Kazakhstan spells out plans for alphabet swap
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Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, exposing themselves to Russian cultural dominance); or switching to Latin, and implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Turkey.
It's not a question with a single definitive good answer. Different ex-Soviet republics tackled it in different ways. The article points out that Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan switched, for example, but e.g. Kyrgyzstan did not.
The other problem with every switch (including the previous ones) is that it affects all existing written materials, especially books and textbooks. When Soviets originally switched most Central Asian republics from Arabic to Latin back in 1920s, they used it to great effect to control what kind of materials the new generations would have access to, very similar to what Ataturk did in Turkey. Same thing applies today: switching the alphabet allows the new governments of these countries to define the majority of the written corpus that their citizens will have ready access to.
> culturally aligning
> themselves with Turkey
Ability to distinguish between and produce Latin characters is an ability approximately everyone literate I've met in South East Asia has, too, and I suspect that's true of much of South and East Asia.
Definitely, though, the fact that the Latin alphabet eases the consumption of culture, science, commerce from a variety of Latin alphabet countries is a huge plus, but it helps to also understand the local context.
[1] http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/general-information/299/308 [2] http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/message-of-the-president-of-the... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union
I believe the Turkic languages are somewhat similar, so this move will immediately give Kazakhs a route into Turkish media and literature. This is probably a good thing given the decline of Russia and Russian.
And at least some of the English/Japanese difficulty is due to fact that you're also changing systems of writing, going from an alphabet to a pictographical system. Comparing that with English to Spanish is almost unfair because of the fact that so many English words of French and Latin origin have very similar cognates in Spanish. I'd imagine you'd have similar troubles if you tried to learn Hindi/Devanagari for instance. Devanagari is an abugida, so you'd need to learn all of the letters in the alphabet and a whole bunch of "modifications" to the consonants that denote adjoining vowels.
Sure, there will be some bumps in learning how to do things like spell and learning the rules, but it won't be that bad. Once the system is learned, it'd be more like writing difficult words by sounding them out.
As for cognates, well, you'd be surprised how much English is floating around in the Japanese lexicon these days.
Of course it is much more easy to read and understand the latin transcription of these languages.
So the success of American economy drives the success of English and Latin script. Imho.
For foreign movies, there were also cases, when the dubbed versions were better (sounded better) than originals - for example Louis de Funès movies or MASH.
As a native English speaker dubbing drives me nuts. I want to see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon subtitled not dubbed.
Why the preference? I know the French are super paranoid about the cultural hegemony of English. Is this the case elsewhere?
For a solid introduction to a few, the best film selection of the Cesars is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Award_for_Best_Film
Generally, if you are a small country, you have to pour a lot of money into the industry to be able to even compete with Hollywood, otherwise the small market size doesn't make it worthwhile to produce anything. It's essentially the state paying for a public good, where the good is culture in your own language.
Bad second language English (like e.g. mine, I feel quite at home in writing, but you should see me navigating the linguistic perils of a US supermarket checkout, not funny) is close to useless when talking to native speakers, but it can be invaluable as a common ground with other non-native speakers.
Yes, but for different reasons. In practice it means tons of corrupt government contracts to cronies to republish textbooks, remake signage, update software and all government services to new alphabet, etc. Millions of dollars in contracts and kickbacks.
The language and writing system are simpler than most languages I've encountered. Most importantly in this age, English is easy to use with keyboards.
Looking at Latin languages there's a lot of time spent learning word conjugation. English has little gender, no formal/informal tenses, a single, mostly phonetic writing system. It doesn't have mutually unitelligble dialects. I don't know of any other widely spoken language with these attributes.
The writing system is simpler than most, mirroring comments of others here that English autocorrect works better and many of them ignore "extra" letters from their language when typing online. This extends even to Eastern countries which largely type using "pinyin", "romanji", etc... even though it's cultural taboo to send these messages without translating them to the symbols they represent first.
Some English language attributes may be a result of it's historical popularity rather than the cause, but either way I have heard these attributes make it easy to reach a broken but usable level of speaking ability.
You've got to be kidding me.
Contrast this to Chinese for example, where the symbol has almost no relation to pronounciation and some dialects are unintelligible even though the written form is exactly the same.
Of course, politics interferes with this. For example, saying that the many ways people speak in China are "dialects of Chinese" is the PRC government's view, but linguists say they're deluding themselves. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan, Hokkien, and so on are different languages.
So here you should be comparing English to Mandarin Chinese, not to every language that gets called "Chinese". Mandarin has even less inflection and word variation than English. It's true that its writing system is a mess, though, and it's even messier that it's used to write other languages that don't have their own standardized written forms.
