The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and challenges of reversal (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and challenges of reversal (2020)

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154 pointsThevet139 comments

I am surprised that the article fails to mention that the traditional Mongolian script is, in fact, a form of the modern Aramaic script (Syriac). (This fun fact makes the history of Mongolian writing system much more interesting.)

Fun fact: the earliest alphabets in India, Iran, Syria are all descendent from Aramaic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet

IIRC, proto-sinaitic gave birth to Phoenician and Arabic (with some lost alphabets like Moabite in there somewhere). Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet, and its two children are Aramaic and Greek, with alphabets in the "east" being likely descended from Aramaic (Brahmi script, proto-Farsi and Parthian, Syrian) and those in the "west" descendent from Greek (Latin, Armenian, Cyrillic, Coptic). Thus you would in fact expect Mongolian, being in the east, to be an offshoot of Aramaic if you knew it had an alphabet (it could be like Mandarin without an alphabet). That's the real question -- does it have an alphabet or not.

I only say this because a lot of people think that Aramaic script is some exotic thing, but it was the official language of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, which was quite large, stretching from India to North Africa, and Aramaic was a lingua franca of that era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire

also Aramaic was the main language of the Roman province of Judea some 2021 years ago.

Aramaic was the common language of every place east of the Hellespont, including Palestine, and many (not all) jews in Israel had forgotten Hebrew and long ago adopted the Aramaic script even when they did write Hebrew. And from Babylon they adopted the Babylonian Calendar and names for some of the months. That was the subtext of the book of Jubilees, bemoaning how jews had forgotten the proper times and corrupted their calendars with foreign dating systems. That was an amazing and very crazy period if you were a jew trying to hold onto your tradition, because there was a massive Hellenizing push in the wake of Alexander's conquests, and gymnasiums were springing up all over, there was a concerted effort to promote Hellenization as the new "international" culture of global trade and enlightenment, and many jews were even getting surgeries done to undo circumcision as they tried to fit into this new internationalist world. Many were learning and embracing Greek philosophy and the Greek approach to science, as well as the greek language and culture. That created lots of culture wars as traditional factions fought the (pro-Greek) liberalizing factions, leading to revolts, massacres, and significant turmoil in the whole region. The Maccabean revolt can be viewed as an example of traditional counterattack against Hellenizing influences, as can the subsequent revolts against Rome. It's truly a fascinating time period. But remember that even though all those traditionalist revolts ended in disaster, it is in fact the traditional societies that survive to this day, whereas the Greek and Roman empires have long vanished.

> adopted the Aramaic script even when they did write Hebrew

Indeed, what we think of as the Hebrew alphabet is actually Aramaic (and Aramaic the language is now written using Syriac instead).

There was an original Hebrew alphabet. The Aramaic script was adopted when Israel was conquered by the Persian Empire as all the empire used Aramaic.

It's a good thing, though, the proto-Hebrew is much uglier (IMO) than the square script.

But judge for yourself which glyphs you prefer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet

Well Christianity is from a Hellenizing faction. That's still here.

Despite the fact that Koine ("common") Greek and Roman roads were used to spread Christianity, most converts didn't view themselves as "Hellenizing factions" or transmission vectors of Hellenistic culture anymore than they viewed themselves as Judaizers. But some did - it was a topic of much debate. The relationship (and philosophical differences) between Christianity, Hellenism, and Judaism is often discussed the in the letters of Paul:

"Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him."

Early Christianity is very different than the views and practices of Herod or Josephus, I'll grant you.

I suppose the most go-with-the-flow residents ended up as Arab Muslims after many rounds of assimilation. But there are many off-ramps along the way.

That's not really an accurate view. Christianity is open to absorbing anything good in any culture (logos spermatikos) and the Greeks were unrivaled in terms of philosophical and artistic sophistication. St. John couldn't convert the Greeks to Christianity until he made the connection between Christ and Logos (John 1) because Hebrew genealogies didn't mean anything to the Greeks. And then it clicked.

"Hellenizing" better describes the Seleucid influence, which lead to the Maccabean revolt, that not only led Jews to adopt Greek cultural practices and customs at odds with Jewish worship, but even to worshipping the pagan gods.

> But remember that even though all those traditionalist revolts ended in disaster, it is in fact the traditional societies that survive to this day, whereas the Greek and Roman empires have long vanished.

Might this not "just" be because those "fallen" empires largely blended into and became whatever came next--arguably barely even having an identity other than their government--while these separate smaller cultural groups chose to maintain their heritage (something "Rome" arguably didn't have any of to begin with) and so can be subjugated and suppressed but not destroyed? Like, to the extent to which Rome is even a thing with a culture as opposed to merely the world's most thinly-stretched government, I have seen a lot of historians now take the position that it was more of a decline than a fall, that depending on where you were that it might have existed for a very long time (a century? longer?) in a form where people on the ground might have only barely noticed changes, and that maybe it arguably even still exists in the form of greater western civilization.

The Babylonian Talmud is written in Aramaic, so it is not quite correct to equate Aramic with helenizing influence; also it would rather have been a neobabylonian/sasanian influence. Also all of the elite of Judae came back from babylonian captivity, and part of the Book of Ezra is written in Aramaic, just for a start.

Yet here we are, using the Latin alphabet, communicating in a language largely comprised of Romance and Greek words, and (me, at least) living in a world dominated by Western political ideas drawn almost completely from the Greco-Roman world.

I suppose that's right, but I do feel the Anglo-Saxon influence in the British system, and thus that of the US and many Commonwealth countries, doesn't get it's fair due.

