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Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

365 points by happy-go-lucky 9y ago

MistahKoala 9y ago
I was expecting to see some mention about the Russian government's public reaction to such a move. It has the appearance of both a snub to Russian culture and pride, and further encroachment of Western institutions.
strictfp 9y ago
All other alphabets are made by little girls.
forkerenok 9y ago
Don't have an opinion on the news itself, but find it amusing that the title picture features journals exclusively in Russian.
- fanzhang 9y ago
  Is that right? It's not just Cyrillic, but actually Russian language? If so, that's pretty funny.
  - forkerenok 9y ago
    Yes, it's actually Russian. For a second I thought they wanted to credit the origins of Cyrillic, but realized that then it would be Bulgarian.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    Copy-pastable Magazine title (I just copied from a Cyrillic alphabet): Пекарь Seems to be something about bread.
    - nbabitskiy 9y ago
      It's Лекарь (doctor), not Пекарь (baker). It's actually borrowed germanic root[0] [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/læce https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/læce
nsbq71 9y ago
This is like a way of asking to be the next Crimea, hahaha
emodendroket 9y ago
The costs are not purely economic -- you will have people struggle to read in the new script and make old texts inaccessible to young people. Additionally, this isn't a case like Chinese where Romanization has the benefit of making it easier to acquire literacy. What is the benefit of this change? I find the claim in this article that using the same script to write their language is going to bring them closer to Western Europe and the US pretty implausible.
- kolpa 9y ago
  ASCII with the English charset is easier than charset juggling and Unicode? Less subconscious negative feeling from Latin-alphabet-users? It's a linguistic version of website moving to "flat" UI design.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I mean, this is a solved problem
  - zokier 9y ago
    The new Kazakh alphabet is not subset of ASCII, so no benefit there. The "ugly" apostrophe version would have been though, but that got scrapped.
  - klez 9y ago
    ASCII with the English charset doesn't cover any Latin script based language I know of (granted, a limited set) other than English. For example it doesn't cover Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, Vietnamese, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Irish, Occitan, Croatian, etc...
    - FRex 9y ago
      It also doesn't cover Polish. It does cover Malay though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_alphabet
    - spacenick88 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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baybal2 9y ago
Doing a short gig for the national revenue office there now. Their previous contractor ran away with $40k, and left them with a JPEG picture instead of a tax return portal. The first version of a new script (one with apostrophes) was beyond unreadable.
OliverJones 9y ago
Why? Thumbing their national nose at Russia? Trying to align themselves economically more with Europe and America? And, will the Unicode for the new alphabet use existing glyphs from the Latin planes, like "A"? Or will they stick with the Cyrillic planes for letters that look the same, like "A"?
deleted 9y ago
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niftich 9y ago
Hearts and minds. The immense monetary cost and hassle of doing so is weighed up against developing a closer connection to Turkey and Azerbaijan, ostensibly [1]; but the cultural subtext of easing consumption and learning of other latin-script media and art from the wider world. There's an element of sticking it to the Russians, an element of exploiting a generational divide unlike other leaders who stuck with their aging power base, and an element of a leader wanting to make a permanent mark on the state, but they mismash into an ambitious scheme that continues Kazakhstan's to be a relevant actor and independent participant in the world stage. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124215#14124449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124215#14124449
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > The cultural subtext of easing consumption and learning of other latin-script media and art from the wider world. That’s not really the motivation here. English learning has boomed in Kazakhstan for many years now even without a script reform, the younger generations have no problem with the Latin alphabet. Kazakh-language texts on social media are often liberally sprinkled with English phrases in the Latin alphabet regardless of Kazakh itself still being written in Cyrillic.
  - dennisgorelik 9y ago
    It is not convenient to switch between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets while typing. Using the same alphabet for both languages adds extra convenience and ease to text communication.
vbezhenar 9y ago
I'm ethnical Russian living in Kazakhstan and I think that it's not a very wise decision. As correctly written in the article, overwhelming majority of Kazakhstani citizens speak and write Russian well. I just don't see any point with this change, but costs are tremendous, you have to rewrite every single book including learning books, you have to replace every street plate. When overwhelming majority of people speak Russian and Russia is the most important trade partner, I think that it's only logical to have Russian as one of the official languages in the country (with Kazakh language, of course). Instead Russian language has strange status as a "language of international communication" and basically they are trying to suppress its usage, many plates are not include Russian translations, etc. For example in Canada only 38% of population speak French, nevertheless French is an official language.
- adventured 9y ago
  > When overwhelming majority of people speak Russian and Russia is the most important trade partner, I think that it's only logical to have Russian as one of the official languages in the country It makes perfect sense if you want to move away from Russia to dramatically broaden your national potential over time. Russia has a very modest economy versus its population size. Canada and South Korea have overtaken it, and next up Spain, Australia, Mexico and Indonesia will do the same. There's no hint Russia's economic backwardness is going to change soon. Putin has entirely failed to develop the nation's potential outside of energy. Their GDP per capita has fallen below much of Eastern Europe, including Croatia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia (as well as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Russia is ranked around #60 in the world on GDP per capita. It would be wise of Kazakhstan to limit their dependency on trade with Russia and look to far larger opportunities globally. The only future Russia can offer Kazakhstan is one of weak dependency, a future in which Russia dreams perpetually of re-acquiring its former empire territories.
  - bitL 9y ago
