22 ms·

Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

335 points by yorwba 7y ago

yorwba 7y ago
The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/
- ah-ha 7y ago
  Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
    - nordsieck 7y ago
      > Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
      - elros 7y ago
        This is their current situation, but historically this has not been the case. Korean for a very long time was written with Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese. The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
      - yorwba 7y ago
        The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
        LeonidasXIV 7y ago
        > The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
        L_Rahman 7y ago
        It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
        dangerbird2 7y ago
        Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#Edo_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
    - Koshkin 7y ago
      In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
      - yorwba 7y ago
        You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji). If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    It’s based on Old Uighur and originates from western Xinjiang. Not really invented by Uighurs, but whatever culture they succeeded in Turpan.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet. The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.
    - KMag 7y ago
      Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
      - mytailorisrich 7y ago
        Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".
        bane 7y ago
        I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
      - koenigdavidmj 7y ago
        A clearer statement is that writing was only invented/discovered in isolation three times that we know of--by the Mayans, the Chinese, and somewhere in the middle east.
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    Close, it's derived from Syriac. Arabic and Syriac have a common ancestor, Aramaic. http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script
- simonh 7y ago
  That's beautiful, thanks. My wife is Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script is used widely in signage, posters, dual-language leaflets and such so I'm quite familiar with the look of traditional Mongolian script. In fact until now I had no idea Mongolia itself largely used a different script.
  - mhotchen 7y ago
    Mongolia adopted Cyrillic during its early communist years which saw heavy influence from the USSR. They started adopting their traditional script in schools again a few years ago, but the older people didn't know how to read or write it unfortunately. I saw the traditional script being used sparingly in Ulaanbator around 2017 but as for the rest of the country I don't think I saw it at all, except in Buddhist temples (which were also mostly destroyed during the communist era unfortunately).
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Mongolian is also one of the scripts on Chinese bank notes, along with Tibetan and Uyghur, in addition to Chinese characters.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I like that, that is, the new take on UI with having vertical script. I mean there was a design website posted on HN the other day (it was a list of colors I believe) which also had vertical (English & Japanese) text. The closest I've worked with is a booking website for an international parcel delivery company. We offered the application in idk, dozens? of languages. Hebrew was one of them, it's a right-to-left language and our whole website became right-to-left when switching to that, so the main menu was on the right instead of the left, things like that. Great work by our CSS people.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  That website confirms one of my greatest fears about this sort of thing (which I am otherwise moderately thrilled about): that scrolljacking is going to be widely employed. And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right (whatever “right” means), though I have encountered two in the last decade that were quite close, but still definitely failed. I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure. With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it. With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.) It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge. I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.
  - athenot 7y ago
    Horizontal scrolling seems to work just fine (macOS with Magic Mouse; same with trackpad). The fact that they included a workaround for those who don't have input devices with horizontal scrolling is a nice touch, yet it didn't interfere at all with my horizontal scrolling. I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.
    - chrismorgan 7y ago
      But that’s just the thing, and why scrolljacking is so bad—I’m on a platform with excellent horizontal scrolling facilities, and it’s ruining that. Based on my experience in this space, but not their code which I haven’t seen, I guess that this will affect at least all Windows users with precise touchpad scrolling. From my perspective, it’s a terrible trade-off. User agents need to handle this better, urgently.
- robocat 7y ago
  Here’s an example of a form: https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“
  - tapirl 7y ago
    A combined influence result of ancient Chinese writing style and Arabic?
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    And yet the english characters are rotated clockwise?
    - Ericson2314 7y ago
      Oh duh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet the syriac whence it came was right-to-left, and by rotating the English in the other direction they both go down.
- rozab 7y ago
  Fascinating, thank you. It's interesting how the Arabic numerals in the dates are flipped 90°, as opposed to in some right to left scripts where they are just reproduced as is. I've always thought this would hinder the flow of the reading, but I suppose small numbers (for most people) are instantly recognised rather than being parsed left to right.
  - bangonkeyboard 7y ago
    Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.
    - rozab 7y ago
      Yeah I figured that was the case for arabic but in hebrew the most significant digit seems to be said first
    - function_seven 7y ago
      Wait, so 1,672 in arabic script would have appeared the same way, but would have been read as (something like) "two seventy six hundred and a thousand"?
      - bangonkeyboard 7y ago
        Historically, yes, exactly. Modern conventions now favor the left-to-right numeric readings for interoperability.
    - danans 7y ago
      > Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, This is incorrect. They originated in the LTR writing systems of India, which is why the full name is Hindu-Arabic Numeral System. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals If you read Arabic, this is clear because the numbers are written in the opposite direction as the words. > they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. Only the ones and tens place are read from the right - which many languages do, including English in the 'teens' words: thir-teen == three and ten four-teen == four and ten fif-teen == five and ten In modern Arabic, the hundreds and above are read left to right. For example: 42: ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40) 142: maa'a (100) wa (and) ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)
- soperj 7y ago