There really isn't any direct line from the British parliament back to Rome or Greece, rather it derives from the Anglo-Saxon Witan and folkmoots. Yes this system was interrupted at the top by th Norman invasion, but it fought it's way back up the power structure into the Model Parliament which had actual elected commoner members. Imagine!

I'm sure Greek democracy influenced the process of voting at some point and Athenian democracy set an important cultural and historical precedent, but the principle of commoner representation came from the Anglo-Saxon traditions, at least in England.

And then there's the common law system of course.

>Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet

That would be Greek, since the Phoenician script is an abjad.

All the semitic languages omit vowels (although there are some mater lectionis). The vowel requirement is not required for alphabets, particularly in languages where vowels play a somewhat ambiguous role in the language itself. Even in modern Hebrew, the nikkud pointing system is only used for the Bible, if you read a newspaper or novel, you aint getting any vowels (again, excluding mater lectionis)

I'm aware of these things, except for the claim that "vowels are not required for alphabets", since capturing vowels has always been the distinguishing feature of alphabets compared to earlier scripts. Or perhaps maybe it works differently in English, who am I to tell.

> All the semitic languages omit vowels (although there are some mater lectionis).

I think it is just most. Maltese uses the Latin alphabet. Amharic and Tigrinya use Ge'ez which encodes vowel information. Also Arabizi, Arabic in Latin alphabet, is popular for writing local variations of Arabic.

The term "abjad" was introduced in 1990.

Phoenician is the ancestor of all alphabets, and does, in fact, begin "alef bet".

Whether you consider abjads a type of alphabet or a completely different thing is a matter of taste, but the genealogy is quite clear.

And the term "big bang" was introduced in the 20th century. Does that mean that that thing that happened thirteen billion years ago was not a big bang?

At least where I live, the term "alfabeta" refers very specifically to the Greek script, since that's where it comes from.

Philology isn't physics.

Your introduction of a term of art didn't advance knowledge here, and saying that Phoenician, being an abjad, wasn't the first alphabet, is meaningfully wrong in most of the ways that claim could be true.

Darius the Great (Darayavush) actually commissioned the invention of a cuneiform script for inscribing imperial monuments in Old Persian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform

The Achaemenids kings (Ha-Khaa-Manesh in Persian) were however eminently practical as far as imperial governance was concerned, and as you noted, continued the use of Aramaic, but never in monuments. Sogdians were an Iranian people, so it's likely that Aramaic script made its way into Mongolia via the vector of Persian empire's penetration of Transoxiana and subsequently the Sogdians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia#Language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugut_inscription

How is Arabic traced back to Phoenician when it looks much more like Hieratic[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic

I think it would be really interesting to learn more about the history of the region between ~Georgia and Mongolia before the USSR. It seems fantastic how the Turkic language group can be so geographically widespread as it is (there are languages belonging to it way up in Siberia), though TIL that Mongolian isn't Turkic.

And then the Mongols came from the other direction, unifying the area. What did that do culturally?

This is basically all I know about the area, but it seems extremely interesting.

The Turkic and Mongolian languages all came from the area around south Siberia and Mongolia. So ironically it is those Turkic people in Siberia who are the ones that stayed closest to home!

The Huns might have been a Turkic group, but that's hard to prove or disprove since we don't have any records of their language beyond names and a few words that were probably borrowed anyway.

Well the steppe the highway of Eurasia, so it makes sense those language families are strewn all over it.

One thing I've always been curious about with alphabet transitions like these is how people dealt with it. State newspapers might start printing in the new alphabet, but at what point did shop signs and handwritten correspondence switch over? Did everyone over schooling age stick with the old?

I think you’re grossly overestimating the level of literacy.

According to Wikipedia: "Mongolia has a high literacy rate, consistently rated around 98%" ([1]).

Which is not surprising given that Soviets always had put a special focus on strong educational system. They failed in many areas, but they did "liquidate illiteracy" everywhere they could ([2])

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Mongolia#:~:text=....

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez

You're grossly underestimating the level of education in Mongolia. Until the IMF-mandated austerity policies of the 90's, during which so many schools closed that many families couldn't even send their children to primary school anymore, and the remaining schools had to close in winter because they couldn't afford heating, Mongolia did not only have near-total literacy, but also one of the highest rates of tertiary education, that is, college education, in the world (not in the "third" world). Of course, since Mongolia has been blessed with the free market, living standards have been on a decline throughout the country, and nowadays, your offhand remark is more likely than not to have some substance. However, things have been improving again over the past decade or so.

The Western drive to assume that people in poorer countries are all uneducated seems to me to reflect something Hannah Arendt wrote about Soviet totalitarianism, namely that once Soviet propaganda had claimed that the Moscow metro is the only working metro in the world, there emerged a need to conquer the whole world, just so all other metros could be shut down to ensure the truth of the ideology.

He meant literacy before the Soviets. That went "whoosh".

I lived through it in Moldova (see my other comment as well, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27081059). In 1989 that is literally what happened, the whole country went from Cyrillic script to Latin script.

I took slightly over year IIRC for basically everything written in Romanian to go from Cyrillic script to Latin script. And it was very, very hard on many people, especially middle age and older. As various government jobs switched to Latin script, quite a few people where let go because they couldn't adapt to the new system quickly enough.

I was in school at the time, and I remember that even for us it took some adjustment. I think it took me at least several months to fully switch (I'm not a native speaker, and we Romanian was a mandatory class from second grade up).

A friend of my mother's, a native Moldovan with roots back to time immemorial, still struggles with Latin script even though it's been 30 years since the change.

I've heard that another effect of Sovietization in Mongolia was surnames.

