Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
news.mn
news.mn
I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure.
With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it.
With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.)
It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge.
I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.
The right fix is to ensure that the major browsers (and editors) handle this properly so that there is no urge to hijack scrolling. Mongolian is not the only vertical script.
> And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right
Amen.
I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.
It’s not a Microsoft problem at all: it’s that the web platform simply doesn’t support getting this type of scrolljacking right. It’s just not possible due to how scrolling is handled in the browser, how wheel events work, and the platform’s propensity to asynchrony (so that not only is it not supported, it can never be supported). The best you can achieve is to detect OS and browser and guess at how it’s going to behave, and emulate its functionality. And quite apart from how such things change over time, that’s not guaranteed to work at any particular time: such configuration is flexible per OS, and hardware (which you can’t detect reliably) can influences how it will do things as well. Inertia is a particularly good example of that: it varies in all of these ways, by hardware, by OS, by browser and by configuration in all three of these places. Now I don’t have macOS handy, so I can’t see how it handles the scrolling there. Perhaps that site’s developers (or some library they use) has done that emulation and tuned it for macOS, but not elsewhere.
Obviously it shouldn't interfere with touch scrolling, which is sometimes also done on laptop device screens (which typically conform to the desktop experience by default).
The closest I've worked with is a booking website for an international parcel delivery company. We offered the application in idk, dozens? of languages. Hebrew was one of them, it's a right-to-left language and our whole website became right-to-left when switching to that, so the main menu was on the right instead of the left, things like that. Great work by our CSS people.
This is incorrect. They originated in the LTR writing systems of India, which is why the full name is Hindu-Arabic Numeral System.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals
If you read Arabic, this is clear because the numbers are written in the opposite direction as the words.
> they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right.
Only the ones and tens place are read from the right - which many languages do, including English in the 'teens' words:
thir-teen == three and ten
four-teen == four and ten
fif-teen == five and ten
In modern Arabic, the hundreds and above are read left to right.
For example:
42: ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)
142: maa'a (100) wa (and) ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)
I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first, but if it did then the historical transmission into Europe may have entailed two flips of numeric endianness.
The Sanskrit language (exemplifying the "Hindu system") had the same pattern as English for the teens, i.e:
11: ekadaśa = eka (1) + daśa (10)
12: dvadaśa = dva (2) + daśa (10)
13: tridaśa = tri (3) + daśa (10)
etc ..
In Sanskrit this pattern (least significant non-zero digit spoken first) continues through to larger numbers. so:
20: vimśati
21: ekavimśati
120: vimśati-śatam
1121: ekavimśati-śatam-sahasra
etc.
But it's important to remember that the spoken rendering of numbers in all these languages precedes the written representation by millenia. People have been counting much longer than they have been writing. Of course later ways of speaking the numbers may have been influenced by writing systems, but the spoken rendering of basic smaller numbers tend to be relatively stable over time.
But I thought they originated in India, where left-to-right scripts were in use, which is why Arabic is bidirectional with the digits written left-to-right.
And one of our most common mistakes when speaking English is saying the number wrong. For example, 85 is pronounced fünfundachtzig, five and eighty, but it would not be uncommon for a German to misspeak in English and say fifty-eight.
I wonder if this has anything to do with what you wrote?
I found that surprisingly interesting.
Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.
This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in the 15th century by King Sejong.
However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today, usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong), but in newspapers it may be written as 大統領, which are the matching Chinese characters.
Also, most Korean parents choose Chinese characters to write for their children's names, which read (more or less, as Korean does not have tones) the same as the Korean characters.
I navigate from time to time to Korean website, very few occasion they actually uses Chinese characters, except:
1. Some countries names. 中(China)/美(US)/日(Japan)/北(North Korea)
2. Blue House (think of it as Korean's White House, representing the headquarters of the administration), sometimes referred as 青(Blue).
3. The president's surname, sometimes referred as 文(Moon)
Except for those very limited cases, I don't think Korean people are actually using Hanja anymore, it almost feel like some sort of emoji for then, that they probably can't read it, just comprehend the meaning.
As to Korean names, yes I think they still have a Chinese name registered somewhere, but no longer required and not shown on their government ID card.
The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, there are many exceptions to that, but the mix of scripts has benefits for parsing text.
Obviously, the Japanese writing system is not a single constructed system like Hangul, but I don't see any reason why it is inefficient (aside from, perhaps, the time required to learn kanji for school children).
