[HN Gopher] The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and chal...
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The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and challenges of
reversal (2020)
Author : Thevet
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-05-06 19:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.bl.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.bl.uk)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| 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
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| bloak wrote:
| 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.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Sounds pretty imperialistic for an ideology based on anti-
| imperialism.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Mongolian script is unusual because of its orientation.
|
| How do UIs handle the script? For example mobile chat
| applications.
| retrac wrote:
| Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are
| primarily written vertically, 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 massive shift is almost entirely 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 basically 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 a little ironically, the
| Mongolian script is derived from the Syriac script that went
| along the silk road route, and is distantly related to our
| Latin alphabet. It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other
| reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese
| that way. It seems that rotating to get along is a recurring
| theme.
| scarmig wrote:
| 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...
| Symbiote wrote:
| 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.
|
| "monggol ulus un yerUngqeiilegchi q"
|
| https://president.mn/mng/
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| 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.
| smhost wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| Depends how recent it is. I have no connection to my
| ancestral ethnic languages. They assimilated wholesale into
| North American English culture in two generations. It's been
| a full century since my ancestors spoke Finnish or Russian.
| That cannot be rolled back. It's silly to even suggest. I
| cannot even imagine what the final state might look like.
|
| But for the Mongolians, maybe it's a bit different? Elders
| who are still living would remember before the Sovietization
| of society. They would have learned to read and write the
| traditional script as children, if they were educated in the
| traditional manner.
|
| A forty or so year interruption. And the interruption was
| across all of society. And it was imposed, basically, by an
| authoritarian government following an ideology backed by a
| foreign empire. Trying to reach across that gap, moving away
| from some symbols, and inventing some new terms for borrowed
| vocabulary, seems to be a project that's relatively narrow
| and practical in scope.
|
| And it does seem to be what many Mongolians want. As soon as
| the Communists fell, Mongolia re-introduced education in the
| traditional system in school. Officially changing to the
| traditional script was considered, too. But rejected as
| impractical. Despite that, the popularity of doing so has
| only grown with time. Given the public popularity of the
| script, with or without government backing, one might
| describe this as a somewhat natural evolution in the
| language, occurring now that imposed language change policies
| have been lifted.
| retrac wrote:
| 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'Etat de Poudouchery"
| 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.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| 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.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| 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...
| ryancw wrote:
| 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?
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(page generated 2021-05-07 23:00 UTC)