Mongolians had surnames (strictly speaking, clan names) before the Soviet takeover. The Soviets abolished them, as part of an effort to get rid of the old aristocracy. Since then, Mongolians have been known officially either by a single personal name or by using their father's name in combination with their own.

In the 90s, there was an attempt to bring back surnames. People were given a free choice of which surname to adopt. Some people either still knew the surname their family had had before the Soviet era (because it had been passed down in secret), or were able to find it in local records. But a lot of people chose a name that had no history in their family, either because they didn't know their old surname, it had an unflattering meaning (like "Thief" or "Seven Drunkards"), or they simply wanted a different one.

The attempt was unsuccessful, in part because huge numbers of people chose to adopt Borjigin (Genghis Khan's clan name) as their surname.

interesting that the Cyrillic Alphabeth has a lot of variations [1] for example it's not identical for Ukraine and Russia, the Mongolian Cyrillic Alphabeth also has its variations: they add Ө and a second Ү [2]. For the Latin Alphabeth there are also quite a lot of variations [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets fascinating that Classical Latin didn't have the letter U, so they would have to write SPQR for all instances of IMPERIUM ROMANUM. But here it says they wrote V instead of U https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Roman-V-meant-to-mean-the-lette.... Nice rabbit hole...

Also the name Julius Ceasar would have to be spelled differently without the letter J in the Classical Latin script.

The Latin alphabet as used by the ancient Romans corresponds to the modern capital letters. More precisely, our capital letters corresponds to the alphabet used for inscriptions in stone or other hard materials.

The capital letter V was used for both the vowel u and for the consonant u (usually written "w" in English).

Many hundreds of years later when the alphabets that are the ancestors of the modern small Latin letters were developed for writing on parchment with a pen (i.e. goose feather), the small letter corresponding to the capital letter "V" was "u".

So, for some time, Latin was written using the pair capital "V" and small "u" for both the vowel and consonant "u".

However, in all Romance languages the consonant "u" (English "w") had changed its pronunciation to the fricative "v", so when writing modern languages there was a need to distinguish "u" and "v". That lead to the creation of the capital "U" and of the small "v", and "Vv" were assigned to the fricative, while "Uu" were assigned to the vowel.

As another detail of the "U" writing history, the letter "F" was used in Greek to write the consonant "u" (English "w").

However the Latin language had the fricative "f", which did not exist in Greek, and there was a need to have a letter for it. The Romans chose "F" for the fricative "f", which forced them to reuse "V" (previously used only for vowel "u"), for both the vowel and consonant "u".

So, the modern Latin alphabet has five letters that were originally used to write some variant of "u": F, U, V, W and Y.

("w" was introduced in English because they still had the consonant "u", unlike the Romance languages, where "v" was assigned to the fricative sound; "Y", a different graphic form of "V", was introduced by the Romans to write Greek words, because the Greeks no longer pronounced the vowel "u" like the Romans, but they pronounced it like the German "u" Umlaut or the French "u").

thanks! very interesting.

If anything Cyrillic differs between Ukraine and Russia, and Belarus has it’s own variation too. Also “forbidden nationalistic lettet ґ”

This is true of the latin alphabets as well

Mongolian script is unusual because of its orientation.

How do UIs handle the script? For example mobile chat applications.

The short answer is that they don't. Android flat out doesn't support vertical scripts so there's a library that reimplements a lot of UI components. iOS basically doesn't, but it's somewhat easier to work around. Chrome and Firefox can render the characters with appropriate fonts, but that can be uncommon and applications using them screw up. Electron apps generally render vertical scripts LTR for example.

This is based off 30 minutes of naive research; if someone knows better, please correct me. (No better way to get information than to say something wrong on the Internet.)

Most of the time, major or more sophisticated apps will just use Cyrillic (in Mongolia) or be written in Mandarin (in Inner Mongolia, CN). There are, however, web pages in the traditional script, which you can look at to get a sense of how a UI layout for a vertical script might work [0][1][2]. I also found a website with a full list, with many broken links [3].

From an encoding perspective, Unicode historically hasn't meshed well with Mongolian script, because of a surfeit of homographs. From what I can gather, Menksoft supports the most widely used alternative encoding method, which isn't Unicode-compatible. This apparently makes searching and indexing traditional Mongolian pages hard.

[0] http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home

[1] http://mongol.people.com.cn/

[2] http://www.nmg.xinhuanet.com/mg/

[3] http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbi...

This site seems to use Unicode, unlike your first link.

It's a bit disappointing that the British Library was unable to write the titles in their catalogue in Mongolian script.

"ᠮᠣᠩ᠋ᠭᠣᠯ ᠤᠯᠤᠰ ᠤᠨ ᠶᠡᠷᠦᠩᠬᠡᠢᠢᠯᠡᠭᠴᠢ ᠬ"

https://president.mn/mng/

The author mentions/complains about that late in the essay.

Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are primarily written vertically, in columns right to left: https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png The common exception is technical works, and translations, which from the early 20th century onward are often horizontal and left-to-right to allow using the Latin alphabet, math equations, etc.

Well, not quite. That was the situation until very recently. It's now mostly horizontal. Almost everything on a computer is horizontal. The first Korean newspaper to switch to horizontal text did so in 1988. It was universal by the mid-90s. Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers. But horizontal text is ascendant there too.

While those languages are basically compatible with writing in any direction, this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text. It was terrible when computer typesetting first took off. Even today for publication quality, it probably requires specialized software. So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software. The traditional writing system of several major world languages is simply not properly supported by most software, and much still fails completely.