I think it was linked to dyslexia and languages with spelling and maybe japanese, and how china simplified it's characters led to higher literacy, although that might have a few confounding variables.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
No, actually there was two pushes in modern times. One advocating the use of romaji (or even French) which did not succeed.
Then there was a set a post-WWII reforms that aimed to simplify the script by: standardizing kanji use (eg 言う instead of 言う or 云う), standardization of kanji readings (当用漢字), kanji stroke simplification (新字体), dropping the old kana usage (旧仮名遣), standardization of kanas themselves to get rid of 変体仮名. The convention also shifted from using katakana everywhere where kanji are not used to the mix of kanji/hiragana/katakana of today. So yes, the Japanese script changed quite a lot recently.
There is also an advantage that most foreigners do not realise. The mix of Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana create natural delimiters in the sentence and make spacing useless.
Reading Japanese fully written in Hiragana is currently much harder due to the lack of delimiters between words. The mix of hiragana, katakana and Kanji allow a very high density per character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
Its history will also tell you what it meant for Chinese characters to be adopted by China's neighbors.
Not so quick, there are design decisions that deliberately carry over certain fundamental features from Chinese:
1. The script is not linear at its unit of writing, but fills a square with its base components from left to right, top to bottom (「한글」, not 「ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ」; analogue 「韓字」, not 「十早韋宀子」). 2. One unit represents precisely one syllable. 3. Vertical writing retains the orientation of units (not rotating 90°).
But Turkish seems to fit a latin script quite well, and the previous Arabic/Persian wasn't a "native" script for a Turkic language either, I think.
Aa Ăă Ââ Ee Êê Ii Oo Ôô Ơơ Uu Ưư Yy
On each of which you can add 5 different tone marks: https://vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/
Plus there are diphthongs and triphthongs (look at the zero coda and off glide coda columns): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#ref_Notes
Disclaimer: I know stuff all about Tiếng Việt, but it seemed really hard to learn how to hear and say the sounds when I tried for a few days with private lessons. Using so many diacritics modifies the Latin alphabet so much that it becomes something else...
The Khmer alphabet seems to have 33 consonant letters, 15 vowels, 16 "dependent vowels" (which look to attach like an accent to a consonant), and 12 diacritics.
Since I don't have any knowledge of either language, I don't know if this is better.
A speaker of French, Polish, German, Hungarian or Turkish can muddle through trying to pronounce another European language using the Latin script and get 95% of it but will have no idea of how to read Vietnamese.
The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.
Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ...
Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ...
Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“
There are downsides to any situation. E.G:
- cost
- available resources for education and work
- adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other
I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing.
It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves.
Language preservation is overrated. Sure, it's nice. But compared to one day, having the entire earth speak the same language, be able to communicate and understand each other better? Small price to pay.
It get why they do it. Mongolia is a very peculiar culture, and I don't think it benefits much from mondialisation. Quite the contrary. And it's a way for their society to break from a painful part of their history.
But to me, it seems, at least on the long run, a step backward. Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity. There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information.
Granted, the cyrillic alphabet is not very universal, but it is certainly more common than the traditional mongolia alphabet.
Now since I don't live there, I may be missing some crucial informations. Maybe the population still massively use the old alphabet unofficially and it makes sense. Maybe the use of the cyrillic alphabet brough problems I can't see.
So of course, I'm not the right peson to judge the situation.
But I wanted to bring a counter point to this the enthusiastic parent comment. We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
And that's not necessarily a good thing. It is not just a language that dies, but a part of the culture also dies with the language. I do get the appeal of the world having one language, but attaining it at the cost of diversity would be a _big_ price to pay.
I speak a southern Indian language called Malayalam (34 million speakers). There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live. Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture. I am not claiming that change is bad, simply arguing that preserving a language might help preserve a culture.
[1] IIRC there's been some scientific literature on this. I'll look it up and edit this post when I get time
I've often seen this claim, for all kinds of languages, sometimes even between two standard varieties of a single language. For a particular reason, I like to dig deeper. Invariably, the people making this claim are not very educated in linguistics, so it's not wonder this statement comes out wrong. And it is wrong. I challenge them to disprove me with a single counter example, and they are eager to do so. Typically the conversation goes like this:
Them: "You see, in my language we have ⅏⁝⏏⌸." Me: "And what does it mean?" Them: "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." Me: "You just translated it perfectly, congratulations."
