4 ms·

I guess all people who think that way should visit Hungary and try to read the signs there.

emodendroket 8y ago
If 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 8y ago
Hungarian (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 8y ago
  I'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 8y ago
    Appelsiini is from the German dialectal Apfelsine, so it actually is an Indo-European loan.
jsgo 8y ago
emodendroket - 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 8y ago
  If 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 8y ago
Someone 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 8y ago
When 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 8y ago
  Surely the government could easily print romanized place names in addition to Cyrillic ones, if this is the primary concern.

If 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 8y ago

Hungarian (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 8y ago
I'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 8y ago
  Appelsiini is from the German dialectal Apfelsine, so it actually is an Indo-European loan.

jsgo 8y ago

emodendroket - 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 8y ago
If 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 8y ago

Someone 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 8y ago

When 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 8y ago
Surely the government could easily print romanized place names in addition to Cyrillic ones, if this is the primary concern.