An observation to close with: perhaps ironically, the Mongolian script is from the Syriac alphabet that went along the silk road route, and is distantly related to the Latin alphabet. It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese. It seems that rotating to get along is a recurring theme.

Modern Chinese punctuation marks don't really work in a vertical format.

I'm not fluent, but how so? The 。or ，or 、seem fine when centred. The《 and 》 or 「 and 」get rotated and also look fine. The bigger issue is Arabic numerals, and mixed case or long Latin alphabet words. (Though 2 - 4 letter acronyms like USA or FIFA, one per square, actually fit almost perfectly.)

I always thought bracket quotes looked exactly like what they are, a container for words: https://i.imgur.com/IlwSjnZ.png -- For example, this sentence is written in "vertical Chinese". (Screenshot generated with LibreOffice Write, which can just about handle basic documents in vertical format.)

OK, but now you're saying that, to get working punctuation, we need to replace every glyph with a different glyph. I view this as support for my claim that the existing glyphs don't work in that context.

It’s just presentation.

> It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese

Chinese (and Japanese and Korean), when written vertically, the collums are written right to left. In the Mongolian script, the columns are left to right, so I don't know how well it works with Chinese.

> Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers

Almost every book I have in Japanese, including Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, Kanji dictionaries, kids science books, temple books and even a bilingual Japanese and English Shogi book are written with vertical text (English is horizontal in this last one). My Japanese cookbooks have text in both directions.

Manga text is written vertically, to the point even most translated manga has their pages going right-to-left as their Japanese counterparts.

Japanese ebooks can be read vertically too: https://www.preining.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PW...

I also frequently see very recent Japanese lessons texts and questions all vertically.

So it's definetly not just on novels and some newspapers.

You are correct about the smart phone apps and software in general though.

> this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text.

Yes it can. I remember being able to print vertical Japanese almost 20 years ago.

> So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software

It does not have to be: https://tategaki.github.io/awards/

edits: orthography, added mention to ebooks

I’m not sure whether situations in CJK matters here, Mongolian seems cursive only to me. Cursive was not included in typed CJK texts and what remains is block forms which can be arranged in any orientation(though vertical top down and horizontal left to right are strongly preferred), so CJK are probably easier than Mongolian.

Unicode has reasonable support for combining forms these days in cursive and similar scripts: Arabic, Devanagari, etc.

Mongolian is, I suppose, the combination of everything tricky in text display. Ligatures and joining forms, vertical, left-to-right. I think it's the only living writing system with this particular combination.

A similar change happened in Moldova (which first was Autonomous Moldovan Republic as a part of Ukraine and then Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic within USSR after WWII).

Moldovan was declared a language similar to, but different from Romanian, and was given a Cyrillic script [1]. Even though Moldovan is at most a dialect of Romanian.

The Soviet Union was very direct but also very effective in changing entire cultural substrates of millions of people over a very short period of time. Giving languages under its influence Cyrillic scripts was a part of that.

Note: it's not all bleak and bad, as many indigenous people got their alphabets for the first time in history.

[1] Wikipedia has a very detailed page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1

One of the interesting parts of the OP is that they say Soviets moved to Latinise the scripts of all people as a move to unify Communist groups (second para under "Linguistic Revolution"). Then they simply say "Cyrillic became the preferred, unifying writing system" without explanation.

Roughly, latinization was a Lenin-era policy. However, when Stalin came to power he had different goals and philosophy than the preceding regime of Lenin. For one, Stalin abandoned the idea of spreading world revolution in favour of "socialism in one country", which in large part was about keeping the USSR (and, as its satellite, Mongolia) walled off from the outside world for the sake of tighter control.

For speakers of the USSR’s Turkic languages (Kazakh, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, etc.), latinization was therefore seen as harmful, because these languages are often fairly mutually intelligible with Turkish of Turkey, and a common-ish Latin alphabet would mean these peoples would be susceptible to anti-Soviet ideas coming from Turkey. Therefore, the Stalin-era language authorities not only gave them a new Cyrillic orthography, they gave each language a different Cyrillic orthography than the rest to fragment them even further.

In the case of Mongolian, Cyrillic helped better separate Mongolian of Mongolia from the mutually intelligible dialect of Mongolian spoken across the border in China.

Sounds pretty imperialistic for an ideology based on anti-imperialism.

> they gave each language a different Cyrillic orthography than the rest to fragment them even further

That doesn't seem correct to me. Different languages require different orthographies because they have different phonetics. Compare the Latin script when used for English to German to Vietnamese to Turkish. Same thing with the Arabic script with Persian and Urdu. When tailored orthographies aren't used, the written representation becomes a poor representation of speech. Though even then it might not have been a perfect fit in the first place, requiring digraphs or diacritics. Or the spoken language can diverge.

No, the Turkic languages of Russia often have very similar phonology, but the Stalin-era language planners intentionally chose different ways to orthographically represent identical features across the languages.

For example, Turkic languages typically feature front/back vowel harmony where stops are velar before front vowels and uvular before back vowels. This is represented differently in the Stalin-era Cyrillic orthographies for Karachay Balkar (к/къ), Kazakh (к/қ) and Tatar (just к with the following vowel letter showing the distinction). Bashkir neighbors both Tatar and Kazakh and is mutually intelligible with them, and it doesn’t differ at all in this feature, but its orthography was given к/ҡ just to make it different from the other two.

Wikipedia says in the article on "Languages of the Soviet Union": "After 1937, all languages that had received new alphabets after 1917 began using the Cyrillic alphabet."