  I think it would be because most browsers are made by US based companies. These different modes should be options out of the box, and should have been now for a long time considering the web is international.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/ I found that surprisingly interesting. Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  Wow this is one of the very few websites I've seen in recent years that makes good use of the huge horizontal screen estate on modern displays. Love it!
- finiteloops 7y ago
  Curious. Left-right scrolling works as expected, however up down turns into left-right but with vertical overscroll. seems like they need an extra "overscroll-behavior-y: none;"
- zaat 7y ago
  When the page was opened I immediately tilted my head to "correct" the page, a totally unconscious reaction, much deeper than assumption.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Me too. The menu bar on the left hand side is a big visual clue, I think.
    - zaat 7y ago
      I checked the English version, looks totally different, but the images are the same and I guess the content is as well. There is a link on the menu bar, the address is: https://president.mn/en/ https://president.mn/en/
up-gab 7y ago
That will be cool- we are waiting
boznz 7y ago
Ouch! imagine trying to re-write your gui for this, I cant even think how I would adapt one of my business programs to vertical orientation, except for maybe turning the screen by 90degrees.
- enriquto 7y ago
  I guess if your site/program is well-designed you should only have to edit a single style file, and nothing else.
  - srg0 7y ago
    I guess you need at least one person on your QA team who is proficient in a top-down right-to-left language and can read and use the non-standard layouts. And I believe that exclusively "top-down right-to-left" spells "Mongolian". Common Asian (CJK) languages have an _option_ to write text vertically, but they are usually written left to right in the digital media. So basically the same UI layout works for Japanese and for Norwegian users. Horizontal right-to-left languages like Arabic might flip the layout horizontally, but they don't break vertical scrolling.
    - andrewshadura 7y ago
      Actually, Mongolian is one of the few languages which are top-down left-to-right.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom, &c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-orientation. Browser support for the complete set of this stuff is still a tad patchy; Firefox is best in general, but all the browsers have at least the basics. But yeah, it mostly seems to boil down to rotating your app’s entire layout by 90°.
  - 7y ago
Brosper 7y ago
As a web developer I reject that change :P
- robin_reala 7y ago
  Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility I don't think the support is really there for vertical writing systems.
    - robin_reala 7y ago
      I think we can say it is. writing-mode in particular has full support in all modern browsers, and some support in IE back to version 6: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-writing-mode https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-writing-mode
      - kouteiheika 7y ago
        In theory, yes, in practice (I speak from experience) it has a massive amount of bugs when you actually try to use it for something that is not completely trivial. And the bugs are different for every browser, so working around them is pretty much intractable.
    - Symbiote 7y ago
      Posted earlier in the discussion, the Mongolian President's website works well for me, in Firefox on Linux. The mouse scroll scrolls right, selecting text works (with a horizontal cursor), the western text (dates, numbers and "Covid-19") embedded in the text are appropriately rotated. "View source" shows the source text, and it doesn't look like there are any nasty tricks to support this. Is anything missing? https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/
WilTimSon 7y ago
UI issues aside, I think this is quite fabulous. Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it. Although I do wonder how easy it will be for the whole nation to switch from one alphabet to another when they're so drastically different. I don't suppose any Mongolians are here to give their input?
- sametmax 7y ago
  > Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it There are downsides to any situation. E.G: - cost - available resources for education and work - adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing. It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves. Language preservation is overrated. Sure, it's nice. But compared to one day, having the entire earth speak the same language, be able to communicate and understand each other better? Small price to pay. It get why they do it. Mongolia is a very peculiar culture, and I don't think it benefits much from mondialisation. Quite the contrary. And it's a way for their society to break from a painful part of their history. But to me, it seems, at least on the long run, a step backward. Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity. There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information. Granted, the cyrillic alphabet is not very universal, but it is certainly more common than the traditional mongolia alphabet. Now since I don't live there, I may be missing some crucial informations. Maybe the population still massively use the old alphabet unofficially and it makes sense. Maybe the use of the cyrillic alphabet brough problems I can't see. So of course, I'm not the right peson to judge the situation. But I wanted to bring a counter point to this the enthusiastic parent comment. We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
  - hypnotist 7y ago
    >> nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used. seems it is used a lot already - they are just making it a standard.
keiferski 7y ago
I think (and hope) that as translation tech gets better, we'll see a renewed interest in local languages and dialects.
- sametmax 7y ago
  I think it will have the opposite effect. Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and dialect? Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work it is to translate materials to a language, it will stop to be done: let the automatic system do that for you! Then, people will be able to mix and travel more, exchange more, and so they will. In this env, and using translation again and again, people will start to pick up whatever language is the most common. Eventually, what is not useful will diseapear, only artefacts that we can translate automatically, will remain.
  - robin_reala 7y ago
    Different languages and scripts don’t just convey information, they shape the speaker and reader.[1] Sure, there’s value in a shared communication language (and International English[2] is well on the way to being that), but that mostly communicative medium doesn’t capture everything that language is. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English
    - sametmax 7y ago
      I know. And I believe it's ok to lose that too. We will develop different ways of thinking or improve the language we use. I don't think there is anything in what we currently have that can compare to a united humanity. And this only can happen if we all can understand each others.
eps 7y ago
I once saw a Mongolian book (written in Cyrillic alphabet) and it was very jarring. It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a square peg of an alphabet in a round hole of a language.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  > always at the front of a word. That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they use different letters.