    > Their GDP per capita has fallen below much of Eastern Europe I think that was the product of the 90s and you can see it still in full swing in Ukraine (African level of GDP). Since those crazy times of societal collapse their GDP PPP per capita actually rose up to the level of Turkey IIRC; without sanctions they would probably be even a bit higher and become even more threatening, which might not be in US+EU's best interests.
DenisM 9y ago
90 years ago similar Latinization was attempted in Russia itself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_U...
- rasz 9y ago
  Small committee running for a year and dying under Stalins boot is hardly an attempt, especially in the face of previous 100 years of intense Russification.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  Cyrillic was heavily altered to be closer to Latin script in the 18th century, too. https://www.quora.com/What-changes-did-the-Russian-Emperor-Peter-the-Great-make-to-the-Cyrillic-alphabet-and-why https://www.quora.com/What-changes-did-the-Russian-Emperor-P...
zokier 9y ago
Did they seriously go with dotless i, the character that is endless source of fun for any case mapping code. Would í have really been so bad? All the other accented characters are using ´ ffs.
- zokier 9y ago
  And while I'm considering stupidities, why are the two digraphs apparently part of the alphabet, instead of simply being two characters? Does this imply that they need to be collated specially? Or are they just shown like that for transitional convenience?
- bonzini 9y ago
  Well, the two (now three) languages that use dotless i are Turkish and Azeri, both of which are Turkic languages like Kazakh. So it does make sense, even though it's going to be painful.
- gnulinux 9y ago
  Used dotless, dotted i all my life never had any problems. What endless source of fun are you talking about?
  - M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
    Convert ı to upper case and you get I. But convert I back to lower case and what should you get? i or ı?
    - netmare 9y ago
      By converting to uppercase you lose information. There's no magic way to avoid this, unless you store the original. Greek also has this problem with stress accents. For example, both "γέρος" (old man) and "γερός" (strong) become "ΓΕΡΟΣ" in upper case. Case round-tripping isn't available in all languages.
      - zokier 9y ago
ibdf 9y ago
Next, the US will try to adopt the metric system (again).
- toephu2 9y ago
  and they should. Also please get rid of DST while you are at it.
  - bsder 9y ago
    The US has a bit of an oddity in the law: "The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time." Florida is attempting to be on DST all year round.
- jsgo 9y ago
  I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler.
  - Lionsion 9y ago
    > I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler. Not really, and you'd have to do it more frequently. The US already has a standard, and a lot of existing stuff built to it. Adopting the metric system isn't going to change the size of the pipes in my house's plumbing, the units in my recipes and cookbooks, etc.
    - Symbiote 9y ago
      My grandma's (British) cookbooks have pounds and ounces [1]. My mother's have grams, and ounces in brackets. Mine only have grams. There's little reason to convert a recipe in any case, assuming you won't forget how to use "English" units. [1] Different sizes to yours, naturally. At least the fluid ones.
    - jsgo 9y ago
partycoder 9y ago
Turkey went through a similar process. Reasons included a desire to increase literacy rate and a creating a new national identity. This doesn't really apply to Kazakhstan, a country that already has a good literacy rate.
- lmm 9y ago
  Forming a national identity is still pretty important for Kazakhstan, which lives in the shadow of Russia. That Nazarbayev apparently deferred to the popular will on this issue is promising if the nation is to outlast him.
- TomK32 9y ago
  Well, Turkish didn't have it's own native script, merely adopted and adapted the arabic script which wasn't a good match https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet
parliament32 9y ago
Here's a country changing their alphabet to boost their international compatibility... now if only the US would switch to the metric system.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Not like people are going to refuse to trade with the US because we have customary units, realistically. That's the benefit of being the world's richest country and not a small Central Asian one.
  - parliament32 9y ago
    Foreign trade is, interestingly enough, considered the most important reason to convert the US to the metric system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States#20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat... Apart from trade though, this issue might cause some countries to hesitate to work with the US for scientific research or related initiatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      The world's largest consumer market, among other things, more than make up for the inconvenience of specifying that a screw is one-eighth of an inch.
  - amaccuish 9y ago
    And people refuse to trade with countries with a different alphabet?
swrobel 9y ago
I'm really curious about how this will be implemented from a software standpoint. Will the language use the same ISO (or whatever body determines them) browser language code like en-US or will there need to be two separate codes that exist in parallel, one for the old cyrillic version, and one for the new latin one. Are there any modern examples of this sort of transition having to be implemented? I think we all think of the set of possible language codes as something that has been static for a long time, but this shows that it can be rather fluid.
- rspeer 9y ago
  BCP 47 language codes [1] have three major parts: the language, the script, and the region. Canonically, the language is two or three lowercase letters, the region is two capital letters or three numbers, and the script is four letters in title-case. These values can be filled in from context. "en-US" means the same thing as "en-Latn-US" because it's always written in the Latin alphabet. "ja" (Japanese) means the same thing as "ja-Jpan-JP" (Japanese, as used in Japan, written in the combination of scripts that is unique to Japanese). You could refer to romanized Japanese as "ja-Latn", though this is really rare. But there are a few language codes where you should specify the script. Particularly Serbian, where the Latin and Cyrillic scripts coexist. In that case, you distinguish them as "sr-Latn" and "sr-Cyrl". So the language codes for Kazakh will be "kk-Latn" and "kk-Cyrl". Which one "kk" means by default may change at some point. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47 https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47 - if you find yourself referring to "ISO language codes" in the present day, this is what you actually mean.
  - stordoff 9y ago
    > "ja" (Japanese) means the same thing as "ja-Jpan-JP" (Japanese, as used in Japan, written in the combination of scripts that is unique to Japanese). Incidentally, I noticed that Facebook has both ja-JP and ja-KS (for Kansai-ben) recently, which I haven't seen elsewhere before.
    - rspeer 9y ago
