32 ms·

The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and challenges of reversal (2020)

154 points by Thevet 5y ago

ncpa-cpl 5y ago
Mongolian script is unusual because of its orientation. How do UIs handle the script? For example mobile chat applications.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  The short answer is that they don't. Android flat out doesn't support vertical scripts so there's a library that reimplements a lot of UI components. iOS basically doesn't, but it's somewhat easier to work around. Chrome and Firefox can render the characters with appropriate fonts, but that can be uncommon and applications using them screw up. Electron apps generally render vertical scripts LTR for example.
- scarmig 5y ago
  This is based off 30 minutes of naive research; if someone knows better, please correct me. (No better way to get information than to say something wrong on the Internet.) Most of the time, major or more sophisticated apps will just use Cyrillic (in Mongolia) or be written in Mandarin (in Inner Mongolia, CN). There are, however, web pages in the traditional script, which you can look at to get a sense of how a UI layout for a vertical script might work [0][1][2]. I also found a website with a full list, with many broken links [3]. From an encoding perspective, Unicode historically hasn't meshed well with Mongolian script, because of a surfeit of homographs. From what I can gather, Menksoft supports the most widely used alternative encoding method, which isn't Unicode-compatible. This apparently makes searching and indexing traditional Mongolian pages hard. [0] http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home [1] http://mongol.people.com.cn/ http://mongol.people.com.cn/ [2] http://www.nmg.xinhuanet.com/mg/ http://www.nmg.xinhuanet.com/mg/ [3] http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbichig.html http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbi...
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    This site seems to use Unicode, unlike your first link. It's a bit disappointing that the British Library was unable to write the titles in their catalogue in Mongolian script. "ᠮᠣᠩ᠋ᠭᠣᠯ ᠤᠯᠤᠰ ᠤᠨ ᠶᠡᠷᠦᠩᠬᠡᠢᠢᠯᠡᠭᠴᠢ ᠬ" https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/
    - gumby 5y ago
      The author mentions/complains about that late in the essay.
- retrac 5y ago
  Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are primarily written vertically, in columns right to left: https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png The common exception is technical works, and translations, which from the early 20th century onward are often horizontal and left-to-right to allow using the Latin alphabet, math equations, etc. Well, not quite. That was the situation until very recently. It's now mostly horizontal. Almost everything on a computer is horizontal. The first Korean newspaper to switch to horizontal text did so in 1988. It was universal by the mid-90s. Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers. But horizontal text is ascendant there too. While those languages are basically compatible with writing in any direction, this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text. It was terrible when computer typesetting first took off. Even today for publication quality, it probably requires specialized software. So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software. The traditional writing system of several major world languages is simply not properly supported by most software, and much still fails completely. An observation to close with: perhaps ironically, the Mongolian script is from the Syriac alphabet that went along the silk road route, and is distantly related to the Latin alphabet. It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese. It seems that rotating to get along is a recurring theme.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Modern Chinese punctuation marks don't really work in a vertical format.
    - retrac 5y ago
      I'm not fluent, but how so? The 。or ，or 、seem fine when centred. The《 and 》 or 「 and 」get rotated and also look fine. The bigger issue is Arabic numerals, and mixed case or long Latin alphabet words. (Though 2 - 4 letter acronyms like USA or FIFA, one per square, actually fit almost perfectly.) I always thought bracket quotes looked exactly like what they are, a container for words: https://i.imgur.com/IlwSjnZ.png https://i.imgur.com/IlwSjnZ.png -- For example, this sentence is written in "vertical Chinese". (Screenshot generated with LibreOffice Write, which can just about handle basic documents in vertical format.)
1cvmask 5y ago
India has been independent of colonial rule for over 5-7 decades depending on the area and influence of English and even Portuguese (in Goa) still persist.
- smhost 5y ago
  I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only untenable but actually destructive. The history of every language and culture is one of brutality and conquest as well as mutual exchange. That doesn't mean that we should be trying to revert to some imagined "pure" time before the traumatic event. I'm a product of brutal attempts at nation building by the American war machine. I wouldn't be speaking English otherwise. But that doesn't mean that this language isn't mine. If I were forced to speak and write differently because of some political initiative, it wouldn't be a return to authenticity. It would be forcing me to reject a part of me that's already been irreversibly changed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    The English language without nongermanic influences (a great essay in its own right): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/studen...