Anyway, if we look at European languages, English is the one that's extreme in terms of how non-obvious the correspondence of its script and its phonetics are. It's not just that the mapping is very arbitrary - French can be similarly arbitrary in dropping consonants, for example - but it's also very inconsistent. You think you've learned how some combination of letters is pronounced by looking at some word and then hearing it... and then you find out that the same combination can be pronounced in three more ways.
There are still patterns behind all it, and eventually you grok them, but they're way more complicated than "this letter plus this letter gives this sound", which is typical of other languages - or at least such simplified rules can be used to speak in a way that others will understand. Not so in English - you have to learn all those exceptions and subtle rules to be understood.
A few examples: "live" / "life"; "leaf" / "leaven"; "over" / "oven"; "even" / "seven"; "dew" / "sew"; "dull" / "bull"; "mint" / "pint".
Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago.
Most nationalists or people aligned with Russian views use Cyrillic here and others use Latin. Having to learn both at young age (7 for Cyrillic, 8 for Latin) gives you more options in life. You can easily read anything on the Internet and learn western languages. On the other hand, you can go to Russia or Bulgaria and quickly find your way around. One can even argue that this opens up your views, so when you see Greek for the first time, it doesn't look like a bunch of weird characters but you start seeing similarities (esp. with capital letters) and it's makes you want to learn the ones that seem completely alien (like Sigma or Omega).
I disagree because current synchronic digraphia in Serbia is a mess. You have people using Cyrillic script in Latin documents, Latin script in Cyrillic documents. You have people religiously using Cyrillic and Latin. People who prefer Latin and make fun of people using Cyrillic.
You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša).
Learning English (and it's alphabet) gives you mush more options in life than being a speaker of a language which uses a Latin based script (or Cyrillic, or any other script).
So do all the other countries and they make different kinds of "sins" regarding to proper writing.
> who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša).
This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. Also, a lot of hardware is still sold without proper keyboard layout (you can change it in software, but then you have to remember which of the curly brackets is used for what letter). On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower.
These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.
Many times autocorrect has word only in present-masculine form. Or it doesn't have subjunctive form. Even for words I consider common. I can only imagine how it can be for less popular Slavic languages.
There was proper support for Cyrillic and Latin basically from Windows XP. Also many other Linux distros supported our scripts from early on.
On the mobile front, there was also a support for both scripts relatively early on. I remmember using both Cyrillic and Latin keyboards on Android 2.1, in 2008.
> On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower.
On the older devices which had physical buttons, sure. But on Android with QWERTZ/ЉЊЕРТЗ software keyboard that simply isn't the case anymore.
> These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.
Not directly but indirectly. If we had just one script, there would be more software solutions because it would be easier to develop them. Nowadays you mostly get some kind of support with/for Serbian Latin or no support at all, as you said.
Some phones from the carriers (LG phones notably) come with the default Android Serbian Cyrillic localization and Cyrillic keyboard.
If you buy a mobile phone without a contract, you will go to the first time setup wizard which will ask you what language you want to use. You will, among other languages, have Српски (Serbian) and Srpski (Serbian Latin). Depending on what you choose, you will get the appropriate keyboard.
There are also other keyboards which provide an easy way to input both Latin and Cyrillic characters from one keyboard application. Also, every key is large enough because we don't have a lot of letters in contrast to English (30 letters). The biggest alternative keyboard application is the Google's GBoard application[1][2].
[1] http://i.imgur.com/s7kNaBZ.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/9OrAItF.png
Nokia were actually the only company I know of consistently providing extra keys for umlauts since the dawn of smartphones...
I am talking about casual messaging - for formal writing you probably do come off as illiterate if you don't bother to use them.
The problem with not writing out diacritics is that Serbian is a language with a fully phonetic alphabets. You don't need to ever guess how words are written or read. You lose greatest feature of the Serbian language if you don't use diacritics, when using the Latin keyboard. I shouldn't, ever, guess how a Serbian word is read when I see it.
So there are no dialects or regional accents?
My Norwegian teacher tried to tell me the same thing thirty years ago. For Norwegian it is manifestly untrue because pronunciation varies from valley to valley.
There are also regional accents but accents aren't different enough to pose any kind of problem when communicating.
Hell, even other language standards created from the Serbo-Croatian language aren't different enough to pose a problem when communicating. :)
It's the same with Czechs: 15-20 years ago, typing without diacritics was perfectly normal. Some people still do.
So ,no. Not uneducated.
Yes, as an American who has learned Cyrillic via Bulgarian, I find that traveling in Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, etc is much easier because I can read this script (not to mention the similarity of many Slavic words). I'm definitely a fan of learning languages with different scripts—hell, it even helps you as a programmer when testing your input fields, layout, etc!