      Language codes made up off the top of someone's head are my peeve. If anyone else wanted to support Kansai dialect, they wouldn't necessarily (and probably shouldn't) make the same decision to pretend that it's a country with code KS. It's not like the standards left them with anything to work with, but "ja-x-kansai" would have been quite acceptable. At least it's not as bad as code I've seen that used "zh-SC" and "zh-TC" to represent Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese, because they either didn't know about "zh-Hans" vs. "zh-Hant", or didn't leave room for script codes in their database. (In my post I neglected to even mention Chinese, by far the largest example of a two-script language.) If you read the codes "zh-SC" and "zh-TC" literally, they're distinguishing whether it's "Chinese as used in Seychelles" or "Chinese as used in the Turks and Caicos Islands". And it's not as bad as the OpenSubtitles language code "ze", which after some examination, I have to conclude means "this might be Chinese or might be English, we're not sure, we found it on a shoddily pirated DVD".
eu 9y ago
Moldova went through a similar transition in early 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Reversion_to_Latin_script,_and_beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Reversion_to...
Bud 9y ago
In other words (in other letters?), Kazakhstan is doing more to rid itself of Russian influence than the US is. Ouch.
- lolsal 9y ago
  Do you think Kazakhstan and the US have similar levels of Russian influence?
spacenick88 9y ago
I wonder if since this is a pure script change there will be such a clear and simple transliteration that it's possible with a finite state machine. I.e. regex replace
PunchTornado 9y ago
Isn't it better/easier to type at a keyboard using a latin alphabet rather than Cyrilic? There was once a guy trying to type Russian on my computer and he had to go to a website to type it. While when using a latin alphabet you can easily type Romanian with a US or French keyboard or whatever latin based keyboard. This benefit is huge.
- _l0oo 9y ago
  Created an account just to comment on this. I live in an English-speaking country but know Russian. Because of where I live, and because the Internet is like 99% English, I type in US-English layout 99.9% of the time. When the time comes to write in Russian I just have no muscle memory since I never use it, and it becomes a really slow process. An interesting tool is transliteration, where you can type a Latin letter or combination that sounds roughly the same as a Cyrillic letter, and the tool converts it to the Cyrillic equivalent for you. I use this: http://translit.net http://translit.net. However I haven't noticed anything wrong with the Cyrillic layout by any means. I'm just not used to it. Maybe the guy you saw was in the same position. This is the case for most Russians who live in countries that use the Latin alphabet. It shouldn't reflect poorly on the Russian keyboard layout.
- Fins 9y ago
  If you know how to type Russian, using Latin keyboard is no problem. I'm not really good at touch-typing, but I have no issue typing in Russian using a standard US keyboard without Cyrillic stickers (although I do put them on my home machines to make it easier).
- Asooka 9y ago
  Well, for Bulgarian, there are two different keyboard mappings one can use to type cyrillic with. The typewriter layout, which nobody uses. And the phonetic layout, which just maps the latin characters on your keyboard to their cyrillic equivalents where appropriate, plus about half a dozen character mappings where the latin character doesn't have a cyrillic character, so it's mapped to a cyrillic character that doesn't have a latin counterpart. I'm not sure how it is in Russian, but I suspect they have the same system.
KAdot 9y ago
It will take a while to switch everything from Cyrillic to Latin. Serbian is the only modern language that uses both Cyrillic and Latin right now.
deleted 9y ago
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solarkraft 9y ago
> There is also budget for developing a language converter IT program to recode Cyrillic script into Latin in the third quarter of 2018 (approximately $166,000) what
bushin 9y ago
"Munalbayeva Daurenbekovna, head of the National Academic Library" Butchered her name. Latin alphabet didn't help.
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  For the curious: Үмітхан Дәуренбекқызы Мұңалбаева, which I think is Úmithan Dáurenbekqyzy Muńalbaeva in the new alphabet.
  - mda 9y ago
    If you speak Turkish, you can actually read and understand second version.
antimora 9y ago
I am surprised nowhere Uzbekistan's efforts to switch were mentioned. They started processes in 1991, and still the majority are using Cyrillic, including the government officials.
my_first_acct 9y ago
A couple of comments on the article: 1) The article doesn't mention the latinization scheme that was initially proposed last year by the committee of linguists that was tasked to study this issue. Their proposal used only the 26 letters of the English alphabet; since Kazakh has more than 26 sounds, the additional sounds would be represented by digraphs (pairs of letters). President Nazarbayev over-rode the committee, and proposed the "apostrophe" version (mentioned in the article). After much outcry, the final version (with diacritical marks) was adopted. So here is the evolution of the letter currently written with the Kazakh Cyrillic "ә": ae, then a', then á. Note, by the way, that "ә" does not exist in the Russian version of Cyrillic; in order to write Kazakh in Cyrillic, additional letters needed to be introduced back in the 1930s. My opinion: the digraph proposal was the most forward-looking. I'm guessing that most young Kazakhs will end up skipping the diacritical marks when they send text messages, whereas they would have used the digraphs. 2) The article is a bit confusing, in that it mixes up two different initiatives. The first initiative (the main focus of the article) is to convert Kazakh to the Latin alphabet. The second is to reduce the use of Russian in favor of Kazakh. (At some point, President Nazarbayev expressed the goal of educating all children in 3 languages: Kazakh, English, and Russian). 3) The article (and most of the comments) seem to be focused on the question of whether latinization would improve Kazakhstan's economic ties with European and Turkic nations. But Kazakhstan's most important neighbor is China, and it is safe to assume that more Chinese are familiar with the Latin than with the Cyrillic alphabet, so latinization makes sense in this regard as well.
lopmotr 9y ago
Whatever the cost, surely the biggest value is moving closer to a single global script which is more of an ideal to me than practical. Lots of languages have changed their old scripts to latin or latin-based, and whatever the cost when they did it, we benefit now - people in China can read a Turkish person's name and roughly get it recognizable without having to learn anything. A few generations later, nobody will care about the cost of conversion but people will keep benefiting.
overhorizon 9y ago
in other news it will change it's name to Unicodestan.
dennisgorelik 9y ago
Why wouldn't Kazakhstan use pure 26-letter Latin alphabet? There is a big advantage in using the same keyboard that English language uses.
- grzm 9y ago