If you've got a bilingual society I can imagine it makes life easier if both languages use the same alphabet, particularly in the days of mechanical typewriters. But think too about road signs, for example, which could be written in the local language but still mostly comprehensible for Russian speakers who don't know the local language if it's the same alphabet (though there's still the classic problem of "Why are half the streets round here called Einbahnstraße?"). Learning to read a new alphabet at speed is surprisingly difficult. I'm surprised by how hard it is for me, anyway.

The Soviets also imposed (badly needed) reforms on the alphabet and spelling of Russian itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography...), getting rid of two pairs and one trio of phonetically redundant letters and the totally unnecessary appending of hard signs to the end of many but not all words that had previously been required.

But see (if only as a “fun fact”), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Cyrillic_alphabet

To me, all that reversal attempts are deemed to fail. Last time I tried the traditional script, I was not even sure that I can write down my own name properly. It's got some twisted logic that whatever written in it does not always pronounce and/or mean similar to the one in its Cyrillic counterpart.

I was born in USSR and Mongolians were our Asian brothers, together with Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tadjiks and all the other tribes in the 'stans. I remember perusing Uzbekistan main daily in Tashkent as a young child, seeing gobbledygook in Cyrillic and thinking that it was really funny. My mother was had some really wealthy Mongolian clients who were parking money in USA real estate post 2009 meltdown and for a while they were visiting a lot. We had them over at my place and their Russian was remarkable. Basically everyone in the ruling classes was educated in USSR and spoke perfect Russian not only conversationally, but down to the cursing and jokes. My uncle went out with these guys to fish for flounder in Puget Sound and confirms pretty good command of those last two. They brought me a bottle of Chengiz Khan vodka with Cyrillic label and poitless flakes of gold in it that just sat there for a few years until I re-gifted it. Fun times. Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education, without barriers to entry that we have here in USA. Ken Alibek (https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological...) was one of the examples of going from village to bacteriological weapon design and on the strength of being smart.

The USSR was vast, which part of it were you born and raised in?

Burbs of Moscow. But my family traveled extensively, more than usual for average soviet person, so I've been to every republic but Tadjikistan (all of course now countries) before the age of 14. It sounds like a lot, but it was just a spot here and there, that empire is a vast and incredibly varied land full of so many different people and even more full of nothing human related, it is difficult to comprehend unless you experience it.

Basically you were the ruling class and think that's how USSR was for average person :)

You can't possibly know that.

> Burbs of Moscow. But my family traveled extensively, more than usual for average soviet person, so I've been to every republic but Tadjikistan (all of course now countries) before the age of 14

Here.

You're making the assumption that "travel a lot" implies "ruling class". Like I said, you can't possibly know that. You don't know anything about them, other than that they traveled a lot.

FWIW I have a friend from Azerbaijan who saw a lot of the USSR as well. I don't know the details, and there will likely be people here on HN with first-hand USSR experience who can tell me why my memory makes no sense. But his story was that there was money but you couldn't use it for much, except train tickets. They saved it up and then took epic train trips through the USSR, once up to Estonia and once east towards Kyrgyzstan (not sure they got that far though), stopping in every republic along the way.

His parents were a craftsperson and a high school teacher. Don't make assumptions about strangers on the internet.

> You're making the assumption that "travel a lot" implies "ruling class".

Not necessarily ruling but definitely highly privileged. You definitely could not just travel on a whim inside the USSR. You needed special permission from the government, which was most commonly (but not exclusively) given to people whose job depended on travel.

The restrctions might have been somewhat more relaxed in the middle of nowhere in Asia, but they were extremely strict for example in occupied Estonia where I'm from. You couldn't even travel inside the whole capital city of Tallinn, even if you yourself lived there. The city was divided into zones and there were border guards protecting these zones. You can only go to a zone that has a shoreline when you directly reside there. Otherwise you might try to escape the utopia. -- The restrictions of course go way beyond just Tallinn. Want to visit one of the 1500 islands of Estonia? Too bad, not allowed unless you live on the specific island. Want to just explore the countryside? Might be somewhat possible, but better be careful not to get close to any of the secret closed cities or any of the numerous missile silos, unless you want to be labled as a threat to the USSR.

> Not necessarily ruling but definitely highly privileged. You definitely could not just travel on a whim inside the USSR. You needed special permission from the government, which was most commonly (but not exclusively) given to people whose job depended on travel.

No, you did not need permission to travel inside the USSR. I don't know about Estonia, but we were living in Tashkent and before I was 13 I have visited Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Alma-Ata, Vilnyus, and several other places. All that travel was pretty much leisure. My parents were engineers - very not elite. On business my mom traveled to Tbilisi, Talinn, Baku and god knows where else. And yes, we lived in "the middle of nowhere in Asia" (aka Tashkent) and had been in pretty much every corner of a huge country.

There been a huge wave of post-Soviet immigration to New York in early nineties.

A certain amount of people still presume that people in that wave were all Soviet dissidents, intelligentsia, and repressed jews, and etc.

It only came to New Yorkers years later that whom they let in were faaaar from being some poor average Soviet citizens. CPSU members themselves, mafia, ex-spooks.

Back in nineties, an average Russian citizens would need to save for years just to buy a one way ticket to US, and legal paperwork.

Nobody, no regular person in early nineties Russia had money to just to fly to US, and buy a NYC apartment for cash.

A price of a NYC apartment was a few lifetimes worth of savings for even best paid people in union's government.

As a poor person who emigrated from USSR, this is borderline offensive.

I saw a lot of USSR as well. We lived in a 200 sqft apartment with no plumbing.

Not sure which barriers to entry you're thinking of, but Asian Americans, as a whole, are wealthier than White Americans, better educated, stay married more, commit much less crime, and live longer.