I understand the social and political motivations behind wanting to change the script, but I'd be sad if I didn't get to see Kazakhstan with the beautiful кирилица (Cyrillic).
Not true. It wasn't decided centuries ago. But it was done in 1954. in order to distance Yugoslav communists from Stalin's USSR. In fact it was done to placate the US. In fact this move by Kazakhstan, where they are courting the favour of the West, was done by Serbia 63 years ago.
> Most nationalists or people aligned with Russian views use Cyrillic here and others use Latin.
This sentence alone makes it painfully obvious of how things are in Serbia: little countries aren't allowed to have history and its citizens self respect.
Ivo Andric put it well: "Prolonged slavery and bad rule, can confuse and distort the understanding of a people so that the common sense and their judgement weaken and become twisted. Such disturbed people can no longer distinguish good from evil, but their own benefit from the obvious harm."
I'm very cautious with this kind of statement. Up to the 40s (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fraktur&oldid=771...; also cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antiqua%E2%80%93F...) German was mostly written in Fraktur instead of Antiqua. Nevertheless (being German) I can read Antiqua without problems. Yes, Fraktur and Antiqua are much less different [1] than Antiqua (Latin alphabet) vs. cyrillic alphabet vs. Arabic alphabet from your example, but do you consider the citizens as that stupid that there won't be lots of people that teach themselves all the alphabets that are used in text that they want to understand?
[1] they are not equal (i.e. not "just different symbols for the same letters") though. For example in Fraktur there exist two kinds of s (a long one and a round one) with strict rules when to use which. Or there exist ligatures that have to be used: these correspond to specific "combined consonant sequences" with specific sounds (different from the sounds of the individual letters) in German, such as ch, ck, ſt und tz (a subtlety that gets lost if you write German in Antiqua) - cf. for example https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fraktursatz&oldid... (in German).
Google Translate can already translate text live through your phone camera. Merely transcribing an alphabet is a much easier task.
Now imagine where computers will be when these future generations have actually grown up.
BTW, in USSR in 1920s-1930s 66 languages were latinised (including Kazakh): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
Latinization of Russian language was also planned, (wikipedia in Russian): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA...
Later all that was canceled and Cyrillic was used instead.
Was something else used for Russian prior to Cyrillic?
Also here is an English language version of your Wikipedia link:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_U...
Earlier versions had a few more characters, and Old Slavonic / Church Slavonic has different vocabulary and verb forms vs. today's Russian. Similar to the differences between Olde English and today's English.
I think that you're thinking of the Modern English of Shakespeare's era or Middle English (e.g. 'Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote'), not Old English (e.g. 'Hwæt we Gar-dena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon').
Middle English is very similar to Modern English, and can be read with relative ease. Old English has to be studied as a foreign language.
The comparison to Old English with ash ⟨æ⟩, eth ⟨ð⟩, thorn ⟨þ⟩ and wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ sounds appropriate.
Note, however, that OCS does not have an ancestral relationship to Russian - it is a Southern Slavic language, most similar to ancestors of today's Bulgarian. Old Russian texts (such as The Tale of Igor) are written in a different language - Old Russian (which existed long before the split into Russian, Ukrainian and so on, so the name "Old East Slavic" is sometimes used).
No, it's a different article, and I link to it too.
> Was something else used for Russian prior to Cyrillic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script It's elder than Cyrillic, but it was very little used in ancient Rus and was mostly used by south and western Slavs where Slavic writing was originally created.
Later, when Stalin ditched all that, and came up with "socialism in one country" and revival of imperial patriotism, these attempts were scrapped, and Cyrillic became the common script for all Soviet languages instead (even those that were already Latinized). This was in line with the new national policy, which presented the Russian nation as the "bigger brother" of other ethnicities, e.g.: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945...
It's a pity they don't switch to Orkhon script instead of Latin given their roots. There's a movement already to learn Orkhon as it's the traditional writing of the area and already developed with the sounds of the Turkic languages. (As an example, here's a Kazakh music video with subtitles in both Orkhon script and Türk alfabesi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUE05sRwrA). As long as they are going to the trouble of switching orthographies they should make it more meaningful than simply replacing Russian influenced letters with western european ones.
Or you can add diacritical marks to letters: Č/č for "ch", Š/š for "sh", etc.
I was joking with my colleague about how Russia probably just wants Ukraine to add a buffer between the West and Moscow. He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland." Got me thinking about the seemingly absurd concept of disregarding all national history and focusing exclusively on "brand". Find a great sounding country name, a cool memorable flag, a catchy national anthem, a relatable alphabet.
If you look at nations as brands, many (most?) are pretty forgettable. Countless flags that look randomly generated and lots of anthems that don't linger in your ear.