    - oconnor663 5y ago
      I love that essay, and also this little tidbit from Wikipedia: > The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (modern English umbe (now obsolete), cognate to German um and Latin ambi-) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.
  - dheera 5y ago
dmitriid 5y ago
A similar change happened in Moldova (which first was Autonomous Moldovan Republic as a part of Ukraine and then Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic within USSR after WWII). Moldovan was declared a language similar to, but different from Romanian, and was given a Cyrillic script [1]. Even though Moldovan is at most a dialect of Romanian. The Soviet Union was very direct but also very effective in changing entire cultural substrates of millions of people over a very short period of time. Giving languages under its influence Cyrillic scripts was a part of that. Note: it's not all bleak and bad, as many indigenous people got their alphabets for the first time in history. [1] Wikipedia has a very detailed page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  One of the interesting parts of the OP is that they say Soviets moved to Latinise the scripts of all people as a move to unify Communist groups (second para under "Linguistic Revolution"). Then they simply say "Cyrillic became the preferred, unifying writing system" without explanation.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    Roughly, latinization was a Lenin-era policy. However, when Stalin came to power he had different goals and philosophy than the preceding regime of Lenin. For one, Stalin abandoned the idea of spreading world revolution in favour of "socialism in one country", which in large part was about keeping the USSR (and, as its satellite, Mongolia) walled off from the outside world for the sake of tighter control. For speakers of the USSR’s Turkic languages (Kazakh, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, etc.), latinization was therefore seen as harmful, because these languages are often fairly mutually intelligible with Turkish of Turkey, and a common-ish Latin alphabet would mean these peoples would be susceptible to anti-Soviet ideas coming from Turkey. Therefore, the Stalin-era language authorities not only gave them a new Cyrillic orthography, they gave each language a different Cyrillic orthography than the rest to fragment them even further. In the case of Mongolian, Cyrillic helped better separate Mongolian of Mongolia from the mutually intelligible dialect of Mongolian spoken across the border in China.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
I'm really disappointed in the images in that piece, so low-res you can't read the text. For the BL that's pretty awful. I noticed that the top line of the compared newspaper parts also appears to change, but it's so badly rendered and so small as to be almost unreadable. Why would they do that? Aside, whilst it says "Copyright British Library Board" the content is/should be free-gratis and free-libre reproducible under the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. Really it should have a better imprint, something like "free distribution and reuse allowed under this policy" with a link. Even better would be if they'd adopted a more widely recognised license.
ryancw 5y ago
One thing I've always been curious about with alphabet transitions like these is how people dealt with it. State newspapers might start printing in the new alphabet, but at what point did shop signs and handwritten correspondence switch over? Did everyone over schooling age stick with the old?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- koolba 5y ago
  I think you’re grossly overestimating the level of literacy.
  - krasin 5y ago
    According to Wikipedia: "Mongolia has a high literacy rate, consistently rated around 98%" ([1]). Which is not surprising given that Soviets always had put a special focus on strong educational system. They failed in many areas, but they did "liquidate illiteracy" everywhere they could ([2]) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Mongolia#:~:text=Mongolia%20has%20a%20high%20literacy%20rate%2C%20consistently%20rated%20around%2098%25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Mongolia#:~:text=.... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
  - indigo945 5y ago
    You're grossly underestimating the level of education in Mongolia. Until the IMF-mandated austerity policies of the 90's, during which so many schools closed that many families couldn't even send their children to primary school anymore, and the remaining schools had to close in winter because they couldn't afford heating, Mongolia did not only have near-total literacy, but also one of the highest rates of tertiary education, that is, college education, in the world (not in the "third" world). Of course, since Mongolia has been blessed with the free market, living standards have been on a decline throughout the country, and nowadays, your offhand remark is more likely than not to have some substance. However, things have been improving again over the past decade or so. The Western drive to assume that people in poorer countries are all uneducated seems to me to reflect something Hannah Arendt wrote about Soviet totalitarianism, namely that once Soviet propaganda had claimed that the Moscow metro is the only working metro in the world, there emerged a need to conquer the whole world, just so all other metros could be shut down to ensure the truth of the ideology.