  - aquadrop 7y ago
    That's because 'e' also usually makes previous consonant softer(not in your example though, because it's a loan word I guess), so you'd have to put 'ь' everywhere then.
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      usually makes - so why not use 'e' only in the cases when it actually does? I don't say 'э' should always be used in place of 'е'. I mean why not use 'э' when it sounds 'э' (without the preceding letter softening) and 'е' when it really sounds 'е'? The Russian writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
      - h91wka 7y ago
        > The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way. It does not? Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?
rguiscard 7y ago
> The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used. I wonder how much it deviates from the script used in Inner Mongolia.
MichaelMoser123 7y ago
I wonder if China will interpret this as an agressive act with the intent to extend influence over inner Mongolia.
- swilliamsio 7y ago
  Inner Mongolia already uses the traditional script so if anything this news is indicative of increased Chinese influence and decreased Russian influence in Mongolia.
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  China should be happy at this, if anything, they're abandoning the Russian style. Poor Mongolia, it aligned with USSR and now has to deal with China's rise as well. Long term prognosis is not good, as a nice chunk of "Mongolia" is already within China. Can't change geography
- xster 7y ago
  Mongolian script is already on every piece of Chinese legal tender while Cyrillic is not. So it's quite the reverse.
qwerty456127 7y ago
Looks particularly pretty and mostly adorable but I'm not sure it is going to be as legible as cyrilic (which works is the same as latin, just a little bit different), even after a lot of practice. Needless to say it's not going to be nearly as handy for the modern digital world. This way one can hardly be sure the cultural value of this move is enough to outweigh the practical aspect.
- gberger 7y ago
  > This way one can hardly be sure the cultural value of this move is enough to outweigh the practical aspect. How much context do you have on Mongolian culture to be able to make this assertion? Honest question.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    I do have enough. And I also have some context on quite a number of cultures (with different writing systems, including cultures who have actually migrated or tried to migrate from one to another) and it's obvious latin alphabet is the most practical in the context of computers, cyrilic being just slightly different (essentially the same in the most of the technological and practical aspects - the only difference is it's non-ASCII and has slightly different set of glyphs). I don't say practicality is the only significant value to consider though, indeed the cultural value also is very important.
Aardwolf 7y ago
How well is the script and the verticality supported in Unicode? If not well, that could be an interesting update.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  The script is well supported, it was introduced in 1999 with Unicode 3. Vertical writing is a concern of text rendering, so this has nothing to do with Unicode. https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-mode https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-mode This is still a bit lacking outside of Web pages, but generally work-arounds are in place which come with their own problems. HN test: Монгол бичиг ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌
mehdix 7y ago
Based on my experience producing right-to-left content and fixing related software bugs, I'd say they are mostly unaware of the complexities involved. Any software they use today should be adapted to work with the traditional script. How are they going to mix their new script with Latin-based or Cyrillic scripts? What about adding math to the mix? I hope they invest in solving these issues, it would be very interesting to see the outcome.
- detritus 7y ago
  From the date, in Arabic numerals, on the president of Mongolia's website, it looks like they solve that by simply rotating lengths of none Mongolian-content 90° to fit. If you're learning to read Latin (etc) script for the first time, it doesn't much matter what it's orientation is - they're just symbols.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    If you're learning letters then orientation matters unless you have extremely strict orthography. E M W 3 can all be written the same but have different orientations, for example.
    - detritus 7y ago
      Those four glyphs look entirely different to each other to me, no matter which way around I orient my head... :)
      - snazz 7y ago
        They look more similar when handwritten (in print, not cursive) than they do in Verdana or Liberation Sans (the two fonts used on HN on my devices).
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        My comment was about orthography, how letters are manually written; the context was learners who don't already know an alphabet. It's not uncommon to write capital-E with cursive strokes so it's a reflected or rotated 3, and lower case m and w are sometimes written similarly - so as to be very close to rotated versions of the same character.
icheckedthe 7y ago
Not even Wikipedia support vertical languages as I checked: this:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Mongolian_written_in_Mongolian_script https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/W... neither 99.99999999999999% of all programs. So the decision will be likely reverted in the future.
dingdong3 7y ago
What has English given to the world? Scat porn and scantily clad women? Lol
knolax 7y ago
I'm glad they made the correct decision of moving back to a script actually suitable to their language. I always found it ironic that Mongolia the country used Cyrillic despite the significance the creation of the Mongolian Script under Ghengis Khan had to their ethnogenesis. I find it worrying that some in this thread oppose this move on technical grounds. As an industry, software has to acknowledge that technology is subordinate to the needs of people, not the other way around. Especially in this case where the technical barriers are wholely artificial.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  The desired use of technology by the people is exactly the reason to adopt an alphabet that enables ready access to technology though. If you impose a difficult, or unique script you impose a barrier to use of, and development of technology. These moves seem to me like an aspect of the greater separatism and nationalism that has been infecting many nations.
  - onetimemanytime 7y ago
    The young will revert to English when online, this becoming a net loss for Mongolia
nemoniac 7y ago
The Irish language should consider returning to its tradidional alphabet too. Gaelic type has a certain elegance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type
- s_dev 7y ago
  I used seán as a username once. I gave up after I realised it was fine on my own personal computer but once I jumped on to an azerty keyboard or something simpler tasks just became more difficult -- finding the letter with a fada just results in searching the charmap rather than keyboard. You can have fadas in URLs e.g. seán.dev using a technique called Punycode. Ogham is another Irish script and is vertical but unique in Unicode because its space charcter is a line - the only language to do so.
  - nemoniac 7y ago