Incidentally, this is why they've been getting people to stop calling it The Ukraine - because Ukraine is more like a normal country name, while "The Ukraine" is like saying "The Borderland (of Russia)"
Slavic languages lack articles, so in Russian and Ukrainian the linguistic phenomenon SerLava describes manifests only as a choice between using the preposition на versus в (which roughly correspond to the English prepostions in and on) to say "in [the] Ukraine". Using на was standard until after Ukrainian independence, but because на connotes being in an open space or in an indeterminate area (as on sometimes does in English , e.g., on Trafalgar square, on the border) whereas в is the usual preposition signifying being inside a definite space, including being inside a country's borders, Ukrainians reacted against the usage of на, feeling it emphasized the "on the borderlands" understanding of what [the] Ukraine was.
Using в quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of в versus на became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies. The distinction between using or not using the definite article in English and other languages followed. Interestingly, I always say Ukraine rather than the Ukraine in English, but I tend to use на in Russian.
Doesn't seem THAT telling to me. Saying "на Україні" is very common in the Ukrainian language, and lots of Ukrainians use bits of Ukrainian while speaking Russian. I wouldn't be shocked to hear "на Украине" from a Ukrainian, and I most definitely wouldn't make assumptions about political tendencies based on it.
However, "the Outskirts" translates to "окраины", which when pronounced, sounds very close to "Украины". "Uh cra eena" vs "Oo cra eena".
Translating Russian to English involves interpolating articles, definite and indefinite. I now have an inkling of how this controversy arose.
In Russian, when you speak of a named geographic region, the preposition for "in" (as in "10 million people live in ...") is used - in Russian, it's "v". On the other hand, if it's not a name, but rather a descriptive designation like "borderlands", then the preposition for "on" is used - in Russian, it's "na".
So, English "in Ukraine" becomes "v Ukraine". But English "in the Ukraine" becomes "na Ukraine". In modern Russian, both are considered acceptable, but the latter is generally considered normative, and is what most people use. Needless to say, Ukrainians strongly prefer "v", even when speaking Russian (it's unconditionally "v" in Ukrainian, where the same distinction exists). This is a regular cause of flames and edit wars on the Net between Russian and Ukrainian users.
Except that there is no "rule" for that, other than established use, and even that is not consistent. People who insist on "na Ukraine" would somehow never say "na Serbskoi Kraine" or "na Khabarovskom Krae".
Personally, I use "v Ukraine", if only because it's a middle finger to the Kremlin. But I also don't think that the use of "na" necessarily denotes disrespect, or that people should be told how to properly speak their language.
I guess the nearest abstract equivalent to this would be the debate over gender-neutral pronouns like "xe" in English. You have one side laying arguments (many of them pretty good) as to why having such a thing is a good idea; and the other side pointing out that it just feels awkward and non-English-like.
Украи́на [1] vs. окра́ина [2]
But I see what you are saying. They are related.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B...
I wish there were accents not just fada it would seem more intuitive hey maybe Irish would be better written in Cyrillic. Maybe there should be a Celtic alphabet just for Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton.
I found a page with a bunch more of them: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/fr-cuba-article.2157...
No one seems to really know why.
Siam? Turkey?
Just considering common names, here's a few:
Burma -> Myanmar
Belgian Congo -> Congo -> ??? -> Zaire -> DRC
Persia -> Iran
South Rhodesia -> Rhodesia -> Zimbabwe
Upper Volta -> Burkina Faso
Yugoslavia -> Serbia and Montenegro
That would be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia specifically. The much larger Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had already fallen apart by that time (1992).
Yugoslavia broke up in a civil war. I wouldn't count it as a 'rebranding' any more than British Empire -> United States.
And before (soon after WWI) it used to be officially called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Estonia comes to mind, which has invested in a high-tech profile, see for example their e-residency program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-residency_of_Estonia
He's probably a speaker of Russian, so he assumes the Russian meaning of the word to be canonical. Which is rather ignorant, because the word has a different meaning in Ukrainian - it literally means 'country'. It is similar in Polish ('country' vs 'edge'/'border'/'region' in Russian) and probably other Slavonic languages.
> The traditional theory (which was widely supported by historians and linguists in the 19–20th centuries, see e.g. Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian) is that the modern name of the country is derived from the term "ukraina" in the sense ‘borderland, frontier region, marches’ etc. These meanings can be derived from the Proto-Slavic noun *krajь, meaning ‘edge, border’. Contemporary parallels for this are Russian okráina ‘outskirts’ and kraj ‘border district’.