What they mean is: "there often is not a single corresponding foreign word or phrase for a word or phrase in my language", and that's fine; but very far removed from "untranslatable".
But it's about how certain concepts are easy to say in one language -- they fit like a glove -- and hard to say in another. So if they're hard to say, you wind up not saying them, and it changes what people communicate, which changes the culture.
In Brazilian Portuguese you can say "ai que saudades!" or "que malandragem!" which, poorly translated mean respectively, "I missed you!" and "What scoundrel-ness!"
But those translations miss the entire connotation and strength and context -- they're just plain inaccurate. And yes you can take an entire paragraph to explain the nuances of what they actually mean... but not in normal conversation.
Even when I'd speak in English with Brazilian friends, sometimes to explain a certain social situation we had to revert to Portuguese words, because there just aren't English words that fit the frames people understand Brazilian social situations in.
So the main claim that losing language means losing culture still stands 100%.
"Untranslatable" obviously doesn't mean the concept can't be explained if you're given a few sentences or paragraphs. It means there isn't an equivalent word or phrase that can be employed in normal everyday usage.
You can also think of it when translating movie subtitles, which I've done a little of in the past -- you only have a "normal" amount of on-screen space to fit your translation in. Some words just don't have anything you can translate to in the reasonable space. They're untranslatable.
Brings up another thing: when folks 'translate' a piece into English and substitute English phrases for the original author's idion. Frustrates me no end. I may have wanted (always want) to learn something about the culture the piece was written in/for. Such bastard translations wall me off from even guessing what the author said or meant. Just some watered-down elevator-music meaning, because the translator thought I was not smart enough to understand the original.
In one of the languages I speak, "hucci" means stupid, but in fun, loving way. Stupid just doesn't cut it.
That is linguistic relativity / Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1], and intuitively I think it does hold. On the most simple level, there are groups of people who do not have a name for a certain color and they simply can not distinguish them from a related color which may be very obvious to us. And in fiction there is of course Newspeak from 1984.
So yes, I think killing off all other languages apart from English / Mandarin / Esperanto is a bad way to go, I'd rather go for early bi- or triligualism.
You can place where I grew up in the UK to within about 20 miles based on the word we used for lunch. Like the difference between bagged lunch (en-us) and packed lunch (en-gb) I suppose.
Sometimes people want/demand change in the direction of modernity too. I think during 1911 revolution in China, the people were really fed up with the system in place for centuries that they wanted it totally rid off; there was very serious discussion about adopting Esperanto as the language of the new republic.
No, there wasn’t. As a former Esperantist (very dedicated and active at the organizational level in UEA), I remember a lot of these claims being pitched to the public about how Esperanto was so esteemed here or there in history that it was almost used officially, but if you actually looked into the facts, never was serious consideration given to using Esperanto. At best there was just one or two government officials involved in these historical events who were Esperantists themselves, but they had no influence in this regard.
These are the sort of disingenuous claims about Esperanto that Marcus Sikosek sought to debunk in his book Esperanto sen mitoj, and they do more harm than good to Esperanto and they make the movement look kooky.
Nothing is 100% gain or loss.
But I believe there is nothing in our current situation that is worth more than having a united humanity, which can only happen if well all can understand each others.
> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live
It's ok, you can use the native word in an english sentence. English does that all the time: "je ne sais quoi" (french), "taxi" (turkish), "pizza" (italien), etc.
> Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture.
Yes. Change is inevitable anyway. But we can choose to change in one direction. I think the direction of uniting the human specie is the best choice.
> preserving a language might help preserve a culture.
I'll exchange my own entire french cultural heritage in a blink if suddently I could make the entire world speak one common language.
But it doesn't have to be.
A culture is not this immutable things we think it is. Most thing we call ancestral are really just the result of a continuous transformation process that have the same flavor, and so that we identify as stable. Even centuries old religions have been changing all the time.
So culture will change as well. It will adapt, and keep what is meant to be kept, then drop the rest.
We will lose some valuable things in the process, but to gain much more.
My second language is Spanish, and seeing an English word in Spanish text just looks wrong to me, never mind that Spanish is full of Arabic loanwords.
I was really curious how "red" [es] came about for "internet" [en], but I see it's from Latin word for web/net.
Also, I've not studied Spanish at all this just made me view "retina" in a new way, cool.