  Just as fair, is why would they? There are plenty of languages besides English which use the Latin alphabet, and plenty of keyboard variants out there. Crikey, even within English, there are those who prefer non-QWERTY layouts. Find a mapping that makes sense for the language, which, from an admittedly non-native eye, it appears they've done.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  Using pure 26-letter Latin alphabet means using multi-letter combinations to represent particular sounds and/or using same letters to represent very different sounds in different contexts. Both things feel very ugly. I am not really familiar with non-european alphabets but Č (Czech, Croatian, Latvian) looks much better and easier to read than CH (English), CZ (Polish), TCH (French) or TSCH (German, I'm not even sure I've spelled it correctly, it may happen to be even longer and more weird in German). And you can fit more in a twit this way :-) When I was a student speed-writing huge amounts of text on lectures I went even further, e.g. using Ŋ in place of NG in Eŋliš :-)
  - ajuc 9y ago
    With utf-8 digraphs can be actually shorter in terms of bits than diacritics :)
  - dennisgorelik 9y ago
    > Both things feel very ugly. Both things ("multi-letter combinations" and "same letters to represent very different sound") are inevitable anyway -- with or without diacritic characters. After learning the language - I do not notice any of these two problems. But I struggle with switching between keyboard layouts multiple times every day: I frequently forget to switch between English and Russian and start typing in a wrong layout. If Russian used 26 letter latin alphabet - there would be no "layout switch" problem.
M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
What a pointless waste of time and money. Funny that they link halfway to another pointless waste of everybody’s time and money, Sweden’s switch to right-hand traffic, instead of actually addressing the problem of steering wheels being on the wrong side, which could have been solved simply by mandating new cars have the wheel on the appropriate side which would have cost the taxpayer practically nothing.
kmbriedis 9y ago
As a tourist I am pro-change, because it can be nightmare visiting Cyrillic countries - every street sign, label, bus stop name etc. just doesn't make any sense and hard to remember if you don't know Cyrillic
zby 9y ago
English is not very well suited for the Latin alphabet! Learning writing in English is much more difficult than in Polish for example despite the additional letters in Polish. Especially with vowels - come on: 'a' can mean 'æ', 'ɑː', 'ɑ', 'eɪ', 'ə' - and it is also used in 'ea' where it has even different pronunciation.
Markoff 9y ago
shame Chinese didn't went full Vietnam on this
rauanm 9y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm kazakh and passively pro-switch) I'm gonna ignore political aspects of the switch and focus on pseudo-scientific side. (my personal views and thinking) Except for words and phrases adopted from arabic or sort of persian (also arabic, but 'persianised'), our language is agglutinative and mostly follows vowel harmony. (that might not tell you much, but basically means we don't need any special letters or stacks of letters to hint the spelling - we have kind of built-in elements of style when it comes to phonetics) After a long period of using arabic alphabet and brief period of latin-based alphabet (yes, we had that until Stalin decided to change horses midstream - for everyone in ussr), we changed our alphabet to cyrillic. (and when I say 'we', I usually mean soviets did that for us) While doing so, we just took all of 33 letters from russian alphabet and added our own 'custom' letters. This lead to drastic repercussions, because instead of conforming new words and terms to proper lexical and phonetical rules, we adopted everything literally unchanged from or through russian. (no need to remind you that there were no independent science, culture, or literature) Fast-forward to our days. We have long and clumsy alphabet. We write and spell letters we don't need, sometimes basically speaking two languages at once (it feels like spanglish or franglais, except we don't always have an alternative - it either sounds awkward, doesn't exist, or is so archaic no one knows or cares for it). My take is giving up and saying well we sucked dick for 100 years so might as well keep doing it is not the answer. I personally have no idea if there's a way to pay off the technical debt and fix the upstream. Cyrillic is subjectively harder to read or spell because of all the crufty legacy, and the way I see it we don't have a linguistic institution making decisions and defending the language for the sake of the language and its beauty. (god I envy frenchmen and their zealous protection of la Langue).
- jaratec 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, were there attempts/proposals for adopting the Orkhon script (or variant)? Wouldn't it be more natural/easier to use for a turkic language? Link to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet Edit: spelling
  - rauanm 9y ago
    I don't think there were any attempts to adopt runic scripts, but proposals are plenty. Some people say gokturk would be most natural to use. (albeit, unlikely to happen - why would you switch to brainfuck when everyone uses javascript?) In fact, it wouldn't be just adopting, but actually getting back to roots. It's lost history I doubt we'll ever get back. I have no clue what's written on the stele in that wiki article, but I remember seeing someone's 'transliteration' of the text and it's shockingly comprehensible.
madeel 9y ago
Adopting a consistent/stable writing system is more important standardizing on Latin. Main goal is to be phonetically consistent with reading. I highly doubt the beauty of expression in Arabic/Hebrew can be represented outside their respective scripts. Bastardizing on Latin does not give Kazaks anything more than Turkey getting the EU membership.
- kingofhdds 9y ago
  >Bastardizing on Latin It's ugly, and emotionally loaded language which doesn't bring us towards any bright idea. In majority of languages where Latin is the base for their writing systems, there are diacritics, or other graphical changes. I wonder if you want also to tell French, and German guys that they 'bastardized' Latin, or is it only Kazakh who are not allowed to use the script with additions? Besides, Cyrillic had to be heavily modified for Kazakh also, and I guess any script, which realistically exists in modern world.
  - madeel 9y ago
    It's how it is. Chinese/Japanese regardless of it's character hasn't stopped them from carving our respect or economic might the world. So liberalization on an idea for the sake of liberalization is deem to go nowhere.
    - kingofhdds 9y ago
      Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to communicate. What liberalization? This comment is neither answer to the mine, nor continuation of your own above.
      - madeel 9y ago
        liberalization: How liberals seems to interpret adoption of western systems as cure to all problems. In this very case latinization.
        9y ago
Yizahi 9y ago
To those wondering "is it that bad like some people claim" here how it might have looked for you: Хере из эн экземпл оф текст траскрайбед фром латин то кириллик.
ALee 9y ago
Test case for the US if it ever moves beyond the metric system