    I have síntí fada in my name too but I also frequently write in languages that use other accents so I have my keyboard mapping set up in software to type them easily. For example AltGr-a-' for á.
  - aeyes 7y ago
    One of the few features I like on a Mac is that you can hold a key and it pops up a little menu which lets you chose many common variations of the letter without having your fingers do gymnastics on the keyboard. This can be done without key combinations or a charmap: aáªàäâãåąæ Is this possible on Windows or Linux? I constantly toggle between 3 keymaps.
    - skosch 7y ago
      That's clever, I like it. Not sure if something like this exists for Linux, but using compose keys is standard—e.g. to type å, I hit (in sequence) RightAlt, a, o.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  There's also significant value in everyone on Earth speaking the same language fluently. Efficient communication is probably the most important factor in peace.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
If you're not familiar with Mongolian (and I dare say most people aren't), give this a listen: https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or "thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at least sound out words in the current script, but pretending Mongolian is pronounced like Russian won't get you anywhere. The language bears virtually no resemblance to any other major language, and even recognizable loan words seemed to be few and far between.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Sounds like a dialect of Portuguese to me...
tanilama 7y ago
I am curious how would IDE's adopt this vertical writing style. This feels pretty unintuitive
BossingAround 7y ago
While I think the change in and of itself is great, the rise of right-wing nationalism in Mongolia is very frightening (similar to that of Hungary, for example), and I'm afraid this is a result of Mongolian nationalistic views. As such, it is with a hint of sadness that I view this change.
ComputerGuru 7y ago
It’s a very interesting script! It’s like a top-down (columnar) Arabic without any of the later additions of diacritics and distinguishing dots.
- dimitrov 7y ago
  Probably because both the Arabic and Mongolian scripts descend from the Aramaic script
crazygringo 7y ago
I'm curious what best UX practices are around vertical alphabets, or if there even are any. Handling left-to-right localization is "easy" enough with translations and making sure you can handle a little extra text overflow. And right-to-left is fairly "trivial" in simply mirroring the UX wireframe. Extra work, sure, but nothing too conceptually complicated. But what are best practices for handling vertical scripts? Is it basically just rotating the UX 90° and working around the fact that images (like photos) are going to fit into your layout with a reversed aspect ratio? Because while it seems like that might work OK for some webpages, it won't for apps that are designed specifically for portrait or landscape mode on a phone/tablet... Also, is Mongolian the only script that can only be written vertically? I can't find any others on Wikipedia. (Chinese was originally vertical, but is easily adapted to horizontal.) Culturally I celebrate diversity, but from a UX localization standpoint the additional layer of complexity is... yikes.
LatteLazy 7y ago
A similar plan was abandoned after it was launched in 1994. Government documents and media have been available in both versions since 2011. So presumably this new announcement is actually banning the modern alphabet? The article isn't clear but that's implied as apparently supporting both will end in 2024. Adding an option is a very different proposition to removing all other options in my option but maybe the government are just announcing a plan to keep both and doing a really bad job at communicating that? https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6478&Itemid=36 https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mon... Per wikipedia, the script is not well supported. This is partly because letters have different forms depending on their position in a word. So "academia" would need to use 3 different symbols for all those "a"s. It has 26 actual letters but a lot more symbols to learn to allow for that. And (like a lot of alphabets) it's actually based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. So it's an import too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script Per the article, 3m (of Mongolia's 3.17m) people use the modern alphabet. So this will be a huge disruption for 95% of the population of Mongolia. There is no current way to translate (transliterate?) names directly from one to the other. So that will make ID documents either insecure or useless if they're in different languages, which they will have to be since we are talking about documents already printed... Plus the time and effort to learn the new alphabet is time and effort spent NOT learning useful skills in a modern economy. The only advantage seems to be to communicate with Mongolian Ethnicity people in China who are more likely to still use the old alphabet. Oh and something about throwing off the USSR? I really hope this is just a badly translated announcement that no action will be taken...
blululu 7y ago
Interesting news. I hope that Unicode will accommodate this change effectively. There have for instance been some issues with the unicode encoding of the similar Uyghur script. One thing to note is that Mongolia does not use standard Cyrillic - they use a variant that has a few differences in letters and accents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet I once learned this the hard way while trying to help a Mongolian person navigate the bus system of Los Angeles in the era before ubiquitous smartphones.
pattisapu 7y ago
Swimming against the trend of the erasure of any locality of script, language, culture . . . someday I hope that we consider these things to be as precious as they are, like endangered species.
aasasd 7y ago
That's nice and all, but it will have a downside: after Nazi Germany banned the cursive Sütterlinschrift along with the printed Fraktur in favor of ‘deutsche Normalschrift’ and antiqua, the result was that people growing up after the war couldn't read their grandparents' old letters and notes.
anovikov 7y ago
One weird way of fighting the Communism! They may also start looking suspicious to Chinese, since vertical script is also used in Taiwan.
j2i2t2u2 7y ago
I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea!
j2i2t2u2 7y ago
I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea! Do not support this move!
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  I’m curious: why not?
noirchen 7y ago
There are discussions on which Mongolia (Mongolia or Inner Mongolia) is the true descendent of the Golden Horde. Mongolia usually claim that they directly descend from Genghis Khan, but genetic analysis suggest that Inner Mongolians are much closer. Now you can find statues of Genghis Khan in both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia...
garfieldnate 7y ago
I'm very happy for them! I've always thought Mongolian writing was quite beautiful, and it seemed like a shame to replace it with Cyrillic. The few Mongolian people I talked to said they had to learn it in school at some point, but they considered it difficult and had mostly forgotten it since. We'll see how this goes. The Wikipedia page says there's a lot of work to do to make this work out in the digital world. Totally separate thing, but I would love to see wider Baybayin use for Tagalog and related languages. I just love these pretty traditional orthographies!

