7 ms·
The benefit is to more easily draw international tourists and conduct business around the world. Most rich countries use the Latin alphabet, so it's a bid to mo
by pradn 9y ago
The benefit is to more easily draw international tourists and conduct business around the world. Most rich countries use the Latin alphabet, so it's a bid to move away from the Russosphere.
- emodendroket 9y agoDoes it really make a difference to you if all the (from your perspective, as a visitor) unintelligible gibberish is written in Latin script rather than some other script?
- y_molodtsov 9y agoI guess all people who think that way should visit Hungary and try to read the signs there.
- emodendroket 9y agoIf you really want the signs to be intelligible to foreign visitors you can likely more easily do what many other countries do and provide signage in English. This seems like a weak rationale to change how the language is written.
- Semirhage 9y agoHungarian (and Finnish) are unique cases; you haven’t identified a pattern, but the Uralic exceptions. It’s a language family only 25 million people on Earth speak, it is the proverbial exception proving the rule.
- kornakiewicz 9y agoI've moved to Finland four months ago. There are not so many (indo)-european patterns you notice right there, although they exist. Some words are tricky like "appelsin" - "orange" or "matka" - in my mother tongue "mother" ("travel"). Needless to say,I would be much more lost if alphabet were not latin. Or if Finland were not officially bilingual, so most useful information is available also in germanic Swedish.
- jpatokal 9y agoAppelsiini is from the German dialectal Apfelsine, so it actually is an Indo-European loan.
- jsgo 9y agoemodendroket - in the case of Quebec, they've moved heavily towards French only (currently, French predominantly). I have zero issue with this and it would beat everything looking like my emails from corporate where they're blocks of FR/EN/ES or EN/FR/ES translated scripts. Works fine in emails, not sure how I'd feel looking at things out and about having a ton of translations though.
- emodendroket 9y agoIf you go around Asia, many signs are presented in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English, and it works pretty well for them. I think Quebec's political situation is somewhat unique.
- niftich 9y agoSomeone who speaks a language written in a latin script can approximately pronounce Hungarian words by sight, even if they mispronounce digraphs and ignore diacritics. Familiarity with the script alone will aid one-way verbal communication between a tourist and a Hungarian-speaker. A tourist who can sound out "Keleti" or "Nyugati" (instead of the hypothetical cyrillic "Kэлэти" and "Нюгати") will be guided to the respective railway station, and even a relatively intimidating word like "Határátkelő", when mispronounced Ha-tar-at-ke-lo" will be understood as a border crossing. This is the same reason the Moscow Metro includes latin-transcribed station names on the official map [1]. Going the other direction, Hungarians can learn many European languages easier than Russian, because the script is the same, which makes orthography and pronunciation easier to reason about, and vocabulary easier to acquire. [1] https://www.artlebedev.com/metro/map3/ https://www.artlebedev.com/metro/map3/
- mynegation 9y agoWhen glyphs are recognizable, it is still better. If not for informational messages, at least names of the locations can be somewhat recalled. Let's say I drive and I need to go to Székesfehérvár. I have only a slightest idea how to pronounce it, but I will recognize it. Much harder to do if you need to drive to กรุงเทพมหานคร
- emodendroket 9y agoSurely the government could easily print romanized place names in addition to Cyrillic ones, if this is the primary concern.
- jdavis703 9y agoYes. When attempting to pattern match signs it's easier to match similar letters than symbols that appaear totally abstract. It probably has something to do with short term memory being able to hold 5-9 things. Also many languages use enough similar words (i.e. cognates) that you can use context to guess at the meaning.
- emodendroket 9y agohttps://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C3%B4_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Di%E1%BB%87m https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C3%B4_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Di%E1%... Can you make out anything in this article other than personal names?
- singingboyo 9y agoI think that for languages that didn't get adapted into english, the 'similar word' effect is essentially missing - it really only works for romance languages and maybe the odd germanic word. However, if I had a dictionary or something, that article would be much easier to translate than, say, Japanese (or Mandarin, or really any language where writing involves a large number of symbols). I'm not sure that that applies very well to cyrillic vs latin though. IIRC cyrillic is still under ~50 unique characters, so a dictionary would essentially need an index to tell you what the alphabetic ordering is, and then I think you'd be set (as well as you can be with just a dictionary, at least).
- emodendroket 9y agoThat's my point here -- Latin script doesn't offer that many benefits over Cyrillic script, which makes it pretty questionable, in my mind, whether the upheaval is worth it.