The latter does not inevitably follow from the former. "Language protection" has been a big thing in Finland inasmuch as the Finnish intelligentsia has historically preferred coining new words from Finnish roots instead of adopting foreign vocabulary (so tietokone for ‘computer’) and there is heavy state subsidy for local cultural productions in Finnish, but Finns nevertheless have great proficiency in English.
> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.
What? Latin died as a native language by splitting up into a large series of dialects across Europe that were no longer mutually intelligible by the late first millennium. Europe did not gain any uniformity by that process.
Some subject always loses out when you need to teach something extra. Education is not infinite.
As for "Efficient communication is probably the most important factor in peace", that kind of idealism doesn't hold in practice. The peoples of Yugoslavia could efficiently communicate with each other because they shared essentially the same language, but it still didn't stop them from descending into brutal warfare. Even today, peoples of two antagonistic countries can often communicate with one another in English, but they go on despising each other nevertheless.
Strongly disagree. Who are we to decide which aspects of someone else’s culture are worth saving, and which can be thrown under the bus in the name of efficiency?
Why not architecture, or dress, or food, or religion? Are you only taking issue because this one has a particular impact on computers?
> We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
What is our purpose, without culture? We’re not robots.
All of these have a very limited use as a means of conveying information, mostly because the medium itself is static.
> or religion?
Funny you would mention religion. Christianity, Islam and Judaism mention the tower of Babel or something similar to it, implying that splitting the humanity into many languages was God's punishment for defiance.
"6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."
If we are to believe this, then returning to one language for the entire humanity would simply be a return to our most natural, original state as was meant by our creator.
So when Latin evolved into French, Italian, Spanish, ... we gained uniformity? I'm not convinced!
seems it is used a lot already - they are just making it a standard.
Curiously, native English speakers have a terrible ability to speak French (even though they are not as protective of their language). Personally, I think that this is because these two languages, despite being “neighbors” and in some respects related, are at different extremes of some kind of phonetic spectrum. (Learning the written language, on the other hand, is a breeze and fun.)
Even if it was true, why would this matter? Just because you share an alphabet doesn't mean you can understand each others culture.
> It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves.
Such as?
> Mongolia is a very peculiar culture
What's peculiar about it? It's no more peculiar than any other culture. But I'm guessing you meant it's a unique culture. But even then, it's not. It's part of the greater nomadic central asian culture.
> Language preservation is overrated.
If that was true, we'd all be speaking latin. Thank god for language preservation, otherwise, we wouldn't have shakespeare, mark twain and the world's most productive language. Think about all the art, history, culture, value that would have been lost had people like you succeeded in the past.
> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.
Simply not true. The "death" of latin brought linguistic/cultural/etc diversity. When european nations started teaching in their own national languages and when they started worshipping in their national languages rather than latin, it created more diversity.
> We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
Why doesn't it benefit our species? You act like if we all used the same alphabet and spoke the same language, we'd have some kind of utopia. You act like people who speak the same language don't have wars with each other, don't brutalize each other and have cultural differences.
It seems like you've bought into the globalist monoculture nonsense. Where we all think alike, talk alike, eat in the same fast food joints and live alike in cities that all look alike. For our species sakes, I hope not.
Mongolia’s elites adopted Buddhism and their intelligentsia has historically looked to Tibet. That has greatly set Mongolian culture apart from the peoples of Central Asia, who adopted Islam. Also, Mongolic is a completely different language family from Turkic.
I'm not sure this is a compelling argument.
We have contemporary musicians who have written and performed songs in different languages, not just their own. Indeed, we have many examples of non-native English speakers doing very well in US charts that have album sales in the millions. Therefore I am pretty confident that Shakespeare and Mark Twain would have been fine if they had to write in Latin.
Even if not these two specifically, who would have the temerity to assert that we would not have had different but equally talented people writing in Latin in their place?
So they might have written great latin literature, but we'd still lose out on great english language literature.
It's stilly to say we should get rid of spanish, german, russian, etc literature since we'd still have great english literature. Nobody in their right mind would say that. Just because if everyone spoke latin and we'd have great latin literature doesn't mean that we don't lose anything. We'd lose english literature.
Your comment essentially backed my point. Isn't it great to have both ancient greek and english rather than only ancient greek? Ain't diversity great?
If anything, I see an argument for being bilingual, not for English as the only language.