Koshkin 5y ago
I am surprised that the article fails to mention that the traditional Mongolian script is, in fact, a form of the modern Aramaic script (Syriac). (This fun fact makes the history of Mongolian writing system much more interesting.)
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Fun fact: the earliest alphabets in India, Iran, Syria are all descendent from Aramaic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet IIRC, proto-sinaitic gave birth to Phoenician and Arabic (with some lost alphabets like Moabite in there somewhere). Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet, and its two children are Aramaic and Greek, with alphabets in the "east" being likely descended from Aramaic (Brahmi script, proto-Farsi and Parthian, Syrian) and those in the "west" descendent from Greek (Latin, Armenian, Cyrillic, Coptic). Thus you would in fact expect Mongolian, being in the east, to be an offshoot of Aramaic if you knew it had an alphabet (it could be like Mandarin without an alphabet). That's the real question -- does it have an alphabet or not. I only say this because a lot of people think that Aramaic script is some exotic thing, but it was the official language of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, which was quite large, stretching from India to North Africa, and Aramaic was a lingua franca of that era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
  - eternalban 5y ago
    Darius the Great (Darayavush) actually commissioned the invention of a cuneiform script for inscribing imperial monuments in Old Persian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform The Achaemenids kings (Ha-Khaa-Manesh in Persian) were however eminently practical as far as imperial governance was concerned, and as you noted, continued the use of Aramaic, but never in monuments. Sogdians were an Iranian people, so it's likely that Aramaic script made its way into Mongolia via the vector of Persian empire's penetration of Transoxiana and subsequently the Sogdians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugut_inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugut_inscription
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
interesting that the Cyrillic Alphabeth has a lot of variations [1] for example it's not identical for Ukraine and Russia, the Mongolian Cyrillic Alphabeth also has its variations: they add Ө and a second Ү [2]. For the Latin Alphabeth there are also quite a lot of variations [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets fascinating that Classical Latin didn't have the letter U, so they would have to write SPQR for all instances of IMPERIUM ROMANUM. But here it says they wrote V instead of U https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Roman-V-meant-to-mean-the-letter-U https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Roman-V-meant-to-mean-the-lette.... Nice rabbit hole... Also the name Julius Ceasar would have to be spelled differently without the letter J in the Classical Latin script.
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    The Latin alphabet as used by the ancient Romans corresponds to the modern capital letters. More precisely, our capital letters corresponds to the alphabet used for inscriptions in stone or other hard materials. The capital letter V was used for both the vowel u and for the consonant u (usually written "w" in English). Many hundreds of years later when the alphabets that are the ancestors of the modern small Latin letters were developed for writing on parchment with a pen (i.e. goose feather), the small letter corresponding to the capital letter "V" was "u". So, for some time, Latin was written using the pair capital "V" and small "u" for both the vowel and consonant "u". However, in all Romance languages the consonant "u" (English "w") had changed its pronunciation to the fricative "v", so when writing modern languages there was a need to distinguish "u" and "v". That lead to the creation of the capital "U" and of the small "v", and "Vv" were assigned to the fricative, while "Uu" were assigned to the vowel. As another detail of the "U" writing history, the letter "F" was used in Greek to write the consonant "u" (English "w"). However the Latin language had the fricative "f", which did not exist in Greek, and there was a need to have a letter for it. The Romans chose "F" for the fricative "f", which forced them to reuse "V" (previously used only for vowel "u"), for both the vowel and consonant "u". So, the modern Latin alphabet has five letters that were originally used to write some variant of "u": F, U, V, W and Y. ("w" was introduced in English because they still had the consonant "u", unlike the Romance languages, where "v" was assigned to the fricative sound; "Y", a different graphic form of "V", was introduced by the Romans to write Greek words, because the Greeks no longer pronounced the vowel "u" like the Romans, but they pronounced it like the German "u" Umlaut or the French "u").
danielodievich 5y ago