Your comment would have been much better without the unnecessary dig, which was also wrong.

Their comment was on people moving from traditional nomadic life to modern education within a lifetime. How are Asian Americans relevant to that situation in the slightest? Because both groups of people happen to be Asian?

You just witnessed modern US propaganda in action. We are all constantly barraged by messages about "if you look non-white you must be oppressed, poor thing". And because it is constant it is making people perform snap judgements rather than actually think.

Of course someone from Uzbekistan is quite different from an an American with a vaguely Asian looking face, both culturally and economically. Any yet the parent comment author's brain automatically filed them in the same bucket. This kind of automatic thinking is exactly how propaganda works.

Ironically some Asian Americans were interned in concentration camps in living memory. George Takei, for example.

I'm struggling here. Are you saying that there aren't any barriers for entry in the US? For everyone, or for Asians specifically?

My favorite part of Mongolian history is when their head refused to mass kill monks... I mean fight with the enemies of the people, so he was invited to Yalta (or some other resort?) and killed. And a new head was appointed instead.

Say what you want, there are countries that achieved way more than USSR, not to mention Mongolia, without mass killings, man made famines, slavery camps, serfs (1960s was the year when Soviet "collective farmers" were salaried for the first time and got a right to get a passport and leave their "farms").

I grew up in East Germany. I was part of the mass events leading to the wall coming down, so you can tell what side I'm on.

Still, I hate it with a passion that anytime someone dares to mention some good points of what happened in the "socialist" Eastern countries, and on a purely human level there is plenty even on the system level, comes up with this whataboutism normally thrown at others.

Yes those systems had to go. But there was plenty of good stuff there, and rebuking anyone who dares mention some is unhelpful. It's such a random uncontrolled reflex.

There’s always this guy on the internet that thinks in absolutes. The world is black and white for him, without any historical context. It’s all about strong words like “man-made famine”, “slavery camps” etc., all feelings and no thinking.

Yes, let's adopt a more flexible stance and call it "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs". /s

Lies. They got passports in 1974 only. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1147485 (that pertains only to Kolkhoz workers. Sovkhoz workers were free and had passports from the very beginning, but there were many times fewer of them).

A statement can be inaccurate or incomplete without being a lie.

lol it was a joke!

I mean, "good old" Soviet Union was a prison for all of it's population throughout it's existence, but it was also a prison within a prison for 37% of it's population till as late as 1974. Human existence there could hardly be called a modern life at any point of it.

My apologies then, of course. I have seen bald accusations much like that here that were clearly serious so I'm somewhat sensitive to it.

> Say what you want, there are countries that achieved way more than USSR, without mass killings, man made famines, ...

Slavery, colonialism, war mongering, etc. not exclusive to USSR. Well they lost the competition and the winning side likes to warp the reality.

I don’t want to take any side. It’s just that I really don’t believe in absolutes.

> Well they lost the competition and the winning side likes to warp the reality

someone posted this[0] a few days ago.

[0]https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

That's an interesting read.

> I don’t want to take any side. It’s just that I really don’t believe in absolutes.

Do you believe that absolutely?

On a more serious note, how can you lump the Soviets (and socialist regimes like the CCP) with everything else? It's like conversing with someone who, having been told that Bob murdered Alice, responds by saying that everyone makes mistakes and that, on a good day, Bob could be a nice guy. Communist regimes were at a whole different level of evil. The sheer number of people murdered, the social and cultural destruction and dysfunction it wrought, the deeply warped wordlview it imposed through the tyrannical apparatus of the almighty and pervasive state. The list goes on. I guess dissidents were just being ungrateful, eh? They didn't appreciate the good parts!

I will agree that Americans and others should engage in more self-criticism because American culture and its establishment are degenerate and share some eerie similarities with their Soviet counterparts. But this sort of whataboutism doesn't dismiss the glaring truth about the Soviet regime. For someone who says he doesn't believe in "absolutes", you basically demonstrated that you actually do. We're talking about different magnitudes and variety of evil here. People made lasting friendships in concentration camps and gulags, they even found their calling in those awful places[0] in a kind of metaphor for life in general, but no one would say "Eh, you know, it wasn't so bad. There were some good things in those gulags. And after all, American public schools are traumatic and soul-destroying, so..."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ciszek

Please don't take HN threads into total flamewar hell. I realize that the USSR remains a difficult and polarizing topic in a lot of ways, but the GP commenter was posting in a human way and you responded with the internet equivalent of guns blazing. That's not cool. We're trying to have curious conversation here, not smite enemies.

I'm sure that you have excellent reasons for feeling the way that you do on this topic. Nevertheless it's not cool, on this site, to rush into ideological or political battle when strong feelings are activated. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

If you or anyone want more explanation, this set of past comments might be helpful for understanding what we're looking for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

One of my good friends growing up was Kazakh(which is quite rare here in the US) and I met her mother who spoke fondly of the USSR; she spoke fondly of Russians(the people) but not of the government. Meeting them taught me a lot about the difference between people and their government.

"was one of the examples of going from village to bacteriological weapon design "

And this is a good thing?

"Maybe USSR killed millions of people but at least it let ethnic minorities to invent weapons to kill billions"

Well, yes, from the point the poster was making. This person found something he liked to do and had the opportunity to do it.

I am sorry for his choice, and your note gives the impression you are too, but I think it’s a perfectly decent example.

I don't think it is a good example when we are talking abouz adcancement of civilisation and how the USSR helped with it. Because bio weapon research is not helpful with that I think.

> from village to bacteriological weapon design

Right, more bacteriological weapons is what the world needs.