No matter how convenient it is for me, I do not want the entire world to only speak English and follow western culture trends. I would much rather have the diversities that make the world rich.
Not only that, but I can assure you, Westernized culture absolutely doesn't "have it right." We have power for historic reasons and that power, I would argue, has unrightfully supplanted alternative ways of life that may arguably be better. We need other languages, we need other cultures, we need other forms of government policy. These diversities give us references to look upon and improve our own culture in ways or fix things that just aren't quite right.
[1] http://www.csun.edu/~sk36711/WWW/KAG/ch2.html
I'm sure everyone will start using it because I want them to ;-)
Decolonizing from who? From Russia? Mongolia was never colonized by Russia, it was the other way around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%...
I think it is important that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not tourists. If people there is more familiarized with this vertical system than left-to-right with a latin alphabet, I do not think it is fair to call it "less approachable".
I notice that in our family and friends of immigrants, the parents who were fluent in English and able to access all the resources in English, were able to provide their children better advice and their kids are more economically successful than those who didn’t have that resource.
2. You're talking about people who immigrate to an English speaking country, correct? Good advice for people living in Mongolia surely is available in Mongolian.
Mongolians today learn English, at least the guy who went to Sweden to work as a chef that I talked to a couple of years ago did.
All of their parents sent them to English schools, and all business is done in English. You use the native language to talk to old or poor people, but nothing that can make you a living.
So in my experience, all that time I spent learning that native language more than what I needed to for casual conversation was a waste of time.
Your comment is the less human thing I have read in a while, and I spend a huge amount of time reading generated code!
I'm not blaming my elders or anything, I'm sure they were most well intentioned and they don't know the future, but I think my time could have been better spent. And I know there's many things I've wasted my time on, but I am simply stating my belief the future utility of some languages is not worth the cost of keeping them alive.
A language is a tool, but it is also much more. In particular, it is much more than a tool to make money.
I don't know you, maybe you are a wonderful person. Maybe you could have done better things with your time than learning that language (I do not know how much time you invested or your possibilities to use it), but reading your comment made me feel bad.
I didn't mean to imply that language is only worthwhile if you make money from it. But time is a finite resource, and unless you really like learning different alphabets or something, there is no utility gained for 99.9% of people in learning one that no one else is going to use.
Learning how to speak a language is orders less time intensive than a reading and writing an alphabet. I'm glad I speak it fluently, and can converse with elders and poor people. But reading and writing it will never come into use for me.
This very charitably assumes that this is the will of Mongolian people and not just the will of the government.
Nowhere in the article does it mention that there was a referendum on this, and I am certain that almost anyone on HN would agree that one is necessary for a change as serious as this, upheaval of the language itself would have very serious consequences that could potentially last centuries.
I do not know anything at all about Mongolian writing systems to know what would be better. I was just pointing out that assuming that people in Mongolia could prefer their old system instead of English, and that is the opinion that counts. I agree with you that this opinion is not necessarily the one of their government.
A referendum may be necessary but, again, I do not know enough about the situation to know if this is the case. For example, if the party in power had been elected by a large margin and this was the main point of their program, it may be not so necessary, although I still think it would be the right thing to do according to democratic standards.
>I do wonder how easy it will be for the whole nation to switch from one alphabet to another when they're so drastically different.
The software support is more concerning than that, I guess. The traditional script is being taught in schools, and is often used along with Cyrillic. The idea of returning to it is not new either. In Inner Mongolia, its use is obligatory in many cases.
Hong Kong would probably be better off if it had remained a British colony.
"During the Italian rule, infrastructure to connect major cities, railways, public and private companies, and dams providing power and water were built; this along with the influx of Italian settlers and labourers, was the major cause of rapid urbanization growth. Also, the Italian government abolished slavery, a practice that existed in the country for centuries."
And this wasn't even the British Empire, these were the literal fascists of Mussolini.
>should we reunite the USSR?
A controversial topic, to say the least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...
"On March 17, 1991, in a Union-wide referendum 76.4 percent of voters endorsed retention of a reformed Soviet Union. The Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova boycotted the referendum as well as Checheno-Ingushetia (an autonomous republic within Russia that had a strong desire for independence, and by now referred to itself as Ichkeria). In each of the other nine republics, a majority of the voters supported the retention of a reformed Soviet Union."
It's not like European countries like UK and Spain do not have member regions/nations that are very happy with the will of the majority, e.g. Brexit.