I was expecting to see some mention about the Russian government's public reaction to such a move. It has the appearance of both a snub to Russian culture and pride, and further encroachment of Western institutions.

strictfp 9y ago

All other alphabets are made by little girls.

forkerenok 9y ago

Don't have an opinion on the news itself, but find it amusing that the title picture features journals exclusively in Russian.

fanzhang 9y ago
Is that right? It's not just Cyrillic, but actually Russian language? If so, that's pretty funny.
- forkerenok 9y ago
  Yes, it's actually Russian. For a second I thought they wanted to credit the origins of Cyrillic, but realized that then it would be Bulgarian.
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  Copy-pastable Magazine title (I just copied from a Cyrillic alphabet): Пекарь Seems to be something about bread.
  - nbabitskiy 9y ago
    It's Лекарь (doctor), not Пекарь (baker). It's actually borrowed germanic root[0] [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/læce https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/læce

nsbq71 9y ago

This is like a way of asking to be the next Crimea, hahaha

emodendroket 9y ago

The costs are not purely economic -- you will have people struggle to read in the new script and make old texts inaccessible to young people. Additionally, this isn't a case like Chinese where Romanization has the benefit of making it easier to acquire literacy. What is the benefit of this change? I find the claim in this article that using the same script to write their language is going to bring them closer to Western Europe and the US pretty implausible.

kolpa 9y ago
ASCII with the English charset is easier than charset juggling and Unicode? Less subconscious negative feeling from Latin-alphabet-users? It's a linguistic version of website moving to "flat" UI design.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I mean, this is a solved problem
- zokier 9y ago
  The new Kazakh alphabet is not subset of ASCII, so no benefit there. The "ugly" apostrophe version would have been though, but that got scrapped.
- klez 9y ago
  ASCII with the English charset doesn't cover any Latin script based language I know of (granted, a limited set) other than English. For example it doesn't cover Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, Vietnamese, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Irish, Occitan, Croatian, etc...
  - FRex 9y ago
    It also doesn't cover Polish. It does cover Malay though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_alphabet
  - spacenick88 9y ago

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baybal2 9y ago

Doing a short gig for the national revenue office there now. Their previous contractor ran away with $40k, and left them with a JPEG picture instead of a tax return portal. The first version of a new script (one with apostrophes) was beyond unreadable.

OliverJones 9y ago

Why? Thumbing their national nose at Russia? Trying to align themselves economically more with Europe and America? And, will the Unicode for the new alphabet use existing glyphs from the Latin planes, like "A"? Or will they stick with the Cyrillic planes for letters that look the same, like "A"?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

niftich 9y ago

Hearts and minds. The immense monetary cost and hassle of doing so is weighed up against developing a closer connection to Turkey and Azerbaijan, ostensibly [1]; but the cultural subtext of easing consumption and learning of other latin-script media and art from the wider world. There's an element of sticking it to the Russians, an element of exploiting a generational divide unlike other leaders who stuck with their aging power base, and an element of a leader wanting to make a permanent mark on the state, but they mismash into an ambitious scheme that continues Kazakhstan's to be a relevant actor and independent participant in the world stage. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124215#14124449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124215#14124449

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> The cultural subtext of easing consumption and learning of other latin-script media and art from the wider world. That’s not really the motivation here. English learning has boomed in Kazakhstan for many years now even without a script reform, the younger generations have no problem with the Latin alphabet. Kazakh-language texts on social media are often liberally sprinkled with English phrases in the Latin alphabet regardless of Kazakh itself still being written in Cyrillic.
- dennisgorelik 9y ago
  It is not convenient to switch between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets while typing. Using the same alphabet for both languages adds extra convenience and ease to text communication.

vbezhenar 9y ago

I'm ethnical Russian living in Kazakhstan and I think that it's not a very wise decision. As correctly written in the article, overwhelming majority of Kazakhstani citizens speak and write Russian well. I just don't see any point with this change, but costs are tremendous, you have to rewrite every single book including learning books, you have to replace every street plate. When overwhelming majority of people speak Russian and Russia is the most important trade partner, I think that it's only logical to have Russian as one of the official languages in the country (with Kazakh language, of course). Instead Russian language has strange status as a "language of international communication" and basically they are trying to suppress its usage, many plates are not include Russian translations, etc. For example in Canada only 38% of population speak French, nevertheless French is an official language.

adventured 9y ago
> When overwhelming majority of people speak Russian and Russia is the most important trade partner, I think that it's only logical to have Russian as one of the official languages in the country It makes perfect sense if you want to move away from Russia to dramatically broaden your national potential over time. Russia has a very modest economy versus its population size. Canada and South Korea have overtaken it, and next up Spain, Australia, Mexico and Indonesia will do the same. There's no hint Russia's economic backwardness is going to change soon. Putin has entirely failed to develop the nation's potential outside of energy. Their GDP per capita has fallen below much of Eastern Europe, including Croatia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia (as well as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Russia is ranked around #60 in the world on GDP per capita. It would be wise of Kazakhstan to limit their dependency on trade with Russia and look to far larger opportunities globally. The only future Russia can offer Kazakhstan is one of weak dependency, a future in which Russia dreams perpetually of re-acquiring its former empire territories.
- bitL 9y ago
  > Their GDP per capita has fallen below much of Eastern Europe I think that was the product of the 90s and you can see it still in full swing in Ukraine (African level of GDP). Since those crazy times of societal collapse their GDP PPP per capita actually rose up to the level of Turkey IIRC; without sanctions they would probably be even a bit higher and become even more threatening, which might not be in US+EU's best interests.

