4 ms·

The issue is that, unlike slavic languages, those particular turkic languages lose as much or even more detail by being transcripted in cyrillic.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago
The Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet has 42 letter and barely a couple of them have diacritics. One of the main problems of the Latin alphabet is its poor vowel and sibilant inventories.
mFixman 4y ago
Do they? Both alphabets are almost identical, but Cyrillic has many "standardised" sounds that don't appear in the Latin alphabet (Ж "zh", Ц "tz", Ч "ch", Ш "sh") while I don't think there isn't anything the other way around. The biggest difference is that Latin scripts tend to create new sounds by adding diacritics or digraphs while Cyrillic scripts tend to create new letters — IMO the second way is better for non-Slavic languages.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  RISC vs CISC, really.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The Hangul script is the most compositional of them all. It marks individual features, that get combined together to form consonants and vowels.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      +100 for Hangul. Its a script that was actually designed, and it shows. The learning curve is actually not steep at all. But it was invented too late, and lacked an expansionist empire, or a widespread religion, to bring it to enough neighboring peoples.
- gsich 4y ago
  Depends on the target language, with german: Ц -> Z Ш -> Sch Ч -> Tsch one could argue that german should also have one character for the "sch"-Sound instead of 3.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Diacritics exist, and German happily üses them. So the Czech variant, where č = ч, š = ш, ž = ж looks fine to me. The postfix-h notation was a good idea, but the fact that e.g. "ch" is interpreted differently in English, German, and French derails it instantly :(
    - troad 4y ago
      I wish East Slavic languages were more consistently transliterated into something like Czech. I don’t understand the trend to transliterate into English, where you end up with hard to parse compounds like “shzh” and idiosyncratic mixes of Ys, Is, Js, not to even mention the various acutes and apostrophes…
      - Asooka 4y ago
        We don't have Czech letters on our keyboards. That is pretty much the entire reason - it's hard to impossible to type these characters on a standard US QWERTY keyboard, so we don't. Plus the DOS systems will probably balk at them as well.
        nine_k 4y ago
        You don't need Czech letters on your keyboard; I don't have them on mine. That's the beauty of diacritics: they are compositional. I use compose key to type various letters like é, č, ö, ø, æ, ï, etc on my plain American ANSI keyboard. OTOH to type fast, you might want a more ergonomic input mechanism. (But I won't dive into the rabbit hole of really ergonomic keyboard layouts; if you're curious, search for KMonad, and think about e.g. the convenience of having modifier keys right in the home row.)

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

The Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet has 42 letter and barely a couple of them have diacritics. One of the main problems of the Latin alphabet is its poor vowel and sibilant inventories.

mFixman 4y ago

Do they? Both alphabets are almost identical, but Cyrillic has many "standardised" sounds that don't appear in the Latin alphabet (Ж "zh", Ц "tz", Ч "ch", Ш "sh") while I don't think there isn't anything the other way around. The biggest difference is that Latin scripts tend to create new sounds by adding diacritics or digraphs while Cyrillic scripts tend to create new letters — IMO the second way is better for non-Slavic languages.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
RISC vs CISC, really.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The Hangul script is the most compositional of them all. It marks individual features, that get combined together to form consonants and vowels.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    +100 for Hangul. Its a script that was actually designed, and it shows. The learning curve is actually not steep at all. But it was invented too late, and lacked an expansionist empire, or a widespread religion, to bring it to enough neighboring peoples.
gsich 4y ago
Depends on the target language, with german: Ц -> Z Ш -> Sch Ч -> Tsch one could argue that german should also have one character for the "sch"-Sound instead of 3.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Diacritics exist, and German happily üses them. So the Czech variant, where č = ч, š = ш, ž = ж looks fine to me. The postfix-h notation was a good idea, but the fact that e.g. "ch" is interpreted differently in English, German, and French derails it instantly :(
  - troad 4y ago
    I wish East Slavic languages were more consistently transliterated into something like Czech. I don’t understand the trend to transliterate into English, where you end up with hard to parse compounds like “shzh” and idiosyncratic mixes of Ys, Is, Js, not to even mention the various acutes and apostrophes…
    - Asooka 4y ago
      We don't have Czech letters on our keyboards. That is pretty much the entire reason - it's hard to impossible to type these characters on a standard US QWERTY keyboard, so we don't. Plus the DOS systems will probably balk at them as well.
      - nine_k 4y ago
        You don't need Czech letters on your keyboard; I don't have them on mine. That's the beauty of diacritics: they are compositional. I use compose key to type various letters like é, č, ö, ø, æ, ï, etc on my plain American ANSI keyboard. OTOH to type fast, you might want a more ergonomic input mechanism. (But I won't dive into the rabbit hole of really ergonomic keyboard layouts; if you're curious, search for KMonad, and think about e.g. the convenience of having modifier keys right in the home row.)