[HN Gopher] The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and chal...
___________________________________________________________________
The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and challenges of
reversal (2020)
Author : Thevet
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-05-06 19:08 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.bl.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.bl.uk)
| mediocre-one wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| kgeist wrote:
| >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.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| It doesn't matter when it was created in this case. In Mongolia
| it was literally connected to Sovietization of Mongolia.
| 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
| elgenie wrote:
| The Soviets also imposed (badly needed) reforms on the alphabet
| and spelling of Russian itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R
| eforms_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.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| cooper12 wrote:
| > 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.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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 (k/k'), Kazakh (k/k')
| and Tatar (just k 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 k/k' just to make it different from the other two.
| Koshkin wrote:
| But see (if only as a "fun fact"),
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Cyrillic_alphabet
| helge9210 wrote:
| 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.
| sergeykish wrote:
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > 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.
| fpoling wrote:
| 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.
| chokolad wrote:
| > 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.
| fpoling wrote:
| 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.
| sergeykish wrote:
| 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.
| havetocharge wrote:
| That isn't specific to Russians.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| sergeykish wrote:
| 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.
| havetocharge wrote:
| 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?
| sergeykish wrote:
| Because I am Russian speaking, I know this ideology very
| well. It was unexpected to be on another side. It opens eyes.
| danielodievich wrote:
| 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.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| The USSR was vast, which part of it were you born and raised
| in?
| danielodievich wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| Basically you were the ruling class and think that's how
| USSR was for average person :)
| skrebbel wrote:
| You can't possibly know that.
| ajuc wrote:
| > 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.
| baybal2 wrote:
| 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.
| havetocharge wrote:
| As a poor person who emigrated from USSR, this is
| borderline offensive.
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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.
| Strom wrote:
| > _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.
| chokolad wrote:
| > 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.
| havetocharge wrote:
| I saw a lot of USSR as well. We lived in a 200 sqft
| apartment with no plumbing.
| cxfame wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| havetocharge wrote:
| I'm struggling here. Are you saying that there aren't any
| barriers for entry in the US? For everyone, or for Asians
| specifically?
| Talanes wrote:
| 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?
| nzmsv wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ironically some Asian Americans were interned in
| concentration camps in living memory. George Takei, for
| example.
| janeroe wrote:
| 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").
| nickserv wrote:
| The communist countries typically enslave parts of their own
| population, the capitalist countries typically enslave other
| populations. So obviously it's nicer to live in a capitalist
| country.
|
| "Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, communism is
| the inverse."
| f6v wrote:
| 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.
| qlzand wrote:
| Yes, let's adopt a more flexible stance and call it "you
| can't make an omelette without breaking eggs". /s
| geraneum wrote:
| > 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > 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
| ta_ca wrote:
| > 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...
| geraneum wrote:
| That's an interesting read.
| nosianu wrote:
| 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.
| nickpp wrote:
| Now imagine someone saying what you are saying, but about
| the nazi death camps: that there was plenty of good stuff
| there!!!
|
| Do you even realise that you are talking about an inhuman
| sistem that killed millions and shaped the lives on
| countless others in horrific ways? Please have a little
| respect for the victims.
|
| And it's not a reflex to remind the world how communism
| really was: it's a duty. Because every time we see a soviet
| apologist we can see his agenda, his hidden motives and
| perverted thinking. The propaganda machine did not die with
| the soviet empire, it is alive and well serving the new
| master in the East. And the "useful idiots" are all busy
| digging in the turd of the past to uncover the rare jewels
| with which they are hoping to blind the world to the
| horrific truth of what really happened.
| simonh wrote:
| Praise be to Godwin. There's always one, and often
| several.
| cxfame wrote:
| Godwin's law does not apply to the situation when Stalin
| is mentioned and someone introduces a Hitler comparison.
| They were both evil but Stalin had the ideological
| framework that presented him as good.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Now imagine someone saying what you are saying, but
| about the nazi death camps: that there was plenty of good
| stuff there!!!
|
| Nope. The original comment wasn't about death camps. It
| was about the _whole_ of the country.