335 points by yorwba 7y ago

The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/

ah-ha 7y ago
Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.
- yorwba 7y ago
  Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
    - elros 7y ago
      This is their current situation, but historically this has not been the case. Korean for a very long time was written with Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese. The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
      - LeonidasXIV 7y ago
        > The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
        L_Rahman 7y ago
        It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
        dangerbird2 7y ago
        Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#Edo_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji). If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  It’s based on Old Uighur and originates from western Xinjiang. Not really invented by Uighurs, but whatever culture they succeeded in Turpan.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet. The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.
  - KMag 7y ago
    Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".
      - bane 7y ago
        I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
    - koenigdavidmj 7y ago
      A clearer statement is that writing was only invented/discovered in isolation three times that we know of--by the Mayans, the Chinese, and somewhere in the middle east.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  Close, it's derived from Syriac. Arabic and Syriac have a common ancestor, Aramaic. http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script
simonh 7y ago
That's beautiful, thanks. My wife is Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script is used widely in signage, posters, dual-language leaflets and such so I'm quite familiar with the look of traditional Mongolian script. In fact until now I had no idea Mongolia itself largely used a different script.
- mhotchen 7y ago
  Mongolia adopted Cyrillic during its early communist years which saw heavy influence from the USSR. They started adopting their traditional script in schools again a few years ago, but the older people didn't know how to read or write it unfortunately. I saw the traditional script being used sparingly in Ulaanbator around 2017 but as for the rest of the country I don't think I saw it at all, except in Buddhist temples (which were also mostly destroyed during the communist era unfortunately).
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Mongolian is also one of the scripts on Chinese bank notes, along with Tibetan and Uyghur, in addition to Chinese characters.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
I like that, that is, the new take on UI with having vertical script. I mean there was a design website posted on HN the other day (it was a list of colors I believe) which also had vertical (English & Japanese) text. The closest I've worked with is a booking website for an international parcel delivery company. We offered the application in idk, dozens? of languages. Hebrew was one of them, it's a right-to-left language and our whole website became right-to-left when switching to that, so the main menu was on the right instead of the left, things like that. Great work by our CSS people.
chrismorgan 7y ago
That website confirms one of my greatest fears about this sort of thing (which I am otherwise moderately thrilled about): that scrolljacking is going to be widely employed. And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right (whatever “right” means), though I have encountered two in the last decade that were quite close, but still definitely failed. I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure. With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it. With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.) It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge. I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.
- athenot 7y ago
  Horizontal scrolling seems to work just fine (macOS with Magic Mouse; same with trackpad). The fact that they included a workaround for those who don't have input devices with horizontal scrolling is a nice touch, yet it didn't interfere at all with my horizontal scrolling. I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    But that’s just the thing, and why scrolljacking is so bad—I’m on a platform with excellent horizontal scrolling facilities, and it’s ruining that. Based on my experience in this space, but not their code which I haven’t seen, I guess that this will affect at least all Windows users with precise touchpad scrolling. From my perspective, it’s a terrible trade-off. User agents need to handle this better, urgently.
robocat 7y ago
Here’s an example of a form: https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“
- tapirl 7y ago
  A combined influence result of ancient Chinese writing style and Arabic?
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  And yet the english characters are rotated clockwise?
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    Oh duh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet the syriac whence it came was right-to-left, and by rotating the English in the other direction they both go down.
rozab 7y ago
Fascinating, thank you. It's interesting how the Arabic numerals in the dates are flipped 90°, as opposed to in some right to left scripts where they are just reproduced as is. I've always thought this would hinder the flow of the reading, but I suppose small numbers (for most people) are instantly recognised rather than being parsed left to right.
- bangonkeyboard 7y ago
  Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.
  - rozab 7y ago
    Yeah I figured that was the case for arabic but in hebrew the most significant digit seems to be said first
  - function_seven 7y ago
    Wait, so 1,672 in arabic script would have appeared the same way, but would have been read as (something like) "two seventy six hundred and a thousand"?
    - bangonkeyboard 7y ago
      Historically, yes, exactly. Modern conventions now favor the left-to-right numeric readings for interoperability.
  - danans 7y ago
    > Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, This is incorrect. They originated in the LTR writing systems of India, which is why the full name is Hindu-Arabic Numeral System. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals If you read Arabic, this is clear because the numbers are written in the opposite direction as the words. > they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. Only the ones and tens place are read from the right - which many languages do, including English in the 'teens' words: thir-teen == three and ten four-teen == four and ten fif-teen == five and ten In modern Arabic, the hundreds and above are read left to right. For example: 42: ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40) 142: maa'a (100) wa (and) ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)
soperj 7y ago
I think it would be because most browsers are made by US based companies. These different modes should be options out of the box, and should have been now for a long time considering the web is international.
reaperducer 7y ago
The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/ I found that surprisingly interesting. Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.
black_puppydog 7y ago
Wow this is one of the very few websites I've seen in recent years that makes good use of the huge horizontal screen estate on modern displays. Love it!
finiteloops 7y ago
Curious. Left-right scrolling works as expected, however up down turns into left-right but with vertical overscroll. seems like they need an extra "overscroll-behavior-y: none;"
zaat 7y ago
When the page was opened I immediately tilted my head to "correct" the page, a totally unconscious reaction, much deeper than assumption.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Me too. The menu bar on the left hand side is a big visual clue, I think.
  - zaat 7y ago
    I checked the English version, looks totally different, but the images are the same and I guess the content is as well. There is a link on the menu bar, the address is: https://president.mn/en/ https://president.mn/en/

up-gab 7y ago

That will be cool- we are waiting

boznz 7y ago

Ouch! imagine trying to re-write your gui for this, I cant even think how I would adapt one of my business programs to vertical orientation, except for maybe turning the screen by 90degrees.

