7 ms·

From a purely linguistic standpoint, I think Kazakh is a better fit for Cyrillic than the Latin alphabet. Look at all the diacritics they have to use to make th

From a purely linguistic standpoint, I think Kazakh is a better fit for Cyrillic than the Latin alphabet. Look at all the diacritics they have to use to make this work. But we both know the real motivations here probably do not include cleaning up the orthography.

kingofhdds 8y ago
This standpoint is not linguistic at all. Cyrillic too had to be changed, in fact, to become suitable for Kazakh.
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  Yes, but that already happened.
  - kingofhdds 8y ago
    So? Latin-based alphabet was in use for Kazakh for about eleven years before Moscow decided to impose Cyrillic on all peoples of Soviet empire (for purely political reasons).
    - fusiongyro 8y ago
      Then why are they recreating the work rather than reverting to that version alphabet?
      - kingofhdds 8y ago
        Debugging. How, btw, did this question follow from your point in the starting commentary?
eCa 8y ago
Lots of latin-alphabet languages have letters that don’t exist in English. Czech, for example, has 42 letters[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography
- blattimwind 8y ago
  By that logic German uses a thirty letter alphabet, but no one says so.
  - FRex 8y ago
    Are you really telling us Slavs that we are wrong in what we (and our governments, educational systems and language authorities) consider a letter in our native languages and should stop saying our alphabets have however many letters we say they do for decades now because Germans happen to use different logic when counting their letters..? I mean.. really? I'm so astonished by that logic I don't even know what to tell you. Different languages can have different rules you know. Edit: thanks for the downvote. How dare I tell a person who just claimed half of Europe is composing their alphabets wrong because Germans do it differently that they are short sighted.
    - eCa 8y ago
      > Are you really telling us Slavs[...] Absolutely not. My argument was that Kazakh is far from unique in having ”extra letters”, which my native language’s alphabet also has. On a personal level I far prefer latin-alphabet Slavic languages since it makes it easier to approximate an understandable pronunciation.
      - fusiongyro 8y ago
        Is that a feature of the orthography or does that simply tell us something about your personal background?
      - FRex 8y ago
        That was a reply to the person who has said that it's wrong to say Czech has 42 letters because Germans count their letters differently, not to you. I of course agree with there not being a problem with extra letters because Polish does it without any significant problems as well.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
kolinko 8y ago
They have 6 diacritics, that's similar if not less than french (which has 12 if I'm not mistaken), or my native polish (ąćęóńłśćżź).
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  This is called "whataboutism." Other people made similar mistakes, so it justifies this mistake because it's smaller by comparison.
FRex 8y ago
It's really not that bad. They've added 9 of their own to 33 of Russian Cyrillic for a total of 42 when using it for Kazakh. Now they're gonna add 6 diacritics and two digraphs, that's much less already. Compare this to even Polish that has: 1. 9 additional letters: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż. 2. Technically no x, v nor q, but everyone knows their sound so casually or artistically you can use them, just not in 100% orthographically correct Polish. 3. 7 digraphs: ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, sz. And it's not really a problem in any way and the words are distinct enough that if you skip all the Polish specific stuff it's still 100% readable, people texting or writing online or Polish comments in code (in an ASCII file) often do that. I've seen many systems (CJK, Arabic, Hebrew, various European ones) and have somewhat an interest in this stuff and I don't think it's a big deal at all. I also think (as a layman) that it's really not about the system anymore but about fitting it to your language (within reason, e.g. don't try to write Polish with Chinese characters), someone could say Polish butchered Latin or gave it 16 warts but it works and I'd say the phonology is way saner than English (okay, that's not an achievement but still, no one tells English off for it's use of Latin despite it's crazy pronunciations). I also wondered about an experiment of using both Cyrillic and Latin together at once in a language that already uses one of them to denote foreign words (e.g. Polish with foreign words in Cyrillic or Russian with foreign words in Latin), just like katakana in Japanese does (among other uses). I wonder if Kazakh writing (casual or maybe even official) with loanwords from Russian (if they exist, I don't know Kazakh, maybe they have none) might do that just for Russian foreign words, to avoid transcribing them into the Latin alphabet (which would be more awkward than just using them directly as they could in their Cyrillic which was a superset of Russian Cyrillic and would either ignore their own Latin phonology and diacritics or require a new transcription style that is unlike the other ones, thus adding to confusion). Using Cyrillic and/or Latin of course has implications about politics, history and religion, with Cyrillic being associated with Russia, Soviet Bloc, Orthodox Christianity, etc.
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  The source of the diacritical mess in Polish is that it is a Slavic language rendered in a Latin orthography. Cyrillic is a good start for Slavic languages. Latin is a good start for Romance languages. Arabic is a good start for Semitic languages. When you start from an orthographic base of a related language, you don't need as much of these shenanigans. Persian, by the way, is in the same boat as Polish: a language with a large consonant inventory rendered in an orthography that is relatively consonant-poor. However, the Turkic languages don't have a good start in any of these three, yet they're all written in one of them with a large number of diacritics. From the linguistic point of view I posit, your primary concern in designing an orthography is: does this line up nicely with the phonology? If it does, congrats, your literacy rate just went up. Every digraph you add is another exception you have to explain, every sound with two letters is another exception you have to learn. My son is in kindergarten. He wrote "KUMIN" on a piece of paper and hung it on the door the other day. I asked him what it said, he told me "It says 'come in'". Was that obvious to you? It wasn't obvious to me. So, in the grand scheme of things, I know a new Turkic orthography is probably a long shot. But wait, there is already a Turkic language with similar phonology: Turkish. Did they take the Turkish orthography and modify that? Not really. They had to come up with yet another g diacritic. I hope they do normalize the spelling and make it phonetic. Then at least, they may improve literacy, assuming it wasn't as phonetic as it could be under the old alphabet. Because otherwise, what are they getting for what they're spending this huge amount of money replacing books, retraining teachers, fixing software, etc.?