DenisM 9y ago

90 years ago similar Latinization was attempted in Russia itself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_U...

rasz 9y ago
Small committee running for a year and dying under Stalins boot is hardly an attempt, especially in the face of previous 100 years of intense Russification.
Baeocystin 9y ago
Cyrillic was heavily altered to be closer to Latin script in the 18th century, too. https://www.quora.com/What-changes-did-the-Russian-Emperor-Peter-the-Great-make-to-the-Cyrillic-alphabet-and-why https://www.quora.com/What-changes-did-the-Russian-Emperor-P...

zokier 9y ago

Did they seriously go with dotless i, the character that is endless source of fun for any case mapping code. Would í have really been so bad? All the other accented characters are using ´ ffs.

zokier 9y ago
And while I'm considering stupidities, why are the two digraphs apparently part of the alphabet, instead of simply being two characters? Does this imply that they need to be collated specially? Or are they just shown like that for transitional convenience?
bonzini 9y ago
Well, the two (now three) languages that use dotless i are Turkish and Azeri, both of which are Turkic languages like Kazakh. So it does make sense, even though it's going to be painful.
gnulinux 9y ago
Used dotless, dotted i all my life never had any problems. What endless source of fun are you talking about?
- M_Bakhtiari 9y ago
  Convert ı to upper case and you get I. But convert I back to lower case and what should you get? i or ı?
  - netmare 9y ago
    By converting to uppercase you lose information. There's no magic way to avoid this, unless you store the original. Greek also has this problem with stress accents. For example, both "γέρος" (old man) and "γερός" (strong) become "ΓΕΡΟΣ" in upper case. Case round-tripping isn't available in all languages.
    - zokier 9y ago

ibdf 9y ago

Next, the US will try to adopt the metric system (again).

toephu2 9y ago
and they should. Also please get rid of DST while you are at it.
- bsder 9y ago
  The US has a bit of an oddity in the law: "The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time." Florida is attempting to be on DST all year round.
jsgo 9y ago
I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler.
- Lionsion 9y ago
  > I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler. Not really, and you'd have to do it more frequently. The US already has a standard, and a lot of existing stuff built to it. Adopting the metric system isn't going to change the size of the pipes in my house's plumbing, the units in my recipes and cookbooks, etc.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    My grandma's (British) cookbooks have pounds and ounces [1]. My mother's have grams, and ounces in brackets. Mine only have grams. There's little reason to convert a recipe in any case, assuming you won't forget how to use "English" units. [1] Different sizes to yours, naturally. At least the fluid ones.
  - jsgo 9y ago

partycoder 9y ago

Turkey went through a similar process. Reasons included a desire to increase literacy rate and a creating a new national identity. This doesn't really apply to Kazakhstan, a country that already has a good literacy rate.

lmm 9y ago
Forming a national identity is still pretty important for Kazakhstan, which lives in the shadow of Russia. That Nazarbayev apparently deferred to the popular will on this issue is promising if the nation is to outlast him.
TomK32 9y ago
Well, Turkish didn't have it's own native script, merely adopted and adapted the arabic script which wasn't a good match https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet

parliament32 9y ago

Here's a country changing their alphabet to boost their international compatibility... now if only the US would switch to the metric system.

emodendroket 9y ago
Not like people are going to refuse to trade with the US because we have customary units, realistically. That's the benefit of being the world's richest country and not a small Central Asian one.
- parliament32 9y ago
  Foreign trade is, interestingly enough, considered the most important reason to convert the US to the metric system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States#20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat... Apart from trade though, this issue might cause some countries to hesitate to work with the US for scientific research or related initiatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    The world's largest consumer market, among other things, more than make up for the inconvenience of specifying that a screw is one-eighth of an inch.
- amaccuish 9y ago
  And people refuse to trade with countries with a different alphabet?

swrobel 9y ago

I'm really curious about how this will be implemented from a software standpoint. Will the language use the same ISO (or whatever body determines them) browser language code like en-US or will there need to be two separate codes that exist in parallel, one for the old cyrillic version, and one for the new latin one. Are there any modern examples of this sort of transition having to be implemented? I think we all think of the set of possible language codes as something that has been static for a long time, but this shows that it can be rather fluid.

rspeer 9y ago
BCP 47 language codes [1] have three major parts: the language, the script, and the region. Canonically, the language is two or three lowercase letters, the region is two capital letters or three numbers, and the script is four letters in title-case. These values can be filled in from context. "en-US" means the same thing as "en-Latn-US" because it's always written in the Latin alphabet. "ja" (Japanese) means the same thing as "ja-Jpan-JP" (Japanese, as used in Japan, written in the combination of scripts that is unique to Japanese). You could refer to romanized Japanese as "ja-Latn", though this is really rare. But there are a few language codes where you should specify the script. Particularly Serbian, where the Latin and Cyrillic scripts coexist. In that case, you distinguish them as "sr-Latn" and "sr-Cyrl". So the language codes for Kazakh will be "kk-Latn" and "kk-Cyrl". Which one "kk" means by default may change at some point. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47 https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47 - if you find yourself referring to "ISO language codes" in the present day, this is what you actually mean.
- stordoff 9y ago
  > "ja" (Japanese) means the same thing as "ja-Jpan-JP" (Japanese, as used in Japan, written in the combination of scripts that is unique to Japanese). Incidentally, I noticed that Facebook has both ja-JP and ja-KS (for Kansai-ben) recently, which I haven't seen elsewhere before.
  - rspeer 9y ago
    Language codes made up off the top of someone's head are my peeve. If anyone else wanted to support Kansai dialect, they wouldn't necessarily (and probably shouldn't) make the same decision to pretend that it's a country with code KS. It's not like the standards left them with anything to work with, but "ja-x-kansai" would have been quite acceptable. At least it's not as bad as code I've seen that used "zh-SC" and "zh-TC" to represent Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese, because they either didn't know about "zh-Hans" vs. "zh-Hant", or didn't leave room for script codes in their database. (In my post I neglected to even mention Chinese, by far the largest example of a two-script language.) If you read the codes "zh-SC" and "zh-TC" literally, they're distinguishing whether it's "Chinese as used in Seychelles" or "Chinese as used in the Turks and Caicos Islands". And it's not as bad as the OpenSubtitles language code "ze", which after some examination, I have to conclude means "this might be Chinese or might be English, we're not sure, we found it on a shoddily pirated DVD".

eu 9y ago

Moldova went through a similar transition in early 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Reversion_to_Latin_script,_and_beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Reversion_to...