enriquto 7y ago
I guess if your site/program is well-designed you should only have to edit a single style file, and nothing else.
- srg0 7y ago
  I guess you need at least one person on your QA team who is proficient in a top-down right-to-left language and can read and use the non-standard layouts. And I believe that exclusively "top-down right-to-left" spells "Mongolian". Common Asian (CJK) languages have an _option_ to write text vertically, but they are usually written left to right in the digital media. So basically the same UI layout works for Japanese and for Norwegian users. Horizontal right-to-left languages like Arabic might flip the layout horizontally, but they don't break vertical scrolling.
  - andrewshadura 7y ago
    Actually, Mongolian is one of the few languages which are top-down left-to-right.
chrismorgan 7y ago
On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom, &c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-orientation. Browser support for the complete set of this stuff is still a tad patchy; Firefox is best in general, but all the browsers have at least the basics. But yeah, it mostly seems to boil down to rotating your app’s entire layout by 90°.
- 7y ago

Brosper 7y ago

As a web developer I reject that change :P

robin_reala 7y ago
Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility I don't think the support is really there for vertical writing systems.
  - robin_reala 7y ago
    I think we can say it is. writing-mode in particular has full support in all modern browsers, and some support in IE back to version 6: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-writing-mode https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-writing-mode
    - kouteiheika 7y ago
      In theory, yes, in practice (I speak from experience) it has a massive amount of bugs when you actually try to use it for something that is not completely trivial. And the bugs are different for every browser, so working around them is pretty much intractable.
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    Posted earlier in the discussion, the Mongolian President's website works well for me, in Firefox on Linux. The mouse scroll scrolls right, selecting text works (with a horizontal cursor), the western text (dates, numbers and "Covid-19") embedded in the text are appropriately rotated. "View source" shows the source text, and it doesn't look like there are any nasty tricks to support this. Is anything missing? https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/

WilTimSon 7y ago

UI issues aside, I think this is quite fabulous. Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it. Although I do wonder how easy it will be for the whole nation to switch from one alphabet to another when they're so drastically different. I don't suppose any Mongolians are here to give their input?

sametmax 7y ago
> Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it There are downsides to any situation. E.G: - cost - available resources for education and work - adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing. It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves. Language preservation is overrated. Sure, it's nice. But compared to one day, having the entire earth speak the same language, be able to communicate and understand each other better? Small price to pay. It get why they do it. Mongolia is a very peculiar culture, and I don't think it benefits much from mondialisation. Quite the contrary. And it's a way for their society to break from a painful part of their history. But to me, it seems, at least on the long run, a step backward. Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity. There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information. Granted, the cyrillic alphabet is not very universal, but it is certainly more common than the traditional mongolia alphabet. Now since I don't live there, I may be missing some crucial informations. Maybe the population still massively use the old alphabet unofficially and it makes sense. Maybe the use of the cyrillic alphabet brough problems I can't see. So of course, I'm not the right peson to judge the situation. But I wanted to bring a counter point to this the enthusiastic parent comment. We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
- hypnotist 7y ago
  >> nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used. seems it is used a lot already - they are just making it a standard.

keiferski 7y ago

I think (and hope) that as translation tech gets better, we'll see a renewed interest in local languages and dialects.

sametmax 7y ago
I think it will have the opposite effect. Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and dialect? Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work it is to translate materials to a language, it will stop to be done: let the automatic system do that for you! Then, people will be able to mix and travel more, exchange more, and so they will. In this env, and using translation again and again, people will start to pick up whatever language is the most common. Eventually, what is not useful will diseapear, only artefacts that we can translate automatically, will remain.
- robin_reala 7y ago
  Different languages and scripts don’t just convey information, they shape the speaker and reader.[1] Sure, there’s value in a shared communication language (and International English[2] is well on the way to being that), but that mostly communicative medium doesn’t capture everything that language is. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English
  - sametmax 7y ago
    I know. And I believe it's ok to lose that too. We will develop different ways of thinking or improve the language we use. I don't think there is anything in what we currently have that can compare to a united humanity. And this only can happen if we all can understand each others.

eps 7y ago

I once saw a Mongolian book (written in Cyrillic alphabet) and it was very jarring. It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a square peg of an alphabet in a round hole of a language.

qwerty456127 7y ago
> always at the front of a word. That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they use different letters.
- aquadrop 7y ago
  That's because 'e' also usually makes previous consonant softer(not in your example though, because it's a loan word I guess), so you'd have to put 'ь' everywhere then.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    usually makes - so why not use 'e' only in the cases when it actually does? I don't say 'э' should always be used in place of 'е'. I mean why not use 'э' when it sounds 'э' (without the preceding letter softening) and 'е' when it really sounds 'е'? The Russian writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
    - h91wka 7y ago
      > The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way. It does not? Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?

rguiscard 7y ago

> The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used. I wonder how much it deviates from the script used in Inner Mongolia.