I was born in USSR and Mongolians were our Asian brothers, together with Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tadjiks and all the other tribes in the 'stans. I remember perusing Uzbekistan main daily in Tashkent as a young child, seeing gobbledygook in Cyrillic and thinking that it was really funny. My mother was had some really wealthy Mongolian clients who were parking money in USA real estate post 2009 meltdown and for a while they were visiting a lot. We had them over at my place and their Russian was remarkable. Basically everyone in the ruling classes was educated in USSR and spoke perfect Russian not only conversationally, but down to the cursing and jokes. My uncle went out with these guys to fish for flounder in Puget Sound and confirms pretty good command of those last two. They brought me a bottle of Chengiz Khan vodka with Cyrillic label and poitless flakes of gold in it that just sat there for a few years until I re-gifted it. Fun times. Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education, without barriers to entry that we have here in USA. Ken Alibek (https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological-World-Told/dp/0385334966 https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological...) was one of the examples of going from village to bacteriological weapon design and on the strength of being smart.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  The USSR was vast, which part of it were you born and raised in?
  - danielodievich 5y ago
    Burbs of Moscow. But my family traveled extensively, more than usual for average soviet person, so I've been to every republic but Tadjikistan (all of course now countries) before the age of 14. It sounds like a lot, but it was just a spot here and there, that empire is a vast and incredibly varied land full of so many different people and even more full of nothing human related, it is difficult to comprehend unless you experience it.
    - ajuc 5y ago
      Basically you were the ruling class and think that's how USSR was for average person :)
kgeist 5y ago
>Sovietization Cyrillic was created 1100 years ago in Bulgaria for Christian lithurgy among Slavs, it's unfair and sad that it's now mainly associated with communism and USSR in Westerm countries.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  It also is associated with hundreds of years of the Russian Empire. So it’s also associated with that (largely negative) history in large parts of Europe.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  It doesn't matter when it was created in this case. In Mongolia it was literally connected to Sovietization of Mongolia.
helge9210 5y ago
Changing the language or at least alphabet used to write the books the state can control what literature the next generation will be able to read.
mediocre-one 5y ago
To me, all that reversal attempts are deemed to fail. Last time I tried the traditional script, I was not even sure that I can write down my own name properly. It's got some twisted logic that whatever written in it does not always pronounce and/or mean similar to the one in its Cyrillic counterpart.
sergeykish 5y ago
I don't even know where to start. I'd believe you ten years ago. Now I've seen same rethoric from Russian Federation against my country. No more Ukrainian schools in occupied territories. RF population largely supports war to "save Russians". War that killed thousands Russian speaking Ukrainians. And yet they call themselfs "brothers"... just as you said. No need for enemies with such "brothers". I've been to Eastern Europe, a lot of people speak English there. Occupation is not required to a share culture.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  > RF population largely supports war to "save Russians". Only those susceptible to propaganda. But such people are everywhere, who easily believe what they are told to believe.
  - fpoling 5y ago
    Russian propaganda is really good and works rather effectively. Which is no surprising as they use techniques mastered during 70 years of communism. A colleague from work who works on integration a of a translation service in our product said that he needed a brain wash to clean up the propaganda after reading all those Russian news translated with the service.
    - chokolad 5y ago
      > Russian propaganda is really good and works rather effectively. Which is no surprising as they use techniques mastered during 70 years of communism. If only. Russian propaganda is hamfisted, direct and not very effective. It's magical efficiency is perpetuated in the West in order to demonize Russia. If Russian propaganda was that good and effective, Ukraine would still be ruled by Russian-friendly elite and the country would have joined some sort of Russia led economic bloc instead of rushing towards EU and NATO. Alas, Russian propaganda sucks, at least compared to what USA has to offer.
      - sergeykish 5y ago
Ichthypresbyter 5y ago
I've heard that another effect of Sovietization in Mongolia was surnames. Mongolians had surnames (strictly speaking, clan names) before the Soviet takeover. The Soviets abolished them, as part of an effort to get rid of the old aristocracy. Since then, Mongolians have been known officially either by a single personal name or by using their father's name in combination with their own. In the 90s, there was an attempt to bring back surnames. People were given a free choice of which surname to adopt. Some people either still knew the surname their family had had before the Soviet era (because it had been passed down in secret), or were able to find it in local records. But a lot of people chose a name that had no history in their family, either because they didn't know their old surname, it had an unflattering meaning (like "Thief" or "Seven Drunkards"), or they simply wanted a different one. The attempt was unsuccessful, in part because huge numbers of people chose to adopt Borjigin (Genghis Khan's clan name) as their surname.

