Æ (ae, similar-sounding to a in 'bad'), ø/Ø (oe, similar-sounding to ea in 'heard') and å/Å (aa, similar to 'a' in saw). Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a linguist. There are probably some inaccuracies in the above, but it should get you through the next linguist pub quiz without causing embarrassment.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
It's cheaper to fix Google and Twitter than it is to change keyboards, so I think the President has a stronger point here.

Freak_NL 9y ago

> Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e […] Ouch. That's just plain horrible.

Grue3 9y ago
Yet a lot of, say, Hawaiian words are written like that and nobody cares. Seems like Nazarbaev wants to keep the language ASCII instead of adding diacritics which would make it hard to type.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jablan 9y ago
  Why would it make it hard to type? There are probably hundreds of different keyboard layouts so far. That is a long ago solved problem.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  There are a lot less people to complain about that, though. 25 thousand speakers versus 10 million speakers.

geowwy 9y ago

English and lots of other languages have word with apostrophes in the middle, seems like Google would have worked out the technical issues. And for hashtags you just omit the apostrophes. It doesn’t even look that inelegant to me: Barlyq adamdar ty’mysynan azat ja’ne qadir-qasi’eti men quqyqtary ten’ bolyp du’ni’ege keledi. Adamdarg’a aqyl-parasat, ar-ojdan berilgen, sondyqtan olar bir-birimen ty’ystyq, bay’yrmaldyq qarym-qatynas jasay’lary ti‘is.

ithkuil 9y ago
your quotation has two version of the apostrophe (’ and ‘, two different unicode points); is that intentional? I wonder if people would complain less if instead of the apostrophe another unused letter was used, such as "x" (or something else?) Barlyq adamdar tyxmysynan azat jaxne qadir-qasixeti men quqyqtary tenx bolyp duxnixege keledi. Adamdargxa aqyl-parasat, ar-ojdan berilgen, sondyqtan olar bir-birimen tyxystyq, bayxyrmaldyq qarym-qatynas jasayxlary tixis.
- smcl 9y ago
  I wonder why they did it - perhaps they were trying to avoid having digraphs mapping to a single sound. An alternative might be carons + acute accents to modify the letter like the Czech, Slovak and in the Balkans so in the example from the article below... > Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e, and pronounced she-ee-ye. You could define the alphabet so that this is written "šííě". To be honest it seems like this is a tricky example to map to any latin-based alphabet. Maybe diacritics were avoided to avoid internationalisation issues (i.e. you could easily fall back to the locale "en-us" and your Kazakh doc still looks alright)
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    > Maybe diacritics were avoided to avoid internationalisation issues Yes, the article quotes the president as saying: "There should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer."

tomsmeding 9y ago

The alphabet used for a language is bound to be a significant part of the culture belonging to that language. It's going to appear everywhere, absolutely everywhere, all children will have to learn it, all people will have to use it daily, etc. It's not something you can just fuck up and be done with it. And I get the feeling that this president, how great he may have been for the country in the past and present, is on the brink of defacing it now. You may be an authoritarian leader, but if you first collect a commission of experts to form a new alphabet, then suddenly push your own idea (ignoring pushback from those experts you selected in the first place) and apparently are not willing to modify your proposal according to what your experts and the public want, you are being a dictator that's making wrong decisions. I do find it promising that even though a quote in the article mentions that usually all that the president does shall be cheered, this proposal is getting friction from the public. I hope, for the sake of the Kazakh people, that the president will realise that he is in the wrong and will listen more to his people.

baybal2 9y ago
Hardly anybody will wonder to yet another "what a joke of a man he is" when this will fly into Nazarbayev's face. Locals are kinda accustomed to it. The man was so infuriated with Kohen's "Borat" not for it taking an insult on the nation, but him himself, personally (or so he keeps thinking) lol. A so so dictator he is, not much of an issue he is. Ones who are the dangerous people in the country are his lieutenants: sharp guys who actually run the country, all waiting for him to finally die. To locals, him being an unscrupulous buffoon gives much elation, as many see that they will fare much worse were he to be as sharp as leaders of neighboring gangsterlandias
batter 9y ago
If you don't want Russians to come 'protecting' russian-speaking people and stealing part of you territory (like in case of Ukraine/Georgia) you should be as far from them as possible. This tactic worked fine for Hitler when invading Austria and still working. As for me president done more long-term decision which should protect country. Even if that's harsh.
- 9y ago

moltar 9y ago

Not invented here syndrome IRL

unwind 9y ago
Where else does it occur?

zuppy 9y ago

We have adopted a different approach in Romania: we usually don't use diacritics at all on the internet. It's not that hard to read the original word (though, I've heard it's pretty hard for foreigners that try to learn the language to understand what are we writing without them). Of course there are few words where it's harder to understand the original meaning, but the advantage of using plain ascii outnumbers it. We do have a local keyboard standard, just most of us don't use it when typing something that's not official. edit: I'm looking at my driving license and car registration certificate, there are no diacritics and they are official documents.

TomMarius 9y ago
Same with Czech on the internet. Sometimes there is confusion but 99% of time it works. We use diacritics on official documents though.

donatj 9y ago

To me non-accented Latin characters + apostrophes seems way more computer friendly than accented characters. Sure, Unicode is supposed to be everywhere, but in practice it’s simply not. On top of that a more limited character set not requiring any sort of IME or special layer shift keys is way way easier to type.

abrowne 9y ago
But better than diagraphs? It may be my bias as an English speaker/writer, but I'd pick sh over s’, for example. The vowels are trickier, and just doubling them like Finnish would turn s’i’i’e into shiiiie, so you might need something (an apostrophe ;-) ?) to divide the syllables. I still like shii’iie better, but that's just one word.
jablan 9y ago
So, when deciding an alphabet for a language, you would go with computer-friendliness as a key metric? Also, what does "computer friendly" mean? How would you break the word "s’i’i’e" into graphemes? "s’" is a single phoneme, but is it a single letter? Does "s’i’i’e" contain letter "s"? If so, why don't we hear it? If the Kazakhs already have the unique opportunity to reform their alphabet, they should do it right and make it phonetic. Introducing apostrophes is simply stupid, and, if not now, they will get rid of them immediately after the emperor dies.

Halian 9y ago

I can't even find a simple listing of the new Kazakh alphabet anywhere, nevermind the experts' recommendation(s)…

jwilk 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Kazakh_Latin_Alphabet.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Kazakh_Latin_Alphabe...