MichaelMoser123 7y ago

I wonder if China will interpret this as an agressive act with the intent to extend influence over inner Mongolia.

swilliamsio 7y ago
Inner Mongolia already uses the traditional script so if anything this news is indicative of increased Chinese influence and decreased Russian influence in Mongolia.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
China should be happy at this, if anything, they're abandoning the Russian style. Poor Mongolia, it aligned with USSR and now has to deal with China's rise as well. Long term prognosis is not good, as a nice chunk of "Mongolia" is already within China. Can't change geography
xster 7y ago
Mongolian script is already on every piece of Chinese legal tender while Cyrillic is not. So it's quite the reverse.

qwerty456127 7y ago

Looks particularly pretty and mostly adorable but I'm not sure it is going to be as legible as cyrilic (which works is the same as latin, just a little bit different), even after a lot of practice. Needless to say it's not going to be nearly as handy for the modern digital world. This way one can hardly be sure the cultural value of this move is enough to outweigh the practical aspect.

gberger 7y ago
> This way one can hardly be sure the cultural value of this move is enough to outweigh the practical aspect. How much context do you have on Mongolian culture to be able to make this assertion? Honest question.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  I do have enough. And I also have some context on quite a number of cultures (with different writing systems, including cultures who have actually migrated or tried to migrate from one to another) and it's obvious latin alphabet is the most practical in the context of computers, cyrilic being just slightly different (essentially the same in the most of the technological and practical aspects - the only difference is it's non-ASCII and has slightly different set of glyphs). I don't say practicality is the only significant value to consider though, indeed the cultural value also is very important.

Aardwolf 7y ago

How well is the script and the verticality supported in Unicode? If not well, that could be an interesting update.

bmn__ 7y ago
The script is well supported, it was introduced in 1999 with Unicode 3. Vertical writing is a concern of text rendering, so this has nothing to do with Unicode. https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-mode https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-mode This is still a bit lacking outside of Web pages, but generally work-arounds are in place which come with their own problems. HN test: Монгол бичиг ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌

mehdix 7y ago

Based on my experience producing right-to-left content and fixing related software bugs, I'd say they are mostly unaware of the complexities involved. Any software they use today should be adapted to work with the traditional script. How are they going to mix their new script with Latin-based or Cyrillic scripts? What about adding math to the mix? I hope they invest in solving these issues, it would be very interesting to see the outcome.

detritus 7y ago
From the date, in Arabic numerals, on the president of Mongolia's website, it looks like they solve that by simply rotating lengths of none Mongolian-content 90° to fit. If you're learning to read Latin (etc) script for the first time, it doesn't much matter what it's orientation is - they're just symbols.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  If you're learning letters then orientation matters unless you have extremely strict orthography. E M W 3 can all be written the same but have different orientations, for example.
  - detritus 7y ago
    Those four glyphs look entirely different to each other to me, no matter which way around I orient my head... :)
    - snazz 7y ago
      They look more similar when handwritten (in print, not cursive) than they do in Verdana or Liberation Sans (the two fonts used on HN on my devices).
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      My comment was about orthography, how letters are manually written; the context was learners who don't already know an alphabet. It's not uncommon to write capital-E with cursive strokes so it's a reflected or rotated 3, and lower case m and w are sometimes written similarly - so as to be very close to rotated versions of the same character.

icheckedthe 7y ago

Not even Wikipedia support vertical languages as I checked: this:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Mongolian_written_in_Mongolian_script https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/W... neither 99.99999999999999% of all programs. So the decision will be likely reverted in the future.

dingdong3 7y ago

What has English given to the world? Scat porn and scantily clad women? Lol

knolax 7y ago

I'm glad they made the correct decision of moving back to a script actually suitable to their language. I always found it ironic that Mongolia the country used Cyrillic despite the significance the creation of the Mongolian Script under Ghengis Khan had to their ethnogenesis. I find it worrying that some in this thread oppose this move on technical grounds. As an industry, software has to acknowledge that technology is subordinate to the needs of people, not the other way around. Especially in this case where the technical barriers are wholely artificial.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
The desired use of technology by the people is exactly the reason to adopt an alphabet that enables ready access to technology though. If you impose a difficult, or unique script you impose a barrier to use of, and development of technology. These moves seem to me like an aspect of the greater separatism and nationalism that has been infecting many nations.
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  The young will revert to English when online, this becoming a net loss for Mongolia

nemoniac 7y ago

The Irish language should consider returning to its tradidional alphabet too. Gaelic type has a certain elegance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type

s_dev 7y ago
I used seán as a username once. I gave up after I realised it was fine on my own personal computer but once I jumped on to an azerty keyboard or something simpler tasks just became more difficult -- finding the letter with a fada just results in searching the charmap rather than keyboard. You can have fadas in URLs e.g. seán.dev using a technique called Punycode. Ogham is another Irish script and is vertical but unique in Unicode because its space charcter is a line - the only language to do so.
- nemoniac 7y ago
  I have síntí fada in my name too but I also frequently write in languages that use other accents so I have my keyboard mapping set up in software to type them easily. For example AltGr-a-' for á.
- aeyes 7y ago
  One of the few features I like on a Mac is that you can hold a key and it pops up a little menu which lets you chose many common variations of the letter without having your fingers do gymnastics on the keyboard. This can be done without key combinations or a charmap: aáªàäâãåąæ Is this possible on Windows or Linux? I constantly toggle between 3 keymaps.
  - skosch 7y ago
    That's clever, I like it. Not sure if something like this exists for Linux, but using compose keys is standard—e.g. to type å, I hit (in sequence) RightAlt, a, o.
koheripbal 7y ago
There's also significant value in everyone on Earth speaking the same language fluently. Efficient communication is probably the most important factor in peace.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

If you're not familiar with Mongolian (and I dare say most people aren't), give this a listen: https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or "thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at least sound out words in the current script, but pretending Mongolian is pronounced like Russian won't get you anywhere. The language bears virtually no resemblance to any other major language, and even recognizable loan words seemed to be few and far between.