154 points by Thevet 5y ago

Mongolian script is unusual because of its orientation. How do UIs handle the script? For example mobile chat applications.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
The short answer is that they don't. Android flat out doesn't support vertical scripts so there's a library that reimplements a lot of UI components. iOS basically doesn't, but it's somewhat easier to work around. Chrome and Firefox can render the characters with appropriate fonts, but that can be uncommon and applications using them screw up. Electron apps generally render vertical scripts LTR for example.
scarmig 5y ago
This is based off 30 minutes of naive research; if someone knows better, please correct me. (No better way to get information than to say something wrong on the Internet.) Most of the time, major or more sophisticated apps will just use Cyrillic (in Mongolia) or be written in Mandarin (in Inner Mongolia, CN). There are, however, web pages in the traditional script, which you can look at to get a sense of how a UI layout for a vertical script might work [0][1][2]. I also found a website with a full list, with many broken links [3]. From an encoding perspective, Unicode historically hasn't meshed well with Mongolian script, because of a surfeit of homographs. From what I can gather, Menksoft supports the most widely used alternative encoding method, which isn't Unicode-compatible. This apparently makes searching and indexing traditional Mongolian pages hard. [0] http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home [1] http://mongol.people.com.cn/ http://mongol.people.com.cn/ [2] http://www.nmg.xinhuanet.com/mg/ http://www.nmg.xinhuanet.com/mg/ [3] http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbichig.html http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbi...
- Symbiote 5y ago
  This site seems to use Unicode, unlike your first link. It's a bit disappointing that the British Library was unable to write the titles in their catalogue in Mongolian script. "ᠮᠣᠩ᠋ᠭᠣᠯ ᠤᠯᠤᠰ ᠤᠨ ᠶᠡᠷᠦᠩᠬᠡᠢᠢᠯᠡᠭᠴᠢ ᠬ" https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/
  - gumby 5y ago
    The author mentions/complains about that late in the essay.
retrac 5y ago
Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are primarily written vertically, in columns right to left: https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png The common exception is technical works, and translations, which from the early 20th century onward are often horizontal and left-to-right to allow using the Latin alphabet, math equations, etc. Well, not quite. That was the situation until very recently. It's now mostly horizontal. Almost everything on a computer is horizontal. The first Korean newspaper to switch to horizontal text did so in 1988. It was universal by the mid-90s. Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers. But horizontal text is ascendant there too. While those languages are basically compatible with writing in any direction, this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text. It was terrible when computer typesetting first took off. Even today for publication quality, it probably requires specialized software. So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software. The traditional writing system of several major world languages is simply not properly supported by most software, and much still fails completely. An observation to close with: perhaps ironically, the Mongolian script is from the Syriac alphabet that went along the silk road route, and is distantly related to the Latin alphabet. It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese. It seems that rotating to get along is a recurring theme.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Modern Chinese punctuation marks don't really work in a vertical format.
  - retrac 5y ago
    I'm not fluent, but how so? The 。or ，or 、seem fine when centred. The《 and 》 or 「 and 」get rotated and also look fine. The bigger issue is Arabic numerals, and mixed case or long Latin alphabet words. (Though 2 - 4 letter acronyms like USA or FIFA, one per square, actually fit almost perfectly.) I always thought bracket quotes looked exactly like what they are, a container for words: https://i.imgur.com/IlwSjnZ.png https://i.imgur.com/IlwSjnZ.png -- For example, this sentence is written in "vertical Chinese". (Screenshot generated with LibreOffice Write, which can just about handle basic documents in vertical format.)

1cvmask 5y ago

India has been independent of colonial rule for over 5-7 decades depending on the area and influence of English and even Portuguese (in Goa) still persist.