But yes, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa obviously benefited hugely from colonialism and nobody would want them to revert to stone-age tribal society.
Why is it good?
The person above you has not said that mutual intelligibility is bad.
You want people to share their culture with you, yet you are fine with them throwing away something which acts as one of the backbones of their cultural history for the sake of an imagined increase in cooperation.
And also, why does everything have to be useful? The useless things in life are often the best. Like ice cream, poetry, wasting an afternoon away, or hacking. In fact that's why I work, to enjoy the useless things in life.
Communication, is for communication. Yes, it's good to have localised codes, domain languages, private communications; quirky ways to make crypto-poetry, or to create artistic expressions.
But we, IMO, should be very wary of placing those above or ability to communicate effectively with as many people as we're able.
In Welsh counties of the UK school children are forced to learn Cymraeg, a language that doesn't help them access any other cultures, not communicate with any other people they can't already (except literally one or two pre-schoolers).
Cymraeg is very interesting and holds together part of the story of UK, my home country, but for communication it's a bad choice.
I've no problem with people choosing to learn languages for purposes other than communication; but forcing schoolchildren to learn a second language that's near useless [compared to global modern languages] as a communication tool, that's awful.
Yes to historic languages; no to forcibly separating peoples through choosing purposeful separation via language.
It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a square peg of an alphabet in a round hole of a language.
That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they use different letters.
Eg German and French have a simplification every few decades (done by a central process) and a regular process for introducing/recognising new words. In German the words are based on common usage; in French more by committee decision as they want to avoid too many loan words - so "digital" in German is "digital", in French it's "numérique" which was invented specifically to avoid "digital" being the main word, but either way the spelling was normalised at some point).
I can't find a link right now, but there was an interview with a French linguist who explained the history of the grammar and how it came about. Was quite an eye opener and helped making some sense of why it is so bizarre.
Apparently, as recently as in the 1950s, both palatalized ("soft") and non-palatalized ("hard") /n/ in the second syllable of this word were recognized as variants of the normal pronunciation in Russian dictionaries.
This has and always will be the case with spelling vs pronunciation. Pronunciation tends to change much faster over time than does spelling.
This is far from being a general rule. Your example is an exception. Consider "мера", "монета", "обмен" and so on. You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases.
I obviously failed to communicate that properly yet that's exactly what I meant.
> Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts
That's not me. For a spectrum of reasons I believe it's great if whoever having a relevant idea/opinion shares it, even if it's wrong, let alone different from mine. So I don't downvote anybody ever (but in some extremely rare exceptions perhaps).
Ok, sorry for false accusations. I, too, never downvote anyone for the same reason.
As the sibling comment says, it doesn’t, at least not anymore. It is to a large extent traditional. The current Russian writing system is essentially the same as it was in the early 18th century, when it determinedly deviated from the Church Slavonic. There was a spelling reform right after the Bolshevik revolution in the early 20th century, but it was not particularly significant — they just abolished a couple of letters and forbade the use of a particular letter in the end of words. Since the 18th century, the Russian pronunciation has of course evolved (and anyway, there is no such thing as the Russian pronunciation; there are always dialects). Which, inevitably, has led to deviations between the spelling system and whatever was the standard pronunciation at the time.
It does not? Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?
Look at Czech or Korean. Nothing is 100% perfect but these are pretty close to.
> For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?
Use å ;-)
For example, the letter ㅎ (h) is not pronounced in a lot of cases. Some other consonants are reduced depending on their position in the syllable, etc.
The illusion that Korean is "pronounced as written" is created by the fact that Koreans are extremely happy when you learn to speak their language at all. I as a Russian speaker would also rather hear you pronounce Russian words as they are written than not try to learn Russian at all :) But as soon as you start working on sounding as close to native as possible, that illusion of simplicity quickly breaks down.
My point is that different people pronounce things as they are used to, reflecting it in a writing system leads to complexity and inconsistency.
perhaps in Geordie dialect!
it's actually closer to the "o" in "thought"
In fact that's how we tend to recognise a language even if we don't speak it at all.
You can have fadas in URLs e.g. seán.dev using a technique called Punycode.
Ogham is another Irish script and is vertical but unique in Unicode because its space charcter is a line - the only language to do so.
This can be done without key combinations or a charmap: aáªàäâãåąæ
Is this possible on Windows or Linux? I constantly toggle between 3 keymaps.