Speaking to Mongolian clients who likely belonged to the oligarchy before and after the fall of the USSR does not provide an accurate picture of the situation at large.

> Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life

MMhh OK, lets not ignore the fordable settlement that literally wiped out the majority of the wealth of the steppe and and killed or starved to death up to 50% of people while inducing severe starvation and malnutrition on the rest of them.

It basically was basically genocide that attempted to destroy a whole culture.

And then forced to do basically forced labor on state farms for the next couple of decades on low efficiency state farms.

The elites of those groups were moved to the gulags in large numbers as well.

I understand that your experience are from a decades after that and a lot had changed.

But while the mass death of Ukrainians is in the news often because of Crimea, the much higher % of death Kazakhs is basically ignored.

> Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education

The USSR also took a lot of educated modern lifestyle people and sent them to Siberian forced labor camps. The whole thing was very much a calculated plan to replace the educated upper and middle class with new people that would be more loyal to Stalin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_settlements_in_the_Sovi...

I'm really disappointed in the images in that piece, so low-res you can't read the text. For the BL that's pretty awful.

I noticed that the top line of the compared newspaper parts also appears to change, but it's so badly rendered and so small as to be almost unreadable.

Why would they do that?

Aside, whilst it says "Copyright British Library Board" the content is/should be free-gratis and free-libre reproducible under the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. Really it should have a better imprint, something like "free distribution and reuse allowed under this policy" with a link. Even better would be if they'd adopted a more widely recognised license.

Changing the language or at least alphabet used to write the books the state can control what literature the next generation will be able to read.

>Sovietization

Cyrillic was created 1100 years ago in Bulgaria for Christian lithurgy among Slavs, it's unfair and sad that it's now mainly associated with communism and USSR in Westerm countries.

It also is associated with hundreds of years of the Russian Empire. So it’s also associated with that (largely negative) history in large parts of Europe.

It doesn't matter when it was created in this case. In Mongolia it was literally connected to Sovietization of Mongolia.

India has been independent of colonial rule for over 5-7 decades depending on the area and influence of English and even Portuguese (in Goa) still persist.

I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only untenable but actually destructive. The history of every language and culture is one of brutality and conquest as well as mutual exchange. That doesn't mean that we should be trying to revert to some imagined "pure" time before the traumatic event.

I'm a product of brutal attempts at nation building by the American war machine. I wouldn't be speaking English otherwise. But that doesn't mean that this language isn't mine. If I were forced to speak and write differently because of some political initiative, it wouldn't be a return to authenticity. It would be forcing me to reject a part of me that's already been irreversibly changed.

The English language without nongermanic influences (a great essay in its own right):

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/studen...

I love that essay, and also this little tidbit from Wikipedia:

> The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (modern English umbe (now obsolete), cognate to German um and Latin ambi-) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.

Yes, likewise with almost all colonial areas. Asking the Japanese to stop eating curry, or the Hong Kongers to stop drinking milk tea, or the people of Qingdao to stop making beer, or asking all of China to stop eating egg tarts, would only wreak havoc on culture.

After a generation or two such things become assimilated and a part of local culture. The people alive today were born with these things, and they consider them their own.

There have been successful (depending on your point of view) attempts of ridding languages of foreign influences.

For example, Icelandic, which in the 19th century had speakers who worked on replacing Danish loanwords with Icelandic neologisms, and today a good amount of effort is put into coining Icelandic words rather than loaning English ones.

Norwegian had something similar albeit with less success. There are two official written standards for Norwegian, Bokmål and Nynorsk. Bokmål retains more Danish influence, and reflects Norwegian dialects with more Danish influence (especially urban centres like Oslo), while Nynorsk is more 'pure' Norwegian, favouring more traditional grammar. Notably, the three gender system features more prominently in Nynorsk, where it is mandatory, as opposed to Bokmål, where the feminine can optionally be given masculine determiners, which is similar to how Swedish and Danish have collapsed the masculine/feminine genders into a single common gender. The movement for Nynorsk was also in the 19th century, powered by Norwegian nationalism, but only about 10-15% of Norwegians use it.

Notably, though, in both cases the efforts to revert foreign influences on the language came from a grassroots, bottom-up approach, rather than a change from the top. And for the more successful case of Icelandic, well, linguistic reform is probably easier if only 300,000 people (probably much less a hundred years ago) speak it.

I think there's a middle ground - as a Korean speaker, it's pretty easy to find linguistic purists lecturing everyone, and also cringey writers making sentences entirely out of English words barely strung together by Korean suffixes.

In the end, I believe we should consider each word separately. If a loanword is used by select few, they only hinder communication. (In the worst case, imagine a legal document that's inscrutable to most people.) On the other hand, if a loanword is already understood by everyone, there's no point in removing it: trying to removing it will in fact make communication harder.

For what it's worth, the use of Portuguese in Goa is hardly because the language has any real relevance still. It's like with Pondicherry. The official publication of the Union Territory's government is "La Gazette de L'État de Poudouchéry" and the rest of the title page is also in French. (But the actual publications are all in Tamil or English.)

The retained use of French there is symbolic and historical. And the locals have chosen to keep up the tradition. I'm not Indian so it's not my place to say whether such legacies of a colonial history should be discarded. But it strikes me as more quaint than anything else. Such sentimental historical quirks are surely different from when a policy of forced linguistic change is actively in place, as happened under empire (either in India or in Mongolia).

As for English, well, colonization certainly moved things along there, to put it mildly. I certainly understand why some Indians are upset at its heavy use in government and business. Business conducted in a global market set up in large part by the same former colonial power. Learn their tongue if you want any chance of getting ahead. Not a wonderful feeling.