smhost 5y ago
I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only untenable but actually destructive. The history of every language and culture is one of brutality and conquest as well as mutual exchange. That doesn't mean that we should be trying to revert to some imagined "pure" time before the traumatic event. I'm a product of brutal attempts at nation building by the American war machine. I wouldn't be speaking English otherwise. But that doesn't mean that this language isn't mine. If I were forced to speak and write differently because of some political initiative, it wouldn't be a return to authenticity. It would be forcing me to reject a part of me that's already been irreversibly changed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- whatshisface 5y ago
  The English language without nongermanic influences (a great essay in its own right): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/studen...
  - oconnor663 5y ago
    I love that essay, and also this little tidbit from Wikipedia: > The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (modern English umbe (now obsolete), cognate to German um and Latin ambi-) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.
- dheera 5y ago

dmitriid 5y ago

A similar change happened in Moldova (which first was Autonomous Moldovan Republic as a part of Ukraine and then Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic within USSR after WWII). Moldovan was declared a language similar to, but different from Romanian, and was given a Cyrillic script [1]. Even though Moldovan is at most a dialect of Romanian. The Soviet Union was very direct but also very effective in changing entire cultural substrates of millions of people over a very short period of time. Giving languages under its influence Cyrillic scripts was a part of that. Note: it's not all bleak and bad, as many indigenous people got their alphabets for the first time in history. [1] Wikipedia has a very detailed page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
One of the interesting parts of the OP is that they say Soviets moved to Latinise the scripts of all people as a move to unify Communist groups (second para under "Linguistic Revolution"). Then they simply say "Cyrillic became the preferred, unifying writing system" without explanation.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  Roughly, latinization was a Lenin-era policy. However, when Stalin came to power he had different goals and philosophy than the preceding regime of Lenin. For one, Stalin abandoned the idea of spreading world revolution in favour of "socialism in one country", which in large part was about keeping the USSR (and, as its satellite, Mongolia) walled off from the outside world for the sake of tighter control. For speakers of the USSR’s Turkic languages (Kazakh, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, etc.), latinization was therefore seen as harmful, because these languages are often fairly mutually intelligible with Turkish of Turkey, and a common-ish Latin alphabet would mean these peoples would be susceptible to anti-Soviet ideas coming from Turkey. Therefore, the Stalin-era language authorities not only gave them a new Cyrillic orthography, they gave each language a different Cyrillic orthography than the rest to fragment them even further. In the case of Mongolian, Cyrillic helped better separate Mongolian of Mongolia from the mutually intelligible dialect of Mongolian spoken across the border in China.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

I'm really disappointed in the images in that piece, so low-res you can't read the text. For the BL that's pretty awful. I noticed that the top line of the compared newspaper parts also appears to change, but it's so badly rendered and so small as to be almost unreadable. Why would they do that? Aside, whilst it says "Copyright British Library Board" the content is/should be free-gratis and free-libre reproducible under the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. Really it should have a better imprint, something like "free distribution and reuse allowed under this policy" with a link. Even better would be if they'd adopted a more widely recognised license.

ryancw 5y ago

One thing I've always been curious about with alphabet transitions like these is how people dealt with it. State newspapers might start printing in the new alphabet, but at what point did shop signs and handwritten correspondence switch over? Did everyone over schooling age stick with the old?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
koolba 5y ago
I think you’re grossly overestimating the level of literacy.
- krasin 5y ago
  According to Wikipedia: "Mongolia has a high literacy rate, consistently rated around 98%" ([1]). Which is not surprising given that Soviets always had put a special focus on strong educational system. They failed in many areas, but they did "liquidate illiteracy" everywhere they could ([2]) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Mongolia#:~:text=Mongolia%20has%20a%20high%20literacy%20rate%2C%20consistently%20rated%20around%2098%25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Mongolia#:~:text=.... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
- indigo945 5y ago
  You're grossly underestimating the level of education in Mongolia. Until the IMF-mandated austerity policies of the 90's, during which so many schools closed that many families couldn't even send their children to primary school anymore, and the remaining schools had to close in winter because they couldn't afford heating, Mongolia did not only have near-total literacy, but also one of the highest rates of tertiary education, that is, college education, in the world (not in the "third" world). Of course, since Mongolia has been blessed with the free market, living standards have been on a decline throughout the country, and nowadays, your offhand remark is more likely than not to have some substance. However, things have been improving again over the past decade or so. The Western drive to assume that people in poorer countries are all uneducated seems to me to reflect something Hannah Arendt wrote about Soviet totalitarianism, namely that once Soviet propaganda had claimed that the Moscow metro is the only working metro in the world, there emerged a need to conquer the whole world, just so all other metros could be shut down to ensure the truth of the ideology.