Efficient communication is probably the most important factor in peace.
As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or "thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at least sound out words in the current script, but pretending Mongolian is pronounced like Russian won't get you anywhere. The language bears virtually no resemblance to any other major language, and even recognizable loan words seemed to be few and far between.
Any software they use today should be adapted to work with the traditional script. How are they going to mix their new script with Latin-based or Cyrillic scripts? What about adding math to the mix? I hope they invest in solving these issues, it would be very interesting to see the outcome.
The current situation is this: "As of 2015 there are no fonts that successfully display all of Mongolian correctly when written in Unicode" [1], meaning that specialized software using Private Use Areas of Unicode are the only way to typeset it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#Font_issues
If you're learning to read Latin (etc) script for the first time, it doesn't much matter what it's orientation is - they're just symbols.
It's not uncommon to write capital-E with cursive strokes so it's a reflected or rotated 3, and lower case m and w are sometimes written similarly - so as to be very close to rotated versions of the same character.
Handling left-to-right localization is "easy" enough with translations and making sure you can handle a little extra text overflow. And right-to-left is fairly "trivial" in simply mirroring the UX wireframe. Extra work, sure, but nothing too conceptually complicated.
But what are best practices for handling vertical scripts? Is it basically just rotating the UX 90° and working around the fact that images (like photos) are going to fit into your layout with a reversed aspect ratio? Because while it seems like that might work OK for some webpages, it won't for apps that are designed specifically for portrait or landscape mode on a phone/tablet...
Also, is Mongolian the only script that can only be written vertically? I can't find any others on Wikipedia. (Chinese was originally vertical, but is easily adapted to horizontal.)
Culturally I celebrate diversity, but from a UX localization standpoint the additional layer of complexity is... yikes.
Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and dialect?
Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work it is to translate materials to a language, it will stop to be done: let the automatic system do that for you!
Then, people will be able to mix and travel more, exchange more, and so they will.
In this env, and using translation again and again, people will start to pick up whatever language is the most common.
Eventually, what is not useful will diseapear, only artefacts that we can translate automatically, will remain.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape...
We will develop different ways of thinking or improve the language we use.
I don't think there is anything in what we currently have that can compare to a united humanity. And this only can happen if we all can understand each others.
I also don't particularly see the usefulness or relevance of everyone speaking one language for the overwhelming majority of people. Do a Chilean farmer, a Mongolian oil worker, and an American programmer need to communicate with each other on a regular basis? And if they did, would this be worth replacing thousands of years of local culture and language?
There were a few campaigns where various western countries tried promoting their alphabets over native writing systems. Some succeeded (e.g. Vietnamese) and many others failed. Trying to completely change the language is an even bigger stretch. Places like India have a long history of English, but few Indian people speak pure British English. Most will throw a mix of perfectly pronounced English words in the middle of a sea of their local language. English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so many people.
It'll be interesting to see the hybrid blend of English/Chinese/Spanish/Arabic that everyone learns in school.
Doesn’t India have its own English dialect - similar to the US, Australia, etc.?
There has been some synchronisation with other English locales due to the effects of globalisation, but not a great deal. Beyond that, it does have some deviations from British English as it was in the days of the Empire, mostly due to grammatical misunderstandings becoming common and thus standard, or linguistic patterns from local languages making their way into English; the two examples that spring most immediately to my mind (as an Australian currently in Hyderabad): “very less” instead of “very little”, and a gratuitous “only” suffix where other dialects would either omit it or place it earlier in a sentence.
Concerning fiblye’s point: in cities, you’ll hear a fair smattering of English words when people are speaking their local languages. In rural areas this happens much less.
With electing Trump or voting for Brexit native English speakers do not seem to care much.
Ireland now has the biggest natively English speaking population inside the EU. More than ever the EU is a German-French organization.
English.
Certain human languages are definitely more suited for certain topics; talking about music in Italian is no doubt richer than in English (especially considering that many English music words are just Italian imports.)
We'd also see ad-hoc private languages develop on the fly in between people or machines. This already happens on a micro-level, but technology would make it far easier to implement.
Seems like a beautiful future to me.
And the "richness of expression" argument doesn't really hold water in such a reality – if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese", then your magical auto-translator presumably won't be able to actually convey what you're trying to convey if you say it in Chinese and want it translated to English. If the translator can accurately express your meaning, then the initial premise is invalid, no?