However:
> Some Ukrainian scholars, such as Hryhoriy Pivtorak, Fedir Shevchenko, Mykola Andrusyak, Serhiy Shelukhin believe that the name is derived from ukraina in the sense of ‘region, principality, country’. Many medieval occurrences of the word can be interpreted as having that meaning. In this sense, the word can be associated with contemporary Ukrainian krajina, Belarusian kraina and Russian and Polish kraj, all meaning ‘country’ (see Translations, 'region of land').
So different people have different interpretations.
In general, when linguistics gets politicized, and there are multiple competing theories with various implications, take a look at the geographic spread of each. If it's politically relevant for one country, and one particular theory is only popular in that country, it's probably being promoted for political reasons. If it's widespread in academic circles of many different countries, including those that don't have any stakes in any associated politics disputes, it's more likely to be factual.
It doesn't really. Ukrainian meaning of "u" is different from Russian, it's more like a Russian "v". For example "u lavtsi" translates to something like "in the shop", but never "near the shop", at the same time in Russian it would be "v lavke". It's just that heavily pushed "borderland" narrative makes it hard to think straight about this, especially for Russians.
But we're not talking about either one of those. The word is much older than that - about 8 centuries old if you count back to the first time it can be found in written text, and about 4 centuries if you count to its first use specifically to refer to Ukraine.
I'm not saying that 8 centuries ago, that territory was called by that name. Why would it be, when it was still the heartland of Kievan Rus? I'm saying that the word "оукраина" was used to mean borderlands then, such ones as they had.
And then 4 centuries later, that exact word became the name of the border territory of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that covers pretty much the entirety of today's Western and Central Ukraine, in the language of people inhabiting that territory, said language being a direct descendant of the language spoken 4 centuries before...
I would dare say that a straightforward explanation is that the word retained its meaning, and was used in that meaning, because at that time it really was applicable to the territory in question. All the dots connect here in obvious ways. In contrast, if we assume that "ukraina" was derived from "kraina" for "homeland" instead, and try to backtrack, we need to explain how "u-" got there, and why the fact that the result matched the word that historically meant "borderlands" is entirely coincidental. I've seen some very convoluted explanations of this that could work, but Occam's razor still applies - between two explanations that both match observed evidence, the simpler one is preferable.
Which is probably why the "borderlands" etymology is widely accepted among linguists throughout the world, while various alternative theories all seem to have Ukrainian authors. I get that this is a very politicized question in Ukraine, especially since Russian nationalists and irredentists have been trying to interpret the "borderlands" etymology to imply that Ukraine was historically self-identifying as a border territory of Russia - which is, of course, blatantly false. But I don't think that starting with a premise that is more politically palatable, and then backtracking from there to recreate the (less likely) etymology to fit, is a good way to deal with it.
Игорь ждетъ мила брата Всеволода.
И рече ему буй туръ Всеволодъ:
"Одинъ братъ,
одинъ светъ светлый -
ты, Игорю!
оба есве Святъславличя!
Седлай, брате,
свои бръзыи комони,
а мои ти готови,
оседлани *у* Курьска напереди.
Igor awaits his beloved brother,
and Fierce Bull Vsevolod speaks:
“You are my one brother,
Igor,
my one shining light;
we are both sons of Sviatoslav.
Saddle, brother,
your swift horses,
for mine are ready,
saddled ahead *at* Kursk.
Дожидає Ігор брата Всеволода.
Каже йому буй-тур Всеволод:
«Один брат,
один світ світлий,
Ігорю,
Обидва ми Святославовичі.
Сідлай, брате,
свої коні бистрі,
Мої-бо вже готові стоять,
*Під* Курськом осідлані.
And of course I'm not claiming that the word "ukraina" was used to refer to what today is the country Ukraine back in 1200s - that would be ridiculous, for exactly the reasons you cite above. No, my point rather is that the word "ukraina" - "оукраина" - is attested in documents from that period to refer to areas that they (the Kievan Rus state) considered borderlands, and has fairly obvious and transparent etymology of "u+kraina", both parts of which are also attested in written sources.. It is solely about the etymological origin of the word - that, yes, it does in fact mean "borderlands" historically - not about the origin of the name "Ukraine" for the country. That came much later.
As for the latter, it shows up first somewhere circa 1600s, and it first appears in Polish sources (as self-designation of people inhabiting the territory). At that point, the entire Western and Central Ukraine was a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - and for them, it was definitely "borderlands" in all senses. Geographically it was the easternmost territory of the state. Culturally it was significantly different from Polish heartland - language, religion etc - and further east and south there were culturally alien Turkic (Tatar) tribes. Militarily, it was a buffer zone between the Commonwealth and the Tatars, and to some extent with Russia, with constant low-key hostilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Comm...