kingofhdds 8y ago

This standpoint is not linguistic at all. Cyrillic too had to be changed, in fact, to become suitable for Kazakh.

fusiongyro 8y ago
Yes, but that already happened.
- kingofhdds 8y ago
  So? Latin-based alphabet was in use for Kazakh for about eleven years before Moscow decided to impose Cyrillic on all peoples of Soviet empire (for purely political reasons).
  - fusiongyro 8y ago
    Then why are they recreating the work rather than reverting to that version alphabet?
    - kingofhdds 8y ago
      Debugging. How, btw, did this question follow from your point in the starting commentary?

eCa 8y ago

Lots of latin-alphabet languages have letters that don’t exist in English. Czech, for example, has 42 letters[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography

blattimwind 8y ago
By that logic German uses a thirty letter alphabet, but no one says so.
- FRex 8y ago
  Are you really telling us Slavs that we are wrong in what we (and our governments, educational systems and language authorities) consider a letter in our native languages and should stop saying our alphabets have however many letters we say they do for decades now because Germans happen to use different logic when counting their letters..? I mean.. really? I'm so astonished by that logic I don't even know what to tell you. Different languages can have different rules you know. Edit: thanks for the downvote. How dare I tell a person who just claimed half of Europe is composing their alphabets wrong because Germans do it differently that they are short sighted.
  - eCa 8y ago
    > Are you really telling us Slavs[...] Absolutely not. My argument was that Kazakh is far from unique in having ”extra letters”, which my native language’s alphabet also has. On a personal level I far prefer latin-alphabet Slavic languages since it makes it easier to approximate an understandable pronunciation.
    - fusiongyro 8y ago
      Is that a feature of the orthography or does that simply tell us something about your personal background?
    - FRex 8y ago
      That was a reply to the person who has said that it's wrong to say Czech has 42 letters because Germans count their letters differently, not to you. I of course agree with there not being a problem with extra letters because Polish does it without any significant problems as well.
  - blattimwind 8y ago

kolinko 8y ago

They have 6 diacritics, that's similar if not less than french (which has 12 if I'm not mistaken), or my native polish (ąćęóńłśćżź).

fusiongyro 8y ago
This is called "whataboutism." Other people made similar mistakes, so it justifies this mistake because it's smaller by comparison.