I didn't say that there are things that can't be easily expressed, but rather that certain languages are better suited for expressing certain things, or at the very least, opinionated in particular desirable ways. We're talking about the form, not the content.
In any case, yeah, I might be mixing the idea of a cyborg that speaks/understands all languages with a universal translator machine. It seems like these two things will eventually coalesce, though.
I find it worrying that some in this thread oppose this move on technical grounds. As an industry, software has to acknowledge that technology is subordinate to the needs of people, not the other way around. Especially in this case where the technical barriers are wholely artificial.
These moves seem to me like an aspect of the greater separatism and nationalism that has been infecting many nations.
This is still a bit lacking outside of Web pages, but generally work-arounds are in place which come with their own problems.
HN test: Монгол бичиг ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌
Totally separate thing, but I would love to see wider Baybayin use for Tagalog and related languages. I just love these pretty traditional orthographies!
So presumably this new announcement is actually banning the modern alphabet? The article isn't clear but that's implied as apparently supporting both will end in 2024. Adding an option is a very different proposition to removing all other options in my option but maybe the government are just announcing a plan to keep both and doing a really bad job at communicating that?
https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mon...
Per wikipedia, the script is not well supported. This is partly because letters have different forms depending on their position in a word. So "academia" would need to use 3 different symbols for all those "a"s. It has 26 actual letters but a lot more symbols to learn to allow for that. And (like a lot of alphabets) it's actually based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. So it's an import too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script
Per the article, 3m (of Mongolia's 3.17m) people use the modern alphabet. So this will be a huge disruption for 95% of the population of Mongolia.
There is no current way to translate (transliterate?) names directly from one to the other. So that will make ID documents either insecure or useless if they're in different languages, which they will have to be since we are talking about documents already printed...
Plus the time and effort to learn the new alphabet is time and effort spent NOT learning useful skills in a modern economy.
The only advantage seems to be to communicate with Mongolian Ethnicity people in China who are more likely to still use the old alphabet. Oh and something about throwing off the USSR?
I really hope this is just a badly translated announcement that no action will be taken...
Poor Mongolia, it aligned with USSR and now has to deal with China's rise as well. Long term prognosis is not good, as a nice chunk of "Mongolia" is already within China. Can't change geography
I wonder how much it deviates from the script used in Inner Mongolia.
As such, it is with a hint of sadness that I view this change.
Browser support for the complete set of this stuff is still a tad patchy; Firefox is best in general, but all the browsers have at least the basics.
But yeah, it mostly seems to boil down to rotating your app’s entire layout by 90°.
Yeah... even if CSS itself is, the browsers are not at all, not even close. Recently I tried to use a vertical `writing-mode` in a relatively simple application and encountered a massive amount of layout bugs and issues; it's pretty much totally broken in both Chrome and Firefox (unless maybe if you set everything to a vertical writing mode then it might kinda work?), and no one seems to care.
How much context do you have on Mongolian culture to be able to make this assertion? Honest question.
This feels pretty unintuitive
It's interesting to look at the Mongolian president's web page (https://president.mn/mng/): It scrolls horizontally. And see how it responds to the hamburger menu, for example.
Edit: Oh wait, the president's web page is itself a good example: Here is the English version (https://president.mn/en/).
I don't think the support is really there for vertical writing systems.
The mouse scroll scrolls right, selecting text works (with a horizontal cursor), the western text (dates, numbers and "Covid-19") embedded in the text are appropriately rotated.
"View source" shows the source text, and it doesn't look like there are any nasty tricks to support this.
Is anything missing?
Would you please share a link where I can download Mongolian Helvetica?
If you don't want to provide a font and just want whatever passes for sans-serif on a computer with Mongolian fonts installed, use font-family: sans-serif; in your CSS and let the OS handle it.
Here you would choose a Mongolian font and add it to the font-stack in CSS for that language, just as you would for Arabic or Chinese. If you want a grotesque typeface that matches Helvetica in style for Mongolian, use one.
This is hardly a coincedence that Cyrillic alphabet has broader support and adoption among fonts.
Having said that, the place to look for multiscript support in Helvetica would be Linotype’s Neue Helvetica World: https://www.linotype.com/5553118/neue-helvetica-world-family... . Unfortunately, while they currently support 103 languages, Mongolian isn’t among them. I guess if this restoration takes off it might become part of the next release.