Bud 9y ago

In other words (in other letters?), Kazakhstan is doing more to rid itself of Russian influence than the US is. Ouch.

lolsal 9y ago
Do you think Kazakhstan and the US have similar levels of Russian influence?

spacenick88 9y ago

I wonder if since this is a pure script change there will be such a clear and simple transliteration that it's possible with a finite state machine. I.e. regex replace

PunchTornado 9y ago

Isn't it better/easier to type at a keyboard using a latin alphabet rather than Cyrilic? There was once a guy trying to type Russian on my computer and he had to go to a website to type it. While when using a latin alphabet you can easily type Romanian with a US or French keyboard or whatever latin based keyboard. This benefit is huge.

_l0oo 9y ago
Created an account just to comment on this. I live in an English-speaking country but know Russian. Because of where I live, and because the Internet is like 99% English, I type in US-English layout 99.9% of the time. When the time comes to write in Russian I just have no muscle memory since I never use it, and it becomes a really slow process. An interesting tool is transliteration, where you can type a Latin letter or combination that sounds roughly the same as a Cyrillic letter, and the tool converts it to the Cyrillic equivalent for you. I use this: http://translit.net http://translit.net. However I haven't noticed anything wrong with the Cyrillic layout by any means. I'm just not used to it. Maybe the guy you saw was in the same position. This is the case for most Russians who live in countries that use the Latin alphabet. It shouldn't reflect poorly on the Russian keyboard layout.
Fins 9y ago
If you know how to type Russian, using Latin keyboard is no problem. I'm not really good at touch-typing, but I have no issue typing in Russian using a standard US keyboard without Cyrillic stickers (although I do put them on my home machines to make it easier).
Asooka 9y ago
Well, for Bulgarian, there are two different keyboard mappings one can use to type cyrillic with. The typewriter layout, which nobody uses. And the phonetic layout, which just maps the latin characters on your keyboard to their cyrillic equivalents where appropriate, plus about half a dozen character mappings where the latin character doesn't have a cyrillic character, so it's mapped to a cyrillic character that doesn't have a latin counterpart. I'm not sure how it is in Russian, but I suspect they have the same system.

KAdot 9y ago

It will take a while to switch everything from Cyrillic to Latin. Serbian is the only modern language that uses both Cyrillic and Latin right now.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

solarkraft 9y ago

> There is also budget for developing a language converter IT program to recode Cyrillic script into Latin in the third quarter of 2018 (approximately $166,000) what

bushin 9y ago

"Munalbayeva Daurenbekovna, head of the National Academic Library" Butchered her name. Latin alphabet didn't help.

evincarofautumn 9y ago
For the curious: Үмітхан Дәуренбекқызы Мұңалбаева, which I think is Úmithan Dáurenbekqyzy Muńalbaeva in the new alphabet.
- mda 9y ago
  If you speak Turkish, you can actually read and understand second version.

antimora 9y ago

I am surprised nowhere Uzbekistan's efforts to switch were mentioned. They started processes in 1991, and still the majority are using Cyrillic, including the government officials.

my_first_acct 9y ago

A couple of comments on the article: 1) The article doesn't mention the latinization scheme that was initially proposed last year by the committee of linguists that was tasked to study this issue. Their proposal used only the 26 letters of the English alphabet; since Kazakh has more than 26 sounds, the additional sounds would be represented by digraphs (pairs of letters). President Nazarbayev over-rode the committee, and proposed the "apostrophe" version (mentioned in the article). After much outcry, the final version (with diacritical marks) was adopted. So here is the evolution of the letter currently written with the Kazakh Cyrillic "ә": ae, then a', then á. Note, by the way, that "ә" does not exist in the Russian version of Cyrillic; in order to write Kazakh in Cyrillic, additional letters needed to be introduced back in the 1930s. My opinion: the digraph proposal was the most forward-looking. I'm guessing that most young Kazakhs will end up skipping the diacritical marks when they send text messages, whereas they would have used the digraphs. 2) The article is a bit confusing, in that it mixes up two different initiatives. The first initiative (the main focus of the article) is to convert Kazakh to the Latin alphabet. The second is to reduce the use of Russian in favor of Kazakh. (At some point, President Nazarbayev expressed the goal of educating all children in 3 languages: Kazakh, English, and Russian). 3) The article (and most of the comments) seem to be focused on the question of whether latinization would improve Kazakhstan's economic ties with European and Turkic nations. But Kazakhstan's most important neighbor is China, and it is safe to assume that more Chinese are familiar with the Latin than with the Cyrillic alphabet, so latinization makes sense in this regard as well.

lopmotr 9y ago

Whatever the cost, surely the biggest value is moving closer to a single global script which is more of an ideal to me than practical. Lots of languages have changed their old scripts to latin or latin-based, and whatever the cost when they did it, we benefit now - people in China can read a Turkish person's name and roughly get it recognizable without having to learn anything. A few generations later, nobody will care about the cost of conversion but people will keep benefiting.

overhorizon 9y ago

in other news it will change it's name to Unicodestan.

dennisgorelik 9y ago

Why wouldn't Kazakhstan use pure 26-letter Latin alphabet? There is a big advantage in using the same keyboard that English language uses.