Koshkin 5y ago

I am surprised that the article fails to mention that the traditional Mongolian script is, in fact, a form of the modern Aramaic script (Syriac). (This fun fact makes the history of Mongolian writing system much more interesting.)

rsj_hn 5y ago
Fun fact: the earliest alphabets in India, Iran, Syria are all descendent from Aramaic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet IIRC, proto-sinaitic gave birth to Phoenician and Arabic (with some lost alphabets like Moabite in there somewhere). Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet, and its two children are Aramaic and Greek, with alphabets in the "east" being likely descended from Aramaic (Brahmi script, proto-Farsi and Parthian, Syrian) and those in the "west" descendent from Greek (Latin, Armenian, Cyrillic, Coptic). Thus you would in fact expect Mongolian, being in the east, to be an offshoot of Aramaic if you knew it had an alphabet (it could be like Mandarin without an alphabet). That's the real question -- does it have an alphabet or not. I only say this because a lot of people think that Aramaic script is some exotic thing, but it was the official language of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, which was quite large, stretching from India to North Africa, and Aramaic was a lingua franca of that era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
- eternalban 5y ago
  Darius the Great (Darayavush) actually commissioned the invention of a cuneiform script for inscribing imperial monuments in Old Persian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform The Achaemenids kings (Ha-Khaa-Manesh in Persian) were however eminently practical as far as imperial governance was concerned, and as you noted, continued the use of Aramaic, but never in monuments. Sogdians were an Iranian people, so it's likely that Aramaic script made its way into Mongolia via the vector of Persian empire's penetration of Transoxiana and subsequently the Sogdians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugut_inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugut_inscription

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

interesting that the Cyrillic Alphabeth has a lot of variations [1] for example it's not identical for Ukraine and Russia, the Mongolian Cyrillic Alphabeth also has its variations: they add Ө and a second Ү [2]. For the Latin Alphabeth there are also quite a lot of variations [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets

MichaelMoser123 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets fascinating that Classical Latin didn't have the letter U, so they would have to write SPQR for all instances of IMPERIUM ROMANUM. But here it says they wrote V instead of U https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Roman-V-meant-to-mean-the-letter-U https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Roman-V-meant-to-mean-the-lette.... Nice rabbit hole... Also the name Julius Ceasar would have to be spelled differently without the letter J in the Classical Latin script.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  The Latin alphabet as used by the ancient Romans corresponds to the modern capital letters. More precisely, our capital letters corresponds to the alphabet used for inscriptions in stone or other hard materials. The capital letter V was used for both the vowel u and for the consonant u (usually written "w" in English). Many hundreds of years later when the alphabets that are the ancestors of the modern small Latin letters were developed for writing on parchment with a pen (i.e. goose feather), the small letter corresponding to the capital letter "V" was "u". So, for some time, Latin was written using the pair capital "V" and small "u" for both the vowel and consonant "u". However, in all Romance languages the consonant "u" (English "w") had changed its pronunciation to the fricative "v", so when writing modern languages there was a need to distinguish "u" and "v". That lead to the creation of the capital "U" and of the small "v", and "Vv" were assigned to the fricative, while "Uu" were assigned to the vowel. As another detail of the "U" writing history, the letter "F" was used in Greek to write the consonant "u" (English "w"). However the Latin language had the fricative "f", which did not exist in Greek, and there was a need to have a letter for it. The Romans chose "F" for the fricative "f", which forced them to reuse "V" (previously used only for vowel "u"), for both the vowel and consonant "u". So, the modern Latin alphabet has five letters that were originally used to write some variant of "u": F, U, V, W and Y. ("w" was introduced in English because they still had the consonant "u", unlike the Romance languages, where "v" was assigned to the fricative sound; "Y", a different graphic form of "V", was introduced by the Romans to write Greek words, because the Greeks no longer pronounced the vowel "u" like the Romans, but they pronounced it like the German "u" Umlaut or the French "u").

