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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

Turkic languages are split between Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic-based scripts. Kazakhs in Turkey, for example, already write in Latin script.

Is there an issue with Turkish scholarship of history since Ataturk pushed Latin-based alphabet?

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Literacy rate skyrocketed after switching to Latin from Ottoman Turkish alphabet

I don't think it's the same situation. Arabic alphabet is a particularly bad alphabet to write Turkic languages in (although it's ok, as wel all know since people used it for almost a millenia) but Cyrilic alphabet is already pretty close to Latin. Also, literacy in Turkey skyrocketed in 1930s not only because of alphabet change. It might have been a minor factor, but there were other factors and the government highly emphasized Western education, to the point it was totalitarian in most regions.

I've read comments here bemoaning that Turkish people can't read their grandparents' books. But for academic historians the bigger problem is whether the new constitution makes accurate history illegal.

According to the article, Turkish literacy was low at the time that change was enacted. Of course historians will cope but I'm talking about everyday people here.

Sure, but existing Latin scripts have their own equivalents; your everyday person probably could not read Fraktur, for example, and you'd be hard pressed to find a person who can read the original Beowulf: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Be.... Even scripts that haven't changed all that much, like Classical Chinese, are hard to read for modern readers without training because it is so archaic, even for those who use Traditional.

But that's why we have printing presses that make translations into contemporary scripts and vernaculars.

There's a difference between being unable to read ancient texts and being unable to read anything published before 2018. Most materials will never get the lavish treatment given to universally-recognized classics like Beowulf and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

All literature and formal documents were written in Classical Chinese until the May Fourth movement in 1919. All ROC documents were written in Classical Chinese until the '70s. Turkish went Latin in the '30s. Hanja has been effectively dead for only a few decades. That doesn't mean that any of those cultures lost context for the time periods before their switch to modern writing systems.

Before things were ancient, they were contemporary. Not teaching older scripts to everybody =/= no one knows older scripts.

In these examples the benefits to switching were much more obvious -- and the change I'm talking about did take place. Most Koreans, even with university-level educations, are simply unable to read texts making heavy use of hanja with no pronunciation guide.

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