|
| > Do you even realise that you are talking about an
| inhuman sistem that killed millions and shaped the lives
| on countless others in horrific ways?
|
| Yes. We do realise that. Probably significantly _more_
| than you can imagine.
|
| > Please have a little respect for the victims.
|
| Ah yeah. A little respect for the victims by... ignoring
| and disrespecting literally everything else.
|
| > Because every time we see a soviet apologist we can see
| his agenda, his hidden motives and perverted thinking.
|
| Every time I see a comment like this, I realise I'm
| talking to a person completely ignorant of history.
|
| Also, history is _hard_. You can 't say "this was all
| bad, bad, bad, millions dead, nothing good can be said
| about it". Just as you can't say "this was all good,
| good, good, nothing bad can be said about it". You insist
| only on the former. The original comment didn't even
| begin to approach the latter.
| anovikov wrote:
| 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).
| simonh wrote:
| A statement can be inaccurate or incomplete without being a
| lie.
| anovikov wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| nickik wrote:
| > 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.
| neither_color wrote:
| 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.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "was one of the examples of going from village to
| bacteriological weapon design "
|
| And this is a good thing?
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| "Maybe USSR killed millions of people but at least it let
| ethnic minorities to invent weapons to kill billions"
| ajuc wrote:
| > from village to bacteriological weapon design
|
| Right, more bacteriological weapons is what the world needs.
| Strom wrote:
| > _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...
| 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, 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Modern Chinese punctuation marks don't really work in a
| vertical format.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| It's just presentation.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| sauropterygia wrote:
| > 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
| 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/
| gumby wrote:
| The author mentions/complains about that late in the essay.
| 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.
| Koshkin wrote:
| 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.)
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| also Aramaic was the main language of the Roman province of
| Judea some 2021 years ago.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| 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.
| golemiprague wrote:
| It's funny that you call it "Palestine" talking about a
| period before the area was even named "Palestine" by the
| Roman conquerers. The Jews were speaking both languages,
| Arameic was the lingua franca of the whole region for a
| long time, it is still part of the Jewish scripture and
| prayers and it is closer to Hebrew than to Arabic so it
| is not that hard to pick it up for a modern Orthodox Jew
| who study the talmud.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _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).
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Well Christianity is from a Hellenizing faction. That's
| still here.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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."
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| 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.
| saurik wrote:
| > 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.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| eternalban wrote:
| 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
| jhgb wrote:
| >Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original
| alphabet
|
| That would be Greek, since the Phoenician script is an abjad.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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)
| jhgb wrote:
| 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.
| mchaver wrote:
| > 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| jhgb wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| loftso wrote:
| How is Arabic traced back to Phoenician when it looks much
| more like Hieratic[1]?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic
| widforss wrote:
| 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.
| clw8 wrote:
| 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.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Well the steppe the highway of Eurasia, so it makes sense
| those language families are strewn all over it.
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| mannerheim wrote:
| 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,
| Bokmal and Nynorsk. Bokmal 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 Bokmal, 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.
| [deleted]
| yongjik wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The English language without nongermanic influences (a great
| essay in its own right):
|
| https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/studen.
| ..
| oconnor663 wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| shriphani wrote:
| 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.
| 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...
| acidbaseextract wrote:
| 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.
| ufmace wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| 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
| pantalaimon wrote:
| It would be funny if the EU could now also agree on it,
| given that UK is no longer part of it.
| 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?
| [deleted]
| koolba wrote:
| I think you're grossly overestimating the level of literacy.
| indigo945 wrote:
| 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.
| nzmsv wrote:
| He meant literacy before the Soviets. That went "whoosh".
| krasin wrote:
| 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#:~:tex
| t=....
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
| dmitriid wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| 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 O
| and a second U [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
| gumby wrote:
| This is true of the latin alphabets as well
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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").
| Muromec wrote:
| If anything Cyrillic differs between Ukraine and Russia, and
| Belarus has it's own variation too. Also "forbidden
| nationalistic lettet g'"
| Ichthypresbyter wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-05-08 23:02 UTC)