It's exactly the kind of area that would be called e.g. "the Mark" in German-speaking parts of Europe. Indeed, when the revived Polish state later occupied large parts of Western Ukraine after WW1, they referred to it as "kresy wschodnie" in Polish, literally meaning "eastern borderlands" - old habits die hard.
So far as I know, all uses of the word "ukraina" in Kievan sources do not refer to the territory as a whole, nor to territories near Kiev, but rather those that were borderlands with respect to Kiev as the capital (e.g. Halych). Of course, I may well be missing something - can you give an example of a Kievan source that use "ukraina" to refer to the country as a whole, or to its heartland?
FWIW, since the word "Ukraine" is first attested in written form as early as 12th century, its etymology has to be derived from the (then still common) Eastern Slavic of that period, rather than the modern meanings of either Russian or Ukrainian. And in that language, "ukraina" - "оукраина" - did mean "borderlands"
BTW, it doesn't appear to have become the name of the territory, and later the country, because it was borderlands of Muscovy/Russia. Rather, it seems to have originated in the western parts, because they were the borderlands of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russia historically preferred the term "Little Russia" (Malorossiya) to imply cultural affinity and justify territorial claims, to the point of proscribing the usage of "Ukraine" in imperial times.
South Slavs have multiple historical examples of Krajina(s) and they all represented bordering area, edge, (military) frontier. In a broad sense kraj/krai means area, land, place. But krajina(s) were always bordering areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krajina
There's also Polish example of Krajna, the bordering region between Greater Poland and Pomerania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krajna
Of course, linguistics can and do get politicized so...
Israel is also an interesting case; it probably wouldn't exist in its present form if Hebrew hadn't been revived.
More pragmatically, I'd express it as "using any mix of uppercase or lowercase letters wouldn't obscure or change the word being expressed". (I'm sure there are exceptions where you could conflate a proper noun with another noun without proper capitalization, but since you don't get capitalization in speech, people generally can deal with it.)
e: Thinking slightly more, I'd probably phrase it as "52 symbols map to 26 letters, and the words of the language are defined in terms of letters."
First of all when the turkish alphabet reform happened there was a big revolution happening, and most of the people were illiterate. Also, the ottoman alphabet was incredibly bad for writing turkish (among many causes the language has eight vowels and vowel harmony) that nobody in their right mind would oppose.
Secondly the empire was not ancient at all, in fact what Ataturk completed was started by illuminst sultans like Mahmud II and Abdulmejid I. Also, Turkey is not a continuation of the empire but the last of the states that liberated itself from it.
To quote wikipedia. I.e. from what I read on Wikipedia, it is the other way round: Ukraine is the heartland, Moscow would be at the outskirt.
In Hungarian I see this a lot, and it is a shame. We have for example o ó ö ő for variations of the sound O in "lonely". We have a mixed model of variable length and accented characters.
ASCII and QWERTY are (the unintended) cultural equivalent of the Little Boy and the Fat Boy. Poor globalization throughout the IT industry made people adapt to it, instead of challenging it. This makes only variable length survive the "loss in translation".
Now when globalization is better, it became "cool" somehow in some subcultures (eg. UNIX related, programming related), as many ancient tools (Unix, C) lack proper support.
- http://www.bbc.com/uzbek (Cyrillic)
- http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/lotin (Latin)
- http://www.bbc.com/uzbek/afghanistan (Arabic)
One the one hand I find it sad that whole bodies of literature will pass out of understanding.
On the other hand this seems like it will make it slightly easier for the Kazakh people to interoperate with the rest of the world.
In the end I believe the greater good comes from enabling more people to talk to each other.
(I know, it's "just" a script change, not a new language, but I feel the two are sufficiently related that the point stands).
Touch typing with an alphabet that's not printed on your physical keyboard can challenging though (I still struggle a bit with that).
...which was also forced on them by the Soviets.
> Nazarbayev described the use of the Cyrillic script as "political," noting that the Latin alphabet had previously been used from 1929 until 1940. Prior to 1929, the Arabic script had been used. "In 1940 … a law was adopted transferring the Kazakh language from the Latin alphabet to one based on Russian script,"
Also:
> The Kazakh language belongs to the family of Turkic languages, whereas Russian is a Slavic language. Other countries with Turkic languages, such as Turkey, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, currently use the Latin alphabet.
At the end of the day, this is not really about interoperating with the rest of the world. It's about pride and national identity.
Are you an Arabic speaker? This claim is a bit stretched.
Yes, short vowels are written as diacritic symbols on consonants, which are often dropped from mass publications.
However, long vowels are an essential part of the language and they are indeed present as their own letters in Arabic.