Still, I suspect that even if Britain had never colonized India, assuming they still became a major power and the USA later rose to prominence, it'd probably still be the most widely studied foreign language in India, with encroaching use even in government and business, as it is nearly everywhere.

For what it's worth, one of my French teachers was an Indian francophone and explained that in their region (whose name I cannot remember) French is the dominant language and she grew up speaking French at home.

It was certainly true for an older generation. The European settlers spoke French, and some in and around the French-controlled regions adopted French as a daily language, particularly those dealing with to the colonial government. This was true until the return of the territory in the 1950s. A few families have probably carried on speaking their home language. But in absolute terms, it's quite rare. There were probably fewer than ~100,000 native French speakers in India at the peak, and I believe the majority chose to move to France when the territories were returned to India.

The French didn't venture too far inland. They built outposts for trade, without any desire to rule beyond the walls of these outposts. Perhaps that's why the colonial legacy they left there is seen more as an inoffensive quirk.

There have been attempts to phase out English and promote Hindi, but this has been met with opposition from non-Hindi southern states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil...

I'm not even Indian and it's shocking that anyone thinks unification around Hindi will happen. Good luck getting Dravidians onboard with cultural imperialism from the north. To my mind the legacy of English colonialism allows north and south India to remain unified because there's a "fair", common third option provided in cultural conflicts between the north and south. That is exactly what the English language is as a national choice.

That was pretty much my impression on the issue, from conversations with several people who lived there. It's a huge country, and all of the regions have their own language, and it's rare for one of the regional languages to be understood more than 1 or 2 regions away. Picking any one region's language to be the Official National Language would piss off everyone in the other regions whose languages weren't chosen. English is understood moderately well everywhere and allows a universal national language without seeming to unduly favor any particular region.

This shows a very useful function for English as a lingua franca. When it’s almost nobody’s first language (it isn’t mine), it removes the political element of who’s first language gets used

It would be funny if the EU could now also agree on it, given that UK is no longer part of it.

I've been measuring the extent of romanization of local languages in india and in the web age it is only accelerating. The vast majority of Hindi, Telugu, Tamil content is written in the English alphabet online - https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.wnut-1.24.pdf

Romanized Hindi / En / tamil are likely the dominant form of expression online - only going to keep growing at this point.

I don't even know where to start. I'd believe you ten years ago. Now I've seen same rethoric from Russian Federation against my country. No more Ukrainian schools in occupied territories. RF population largely supports war to "save Russians". War that killed thousands Russian speaking Ukrainians. And yet they call themselfs "brothers"... just as you said. No need for enemies with such "brothers".

I've been to Eastern Europe, a lot of people speak English there. Occupation is not required to a share culture.

> RF population largely supports war to "save Russians".

Only those susceptible to propaganda. But such people are everywhere, who easily believe what they are told to believe.

Russian propaganda is really good and works rather effectively. Which is no surprising as they use techniques mastered during 70 years of communism.

A colleague from work who works on integration a of a translation service in our product said that he needed a brain wash to clean up the propaganda after reading all those Russian news translated with the service.

> Russian propaganda is really good and works rather effectively. Which is no surprising as they use techniques mastered during 70 years of communism.

If only. Russian propaganda is hamfisted, direct and not very effective. It's magical efficiency is perpetuated in the West in order to demonize Russia.

If Russian propaganda was that good and effective, Ukraine would still be ruled by Russian-friendly elite and the country would have joined some sort of Russia led economic bloc instead of rushing towards EU and NATO.

Alas, Russian propaganda sucks, at least compared to what USA has to offer.

RF TV is state controlled for 20 years. In Ukraine it is not. Up until a few months ago collaborant TV channels worked in Ukraine.

Actually RF propaganda is quite good at portraing Ukraine as fascist state, West as evil, USA as falling apart. It is good enough for Putin to be elected president, and it is much better than Belarus propaganda. Regarding Ukraine, it is good enough that some people support RF no matter Crimea occupation and 8 years proxy war.

Russia propaganda is effective because it managed to make people to believe very big lies. Even in Ukraine some people believe it despite the realities of war.

Propaganda from USA does not need to stretch the truth anywhere near the same scale and with that it is much more easier to affect more people.

That isn't specific to Russians.

I think the person you're responding to is talking about USSR circa 1920-1980, and you're talking about RF 2010-2020. Of course you can say that it's all the same, but then why would you be agreeing with them 10 years ago?

Because I am Russian speaking, I know this ideology very well. It was unexpected to be on another side. It opens eyes.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar hell. The parent was nostalgically reminiscing. That's totally different.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27082892.

There is nothing nationalistic in my statement. I am Russian speaking. My mother tongue is Russian.

I've just described how such "brotherhood" is created. Occupation regime. RF government use this exact nastalgy to fuel the war. It is not possible to separate means and result.

Words like "nationalistic" can mean different things - if you understand the word differently, that's fine. The main thing we're trying to avoid is internet flamewars of all sorts, including the sort where people argue angrily about nations or governments (whichever ones they may be). Such discussions are predictable and nasty, two qualities which are bad for curious conversation, which is what we're going for here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You accept nastalgy about results of forceful conversion, occupation. It feels awful. I've waited several hours, top comment, tried to write objectively. If anything I've tried to explain how much such "brotherhood" costs, how it is achieved. My bad if it looks like it is against specific state. From my perspective Ukraine occupation is an example of what's happening today. Any nostalgic person may visit it, feel it. People live in fear there.

I'm sure that's true and I certainly don't deny it, but we need to have space for lots of different comments. The other user wasn't saying anything about current wars.

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