- btilly 9y agoI studied Russian enough to know that you are wrong. Technical words, recent inventions, sports and brand names tend to be straightforward transliterations. Plus more are borrowed. Take Russian words like диносавр, Макдоналдс, киоск, and гамбургер. You probably have no idea what they mean, but the direct transliterations are dinosavr, Makdonalds, kiosk, and gamburger are a little easier to guess? Not every word by any means. For example refrigerator is холодильник (roughly xolodinьik though the initial sound is not in English). Which literally translates as "cold making thing". But enough to be helpful more often than you'd guess.
- jsgo 9y agoI speak English only. I find it much easier to translate either online or via English-to-X dictionary if the other language uses Latin script. Could it be done? I'm sure it is possible, but without previously interacting with them, not easily. I'll say this, for work I travel to Montreal at moderately regular intervals. Because everything is in French, it makes it a bit harder, but I can either: a) infer based off similarities to English words b) look it up as it only has a few unique glyphs versus what I'm accustomed to.
- emodendroket 9y agoEnglish has a very large vocabulary either derived from French or having the same roots as French words, which I do not believe is the case with Kazakh.
- jsgo 9y agoOkay, how about this then: If it is in Latin script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can phonetically butcher whatever it is they're attempting to communicate with the other party. If it is in Cyrillic script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can just stare at a person blankly or point at words on paper/signage if the other party is close enough. Provided they traveled at all for fear of this scenario. Honestly, I think it is reasonable to attempt to obtain at least a passing capability to communicate in a foreign area, but the question is why would someone used to a Latin language prefer a similarly derived language vs one with completely different glyphs.
- emodendroket 9y agoThis benefit, again, seems small (you may just be completely impossible to understand), and ignores the fact that Kazakhstan probably has more visitors from Russian-speaking places.
- jsgo 9y agowhile I think it seems pretty reasonable to assume that their tourists are currently from countries with Cyrillic-based languages, they're making a concerted effort to draw more Western audiences. How that'll play out, not sure, but I don't think the premise is silly.
- skookumchuck 9y agoIt makes it: 1. far easier to look up a word you don't know in a dictionary 2. you can make a stab at pronouncing the word 3. you can type it in on your western laptop/phone you brought with you
- emodendroket 9y agoCyrillic is also a phonetic alphabet and you can pretty easily add a Cyrillic keyboard to your phone or laptop. These arguments seem like they belong in a discussion of Chinese script or something similar.
- jsgo 9y agoa cyrillic keyboard to my laptop that I'd have to memorize what latin key it replaces. My laptop flips to French fairly regularly (machine was created with an image containing French and English keyboards) and it is frustrating as it is only easier in the sense that it is poking around for the 1 key to find e with grave or the like vs playing with keystrokes until I land on alt+0232 on numpad. Phones with touchscreen keyboards though, yeah, I could see that being reasonably okay.
- Symbiote 9y agoI tried using my phone to type words into Google Translate while in Armenia. Typing Armenian was a non-starter. I'm not dyslexic, but felt it when faced with words that looked like "արարողակարգը" (random copy-paste from Wikipedia[1]). The second language was often Russian, and typing in Cyrillic was a little better, especially once I found the alphabet is derived from Greek rather than Latin -- so р is r, and н is e, and п is p. But it was still 10 times slower than typing rough Vietnamese into my phone. But anyway, this is clearly a political change, so any reasoning in favour or opposition is irrelevant. [1] https://hy.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D5%80%D5%A1%D5%B5%D5%A5%D6%80%D5%A5%D5%B6%D5%AB_%D5%A1%D5%B5%D5%A2%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%A2%D5%A5%D5%B6 https://hy.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D5%80%D5%A1%D5%B5%D5%A5%D6%80... (Armenian Alphabet in Armenian).
- 9y ago
- viseztrance 9y agoI think the bigger benefit is that it will make English easier to learn by the local populace.
- vbezhenar 9y agoI'm sure that there are many titles in English for international tourists. I can't tell for entire country, but in Astana (capital) almost every title contains English translation (or transliteration) and I think that it's better approach. May be English tourists who visited Kazakhstan will correct me.
- emodendroket 9y agoI would not be surprised if that were true.
- lmm 9y agoI went to Chimkent/Shymkent and Almaty (the old capital - Astana is a new, planned city) as a tourist. I didn't see much in the Latin alphabet.