FRex 8y ago

It's really not that bad. They've added 9 of their own to 33 of Russian Cyrillic for a total of 42 when using it for Kazakh. Now they're gonna add 6 diacritics and two digraphs, that's much less already. Compare this to even Polish that has: 1. 9 additional letters: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż. 2. Technically no x, v nor q, but everyone knows their sound so casually or artistically you can use them, just not in 100% orthographically correct Polish. 3. 7 digraphs: ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, sz. And it's not really a problem in any way and the words are distinct enough that if you skip all the Polish specific stuff it's still 100% readable, people texting or writing online or Polish comments in code (in an ASCII file) often do that. I've seen many systems (CJK, Arabic, Hebrew, various European ones) and have somewhat an interest in this stuff and I don't think it's a big deal at all. I also think (as a layman) that it's really not about the system anymore but about fitting it to your language (within reason, e.g. don't try to write Polish with Chinese characters), someone could say Polish butchered Latin or gave it 16 warts but it works and I'd say the phonology is way saner than English (okay, that's not an achievement but still, no one tells English off for it's use of Latin despite it's crazy pronunciations). I also wondered about an experiment of using both Cyrillic and Latin together at once in a language that already uses one of them to denote foreign words (e.g. Polish with foreign words in Cyrillic or Russian with foreign words in Latin), just like katakana in Japanese does (among other uses). I wonder if Kazakh writing (casual or maybe even official) with loanwords from Russian (if they exist, I don't know Kazakh, maybe they have none) might do that just for Russian foreign words, to avoid transcribing them into the Latin alphabet (which would be more awkward than just using them directly as they could in their Cyrillic which was a superset of Russian Cyrillic and would either ignore their own Latin phonology and diacritics or require a new transcription style that is unlike the other ones, thus adding to confusion). Using Cyrillic and/or Latin of course has implications about politics, history and religion, with Cyrillic being associated with Russia, Soviet Bloc, Orthodox Christianity, etc.

fusiongyro 8y ago
The source of the diacritical mess in Polish is that it is a Slavic language rendered in a Latin orthography. Cyrillic is a good start for Slavic languages. Latin is a good start for Romance languages. Arabic is a good start for Semitic languages. When you start from an orthographic base of a related language, you don't need as much of these shenanigans. Persian, by the way, is in the same boat as Polish: a language with a large consonant inventory rendered in an orthography that is relatively consonant-poor. However, the Turkic languages don't have a good start in any of these three, yet they're all written in one of them with a large number of diacritics. From the linguistic point of view I posit, your primary concern in designing an orthography is: does this line up nicely with the phonology? If it does, congrats, your literacy rate just went up. Every digraph you add is another exception you have to explain, every sound with two letters is another exception you have to learn. My son is in kindergarten. He wrote "KUMIN" on a piece of paper and hung it on the door the other day. I asked him what it said, he told me "It says 'come in'". Was that obvious to you? It wasn't obvious to me. So, in the grand scheme of things, I know a new Turkic orthography is probably a long shot. But wait, there is already a Turkic language with similar phonology: Turkish. Did they take the Turkish orthography and modify that? Not really. They had to come up with yet another g diacritic. I hope they do normalize the spelling and make it phonetic. Then at least, they may improve literacy, assuming it wasn't as phonetic as it could be under the old alphabet. Because otherwise, what are they getting for what they're spending this huge amount of money replacing books, retraining teachers, fixing software, etc.?