That's an orientalist claim. Vowels do exist in Arabic but some foreign learners of the language don't get the distinction between short and long vowels and how the letters "ا و ي" have dual role as consonants and vowels as well.
> you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it.
Here's a phonetic transliteration of your first sentence in Arabic
"Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not."
"أَرَبِك از أَ سِمِتِك لانجوِﭺ، تِركِش أَند أَذَر تِركِك أَر نَت"
By the way, this is the Egyptian convention since the "g" sound is missing in Modern Standard Arabic.
https://translate.google.com/m/translate?hl=en#ar/en/أَرَبِك...
If Arabic had no vowel sounds then this should have been impossible!
[1] Ignore the English translation which is meaningless and irrelevant. In this case I'm using Google Translate for speech synthesis, not for translation.
With regard to Turkic, one of the challenges with using the Arabic script is not just that Turkic has a larger vowel inventory than Arabic or Persian, but the frontness/backness of vowels plays a major part in the morphophonemics. The Orkhon script that was the first used for Turkic languages was designed to reflect this, but when the Arabic script was introduced in towards the Middle Turkic era new strategies had to be thought up to reflect frontness/backness, e.g. the use of Arabic emphatic stops versus non-emphatic ones. However, the solutions that were found left a lot of room for ambiguity. I often read Kazan Tatar documents in the old Arabic script, and I can understand how the plethora of rules and exceptions confused the masses prior to the introduction of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. (The Cyrillic script now in use is hardly better than the Arabic script, though)
1- Egyptian hieroglyphs
2- Sinaic script
3- Phoenician script.
Then alphabets evolved from that like Latin and Greek with all the bells and whistles. Semitic scripts on the other hand remained true to its roots and didn't evolve to have dedicated vowels early on.
Arabic as a Semitic language descended from Syriac and Aramaic and thus lacked distinct vowels. Heck early Arabic script didn't make any effort to differentiate similar looking consonants as diacritic were totally missing. Case in point, Hejazi Script, one of the early Arabic scripts lacked vowels, vowel diacritics and consonant diacritics but only possessed the defining quality of cursive/adjoining writing.
However, for later versions of the Arabic script, things improved substantially esp. when it had the full support and backup of the then-young and burgeoning Islamic state, and thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets but retaining a few distinctive features like compactness.
So, yeah you can say that vowels were afterthought in early Arabic scripts but definitely not for the current system in use for centuries now and that's why I characterized his/her statement as an orientalist claim that's completely inaccurate and improper.
For Ottoman Turkish, I get the frustration that some Turkish speakers may have had with reading or writing in Arabic script. Original Arabic script is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for any language. It needs first to be extended and re-purposed to meet the requirements of the target language and with languages like Turkish with a wider selection of vowels, it gets tricky to work around the limitations of the script like vowel diacritics.
Absent these additions and workarounds, it becomes more advisable to make the switch to more accommodative script like Latin and forgo the succinctness and terseness gains of the Arabic script and that's why I view Kurdish written in Arabic script as a big mess as the developers opted to full hard code of the vowels in the script while dropping vowel diacritics altogether.
It didn’t get all the bells and whistles of other alphabets in actual practice. Yes, in theory short vowels could be denoted with diacritics, but this was rarely done in Arabic, let alone Turkic.
> not for the current system in use for centuries now
Again, the “current system” in use for centuries in Middle Turkic and early modern Kazan Tatar and other Kipchak languages did not mark most vowels with the use of diacritics in spite of their theoretic availability.
Like what exactly? What's missing of value?
> but this was rarely done in Arabic
Because it's redundant. I know it's frustrating for beginners to guess the diacritics on the words but once you get to intermediate/advanced proficiency level of the language, you'll start to appreciate this design aspect of the language.
> Again, the “current system” in use for centuries in Middle Turkic and early modern Kazan Tatar and other Kipchak languages did not mark most vowels with the use of diacritics in spite of their theoretic availability.
How's this Arabic's fault?
To be honest with you, I am not really familiar with Ottoman Turkish let alone other Turkic languages and their evolution journey but if they didn't make any use of extended vowel diacritics or worse the baseline package of Arabic, I don't know exactly how they managed to communicate using that system.
While short vowel markings are left out, as long as different words can have wildly different voicings, it is hard to claim they are redundant. Rather, the reader is simply pressed to tell the vowel pointing from context, a skill that does not come without considerably more literacy education than for alphabet writing systems. The claim that diacritics are redundant would be more easily defended for languages like Romanian where the sounds distinguished by diacritics still usually stand in an allophonic relationship dependent on the word’s morphophonemics, but that is certainly not the case in Semitic languages today.
> How's this Arabic's fault?