grzm 9y ago
Just as fair, is why would they? There are plenty of languages besides English which use the Latin alphabet, and plenty of keyboard variants out there. Crikey, even within English, there are those who prefer non-QWERTY layouts. Find a mapping that makes sense for the language, which, from an admittedly non-native eye, it appears they've done.
qwerty456127 9y ago
Using pure 26-letter Latin alphabet means using multi-letter combinations to represent particular sounds and/or using same letters to represent very different sounds in different contexts. Both things feel very ugly. I am not really familiar with non-european alphabets but Č (Czech, Croatian, Latvian) looks much better and easier to read than CH (English), CZ (Polish), TCH (French) or TSCH (German, I'm not even sure I've spelled it correctly, it may happen to be even longer and more weird in German). And you can fit more in a twit this way :-) When I was a student speed-writing huge amounts of text on lectures I went even further, e.g. using Ŋ in place of NG in Eŋliš :-)
- ajuc 9y ago
  With utf-8 digraphs can be actually shorter in terms of bits than diacritics :)
- dennisgorelik 9y ago
  > Both things feel very ugly. Both things ("multi-letter combinations" and "same letters to represent very different sound") are inevitable anyway -- with or without diacritic characters. After learning the language - I do not notice any of these two problems. But I struggle with switching between keyboard layouts multiple times every day: I frequently forget to switch between English and Russian and start typing in a wrong layout. If Russian used 26 letter latin alphabet - there would be no "layout switch" problem.

M_Bakhtiari 9y ago

What a pointless waste of time and money. Funny that they link halfway to another pointless waste of everybody’s time and money, Sweden’s switch to right-hand traffic, instead of actually addressing the problem of steering wheels being on the wrong side, which could have been solved simply by mandating new cars have the wheel on the appropriate side which would have cost the taxpayer practically nothing.

kmbriedis 9y ago

As a tourist I am pro-change, because it can be nightmare visiting Cyrillic countries - every street sign, label, bus stop name etc. just doesn't make any sense and hard to remember if you don't know Cyrillic

zby 9y ago

English is not very well suited for the Latin alphabet! Learning writing in English is much more difficult than in Polish for example despite the additional letters in Polish. Especially with vowels - come on: 'a' can mean 'æ', 'ɑː', 'ɑ', 'eɪ', 'ə' - and it is also used in 'ea' where it has even different pronunciation.

Markoff 9y ago

shame Chinese didn't went full Vietnam on this

rauanm 9y ago

(Disclaimer: I'm kazakh and passively pro-switch) I'm gonna ignore political aspects of the switch and focus on pseudo-scientific side. (my personal views and thinking) Except for words and phrases adopted from arabic or sort of persian (also arabic, but 'persianised'), our language is agglutinative and mostly follows vowel harmony. (that might not tell you much, but basically means we don't need any special letters or stacks of letters to hint the spelling - we have kind of built-in elements of style when it comes to phonetics) After a long period of using arabic alphabet and brief period of latin-based alphabet (yes, we had that until Stalin decided to change horses midstream - for everyone in ussr), we changed our alphabet to cyrillic. (and when I say 'we', I usually mean soviets did that for us) While doing so, we just took all of 33 letters from russian alphabet and added our own 'custom' letters. This lead to drastic repercussions, because instead of conforming new words and terms to proper lexical and phonetical rules, we adopted everything literally unchanged from or through russian. (no need to remind you that there were no independent science, culture, or literature) Fast-forward to our days. We have long and clumsy alphabet. We write and spell letters we don't need, sometimes basically speaking two languages at once (it feels like spanglish or franglais, except we don't always have an alternative - it either sounds awkward, doesn't exist, or is so archaic no one knows or cares for it). My take is giving up and saying well we sucked dick for 100 years so might as well keep doing it is not the answer. I personally have no idea if there's a way to pay off the technical debt and fix the upstream. Cyrillic is subjectively harder to read or spell because of all the crufty legacy, and the way I see it we don't have a linguistic institution making decisions and defending the language for the sake of the language and its beauty. (god I envy frenchmen and their zealous protection of la Langue).

jaratec 9y ago
Out of curiosity, were there attempts/proposals for adopting the Orkhon script (or variant)? Wouldn't it be more natural/easier to use for a turkic language? Link to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet Edit: spelling
- rauanm 9y ago
  I don't think there were any attempts to adopt runic scripts, but proposals are plenty. Some people say gokturk would be most natural to use. (albeit, unlikely to happen - why would you switch to brainfuck when everyone uses javascript?) In fact, it wouldn't be just adopting, but actually getting back to roots. It's lost history I doubt we'll ever get back. I have no clue what's written on the stele in that wiki article, but I remember seeing someone's 'transliteration' of the text and it's shockingly comprehensible.

madeel 9y ago

Adopting a consistent/stable writing system is more important standardizing on Latin. Main goal is to be phonetically consistent with reading. I highly doubt the beauty of expression in Arabic/Hebrew can be represented outside their respective scripts. Bastardizing on Latin does not give Kazaks anything more than Turkey getting the EU membership.

kingofhdds 9y ago
>Bastardizing on Latin It's ugly, and emotionally loaded language which doesn't bring us towards any bright idea. In majority of languages where Latin is the base for their writing systems, there are diacritics, or other graphical changes. I wonder if you want also to tell French, and German guys that they 'bastardized' Latin, or is it only Kazakh who are not allowed to use the script with additions? Besides, Cyrillic had to be heavily modified for Kazakh also, and I guess any script, which realistically exists in modern world.
- madeel 9y ago
  It's how it is. Chinese/Japanese regardless of it's character hasn't stopped them from carving our respect or economic might the world. So liberalization on an idea for the sake of liberalization is deem to go nowhere.
  - kingofhdds 9y ago
    Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to communicate. What liberalization? This comment is neither answer to the mine, nor continuation of your own above.
    - madeel 9y ago
      liberalization: How liberals seems to interpret adoption of western systems as cure to all problems. In this very case latinization.
      - 9y ago

Yizahi 9y ago

To those wondering "is it that bad like some people claim" here how it might have looked for you: Хере из эн экземпл оф текст траскрайбед фром латин то кириллик.

ALee 9y ago

Test case for the US if it ever moves beyond the metric system