danielodievich 5y ago

I was born in USSR and Mongolians were our Asian brothers, together with Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tadjiks and all the other tribes in the 'stans. I remember perusing Uzbekistan main daily in Tashkent as a young child, seeing gobbledygook in Cyrillic and thinking that it was really funny. My mother was had some really wealthy Mongolian clients who were parking money in USA real estate post 2009 meltdown and for a while they were visiting a lot. We had them over at my place and their Russian was remarkable. Basically everyone in the ruling classes was educated in USSR and spoke perfect Russian not only conversationally, but down to the cursing and jokes. My uncle went out with these guys to fish for flounder in Puget Sound and confirms pretty good command of those last two. They brought me a bottle of Chengiz Khan vodka with Cyrillic label and poitless flakes of gold in it that just sat there for a few years until I re-gifted it. Fun times. Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education, without barriers to entry that we have here in USA. Ken Alibek (https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological-World-Told/dp/0385334966 https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological...) was one of the examples of going from village to bacteriological weapon design and on the strength of being smart.

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
The USSR was vast, which part of it were you born and raised in?
- danielodievich 5y ago
  Burbs of Moscow. But my family traveled extensively, more than usual for average soviet person, so I've been to every republic but Tadjikistan (all of course now countries) before the age of 14. It sounds like a lot, but it was just a spot here and there, that empire is a vast and incredibly varied land full of so many different people and even more full of nothing human related, it is difficult to comprehend unless you experience it.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    Basically you were the ruling class and think that's how USSR was for average person :)

kgeist 5y ago

>Sovietization Cyrillic was created 1100 years ago in Bulgaria for Christian lithurgy among Slavs, it's unfair and sad that it's now mainly associated with communism and USSR in Westerm countries.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
It also is associated with hundreds of years of the Russian Empire. So it’s also associated with that (largely negative) history in large parts of Europe.
dmitriid 5y ago
It doesn't matter when it was created in this case. In Mongolia it was literally connected to Sovietization of Mongolia.

helge9210 5y ago

Changing the language or at least alphabet used to write the books the state can control what literature the next generation will be able to read.

mediocre-one 5y ago

To me, all that reversal attempts are deemed to fail. Last time I tried the traditional script, I was not even sure that I can write down my own name properly. It's got some twisted logic that whatever written in it does not always pronounce and/or mean similar to the one in its Cyrillic counterpart.

sergeykish 5y ago

I don't even know where to start. I'd believe you ten years ago. Now I've seen same rethoric from Russian Federation against my country. No more Ukrainian schools in occupied territories. RF population largely supports war to "save Russians". War that killed thousands Russian speaking Ukrainians. And yet they call themselfs "brothers"... just as you said. No need for enemies with such "brothers". I've been to Eastern Europe, a lot of people speak English there. Occupation is not required to a share culture.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
> RF population largely supports war to "save Russians". Only those susceptible to propaganda. But such people are everywhere, who easily believe what they are told to believe.
- fpoling 5y ago
  Russian propaganda is really good and works rather effectively. Which is no surprising as they use techniques mastered during 70 years of communism. A colleague from work who works on integration a of a translation service in our product said that he needed a brain wash to clean up the propaganda after reading all those Russian news translated with the service.
  - chokolad 5y ago
    > Russian propaganda is really good and works rather effectively. Which is no surprising as they use techniques mastered during 70 years of communism. If only. Russian propaganda is hamfisted, direct and not very effective. It's magical efficiency is perpetuated in the West in order to demonize Russia. If Russian propaganda was that good and effective, Ukraine would still be ruled by Russian-friendly elite and the country would have joined some sort of Russia led economic bloc instead of rushing towards EU and NATO. Alas, Russian propaganda sucks, at least compared to what USA has to offer.
    - sergeykish 5y ago

Ichthypresbyter 5y ago

I've heard that another effect of Sovietization in Mongolia was surnames. Mongolians had surnames (strictly speaking, clan names) before the Soviet takeover. The Soviets abolished them, as part of an effort to get rid of the old aristocracy. Since then, Mongolians have been known officially either by a single personal name or by using their father's name in combination with their own. In the 90s, there was an attempt to bring back surnames. People were given a free choice of which surname to adopt. Some people either still knew the surname their family had had before the Soviet era (because it had been passed down in secret), or were able to find it in local records. But a lot of people chose a name that had no history in their family, either because they didn't know their old surname, it had an unflattering meaning (like "Thief" or "Seven Drunkards"), or they simply wanted a different one. The attempt was unsuccessful, in part because huge numbers of people chose to adopt Borjigin (Genghis Khan's clan name) as their surname.