The Turkic script wasn’t introduced to the Turks in a vacuum. It was brought in as part of a larger influence of Islamic culture, and because among Arabic and Persian speakers the script was almost always used without short vowel diacritics, the Turks inherited the same “right way” of doing things, disastrous as it was for literacy in their languages until the early 20th century.
No, not even close. Another myth like that of the "indoeuropeans" which has zero archeological support.
A more phonetic transliteration of "Arabic is a Semitic language, Turkish and the other Turkic languages are not" is:
أَرَبِكْ ازْ أَ سِمِتِكْ لانجوِج، تِركِشْ أَندْ اُذَرّ تُركِكْ لانجوِجزّ أَرْ نَتْ
which you can listen to a robot speak by visiting
https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/أَرَبِكْ%20ازْ%20أَ%20سِ...
But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.
For Kazakh and their predecessors, the script in use before Arabic was Orkhon. But it was also derived from other scripts.
Honestly I'm seeing it as a pure political decision and huge waste of money, not something, that would have any real benefit. Making Russian and English as an additional official government languages — now that would be useful. Currently almost noone except highly educated people knows English and a lot of people don't know Russian or know it very poorly and it's sad. For Kazakhstan, Russia is a most important neighbor and it's very important to keep common cultural values.
Cyrillic is/was a big part of Russia/USSR's identity from the west -- see things like "BORДT", faux Cyrillic [1], cheap exported Russian vodka, "СССР" on t-shirts, etc.
If Kazakhstan wants to appear less Russian, swapping the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin will be very effective.
(I know the Latin alphabet but only a few letters of the Cyrillic one. It's far easier for me to read signs in Viet Nam than it is in Russia, even though I can probably pronounce Russian much better than Vietnamese. When I don't understand a word written in Cyrillic, it takes me 20 times longer to type it into my phone's dictionary.)
Sounds like how the BJP is about to force all high school students in India to learn Sanskrit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/world/asia/india-sanskrit...
It happened before. For example it happened to my language, Romanian, which used to be written in Cyrillic script until the 1860s or so. AFAIK it was the only Romance language which used Cyrillic, which I find kind of interesting. You're right, most of the Romanian literature/newspapers written before the switch are now illegible for 99% of today's population, but it also matters that not that many books had been printed in Romanian until the switch was made, our culture was mostly an oral one.
I think what is more important is the "drive for expanded international recognition for the Central Asian nation that formed part of the Soviet Union until gaining independence in 1991." that is mentioned in the article. As you can see every foreign article still believes its to be necessary to mention the Soviet union, 26 years after it ended. So it might not change people's lives much, but it will change the perception of what Kazakhstan is.
The people of Anatolia spoke Greek before the Turks invaded.
Further afield, the Central Asian steppes were apparently first settled by Indo-European languages of various branches (Iranian and Tocharian). Alexander the Great's conquest led to the establishment of Greek as a major upper-class language throughout Bactria although it doesn't appear to have transfused down to local populations. Turkic nomads started filtering in and pushing out/assimilating the extant Indo-European speakers in the 400s or so (long before the Mongol Empire).
As for traces of loanwords, yes, many Turkic languages incorporated Indo-European (particularly Iranian/Persian languages) of extant speakers into their language, much like how French incorporated Germanic elements into its language.
I seem to recall reading that as part of the romanization effort, Kazakhstan will also consider spelling reform, so that there will probably not be an exact one-to-one correspondence between the current Cyrillic spelling and the new Latin spelling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_Alphabet
In addition, some of the Cyrillic letters currently used represent two phonemes rather than one - notably letters like "ё", "ю", "я". These would be more naturally represented by "y" + vowel in a Latin-based alphabet.
The alphabet is very regular; it's easy even for non-fluent speakers to perfectly guess the spellings of words.
Of course it is better than the mess English is, but there are still many exceptions, silent letters, dypthongs, etc.
For an almost phonetic language try Italian, for a completely phonetic one try Serbian with the Cyrillic script.
Russian here, I can assure you it decidedly is anything but compact. It frequently annoys me how verbose some things in it are compared to English.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Краткость - сестра таланта.
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6:3!
It is likely that the Russian language will continue to play a strong role in Kazakhstan, so many people will probably need to know both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets, once the transition takes place.
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AF%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B8...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhsta...
My wife is from Kazakhstan, but her ancestors are from Ukraine, and they moved to Kazakhstan during the USSR. Her family only know a few words of Kazakh, and this is relatively common for people who were born and grew up in the USSR. Right now, you cannot get a good job in the city unless you are fluent in Russian, although there is a lot of pressure to move everything to the Kazakh language.
In the past, the pressure was so strong that some official government forms were only made available in Kazakh. But they have reverted that decision, so now everything is still available in both Russian and Kazakh.