Koshkin 7y ago
Sounds like a dialect of Portuguese to me...

tanilama 7y ago

I am curious how would IDE's adopt this vertical writing style. This feels pretty unintuitive

BossingAround 7y ago

While I think the change in and of itself is great, the rise of right-wing nationalism in Mongolia is very frightening (similar to that of Hungary, for example), and I'm afraid this is a result of Mongolian nationalistic views. As such, it is with a hint of sadness that I view this change.

ComputerGuru 7y ago

It’s a very interesting script! It’s like a top-down (columnar) Arabic without any of the later additions of diacritics and distinguishing dots.

dimitrov 7y ago
Probably because both the Arabic and Mongolian scripts descend from the Aramaic script

crazygringo 7y ago

I'm curious what best UX practices are around vertical alphabets, or if there even are any. Handling left-to-right localization is "easy" enough with translations and making sure you can handle a little extra text overflow. And right-to-left is fairly "trivial" in simply mirroring the UX wireframe. Extra work, sure, but nothing too conceptually complicated. But what are best practices for handling vertical scripts? Is it basically just rotating the UX 90° and working around the fact that images (like photos) are going to fit into your layout with a reversed aspect ratio? Because while it seems like that might work OK for some webpages, it won't for apps that are designed specifically for portrait or landscape mode on a phone/tablet... Also, is Mongolian the only script that can only be written vertically? I can't find any others on Wikipedia. (Chinese was originally vertical, but is easily adapted to horizontal.) Culturally I celebrate diversity, but from a UX localization standpoint the additional layer of complexity is... yikes.

LatteLazy 7y ago

A similar plan was abandoned after it was launched in 1994. Government documents and media have been available in both versions since 2011. So presumably this new announcement is actually banning the modern alphabet? The article isn't clear but that's implied as apparently supporting both will end in 2024. Adding an option is a very different proposition to removing all other options in my option but maybe the government are just announcing a plan to keep both and doing a really bad job at communicating that? https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6478&Itemid=36 https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mon... Per wikipedia, the script is not well supported. This is partly because letters have different forms depending on their position in a word. So "academia" would need to use 3 different symbols for all those "a"s. It has 26 actual letters but a lot more symbols to learn to allow for that. And (like a lot of alphabets) it's actually based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. So it's an import too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script Per the article, 3m (of Mongolia's 3.17m) people use the modern alphabet. So this will be a huge disruption for 95% of the population of Mongolia. There is no current way to translate (transliterate?) names directly from one to the other. So that will make ID documents either insecure or useless if they're in different languages, which they will have to be since we are talking about documents already printed... Plus the time and effort to learn the new alphabet is time and effort spent NOT learning useful skills in a modern economy. The only advantage seems to be to communicate with Mongolian Ethnicity people in China who are more likely to still use the old alphabet. Oh and something about throwing off the USSR? I really hope this is just a badly translated announcement that no action will be taken...

blululu 7y ago

Interesting news. I hope that Unicode will accommodate this change effectively. There have for instance been some issues with the unicode encoding of the similar Uyghur script. One thing to note is that Mongolia does not use standard Cyrillic - they use a variant that has a few differences in letters and accents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet I once learned this the hard way while trying to help a Mongolian person navigate the bus system of Los Angeles in the era before ubiquitous smartphones.

pattisapu 7y ago

Swimming against the trend of the erasure of any locality of script, language, culture . . . someday I hope that we consider these things to be as precious as they are, like endangered species.

aasasd 7y ago

That's nice and all, but it will have a downside: after Nazi Germany banned the cursive Sütterlinschrift along with the printed Fraktur in favor of ‘deutsche Normalschrift’ and antiqua, the result was that people growing up after the war couldn't read their grandparents' old letters and notes.

anovikov 7y ago

One weird way of fighting the Communism! They may also start looking suspicious to Chinese, since vertical script is also used in Taiwan.

j2i2t2u2 7y ago

I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea!

j2i2t2u2 7y ago

I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea! Do not support this move!

chrismorgan 7y ago
I’m curious: why not?

noirchen 7y ago

There are discussions on which Mongolia (Mongolia or Inner Mongolia) is the true descendent of the Golden Horde. Mongolia usually claim that they directly descend from Genghis Khan, but genetic analysis suggest that Inner Mongolians are much closer. Now you can find statues of Genghis Khan in both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia...

garfieldnate 7y ago

I'm very happy for them! I've always thought Mongolian writing was quite beautiful, and it seemed like a shame to replace it with Cyrillic. The few Mongolian people I talked to said they had to learn it in school at some point, but they considered it difficult and had mostly forgotten it since. We'll see how this goes. The Wikipedia page says there's a lot of work to do to make this work out in the digital world. Totally separate thing, but I would love to see wider Baybayin use for Tagalog and related languages. I just love these pretty traditional orthographies!