For a recent case, look at Kazakhstan which is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin - https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-ch....
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.