Kazakhstan Is Changing Its Alphabet From Cyrillic To Latin-Based Style Favored By the West (bbc.com) 288
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic script to the Latin-based style favored by the West. The change, announced on a blustery Tuesday morning in mid-February, was small but significant -- and it elicited a big response. The government signed off on a new alphabet, based on a Latin script instead of Kazakhstan's current use of Cyrillic, in October. But it has faced vocal criticism from the population -- a rare occurrence in this nominally democratic country ruled by Nazarbayev's iron fist for almost three decades. In this first version of the new alphabet, apostrophes were used to depict sounds specific to the Kazakh tongue, prompting critics to call it "ugly." The second variation, which Kaipiyev liked better, makes use of acute accents above the extra letters. So, for example, the Republic of Kazakhstan, which would in the first version have been Qazaqstan Respy'bli'kasy, is now Qazaqstan Respyblikasy, removing the apostrophes.
The BBC article goes on to explain the economics of such a change, citing a restuarant owner that marketed his business using the first version of the alphabet. "All his marketing materials, the labelling on napkin holders and menus, and even the massive sign outside the building will have to be replaced," reports the BBC. "In his attempt to get ahead by launching in the new alphabet, [the owner] had not predicted that the government would revise it. He thinks it will cost about $3,000 to change the spelling of the name on everything to the new version, Sabiz." The full transition to the Latin-based script is expected to be completed by 2025, impacting this owner and many other small business owners.
WOW (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounds like a huge undertaking, and seems to be a smart move but it is daunting to think of the effort involved in changing a national alphabet. I am not sure I've ever heard of such an effort before, anyone else ??
Re:WOW (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WOW (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Those who used Cyrillic in the Eastern Europe continue to use Cyrillic. Some former soviet union countries in Cental Asia switched to Latin
Moldova switched in 1989 from Cyrillic to Latin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_Cyrillic_alphabet
Re: WOW (Score:2)
Cyrillic comes from Bulgaria though! You give too much credit to the Russians :)
Re: WOW (Score:2, Funny)
Really? The US is moving to cyrillic you say?
Re: (Score:3)
But Kazakhstan is very literate.
And large sections of the population master both the Kazakh and Russian language meaning in future they'll have to learn both scripts.
Re:WOW (Score:4, Informative)
Because Kazakh is of the Turkish family of languages it sounds kind of logic to do this move.
But in Turkey there is now a small religious movement to go back to Arabic...
Re: (Score:3)
Kazakhstan is very literate.
And large sections of the population master both the Kazakh and Russian language meaning in future they'll have to learn both scripts.
In all likelihood, a large number of them probably already do know both scripts. I know in a lot of countries that don't use the latin alphabet, there is a large understanding of it- frequently out of necessity. I've never had to learn a language with a different alphabet, the languages I've learnt so far have been western, but from speaking to people who have learned Russian- learning the second alphabet is actually one of the easier steps of learning Russian. It's not that hard to learn a new alphabet-
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: WOW (Score:2, Informative)
Really? Which ones? AFAIK only the orthodox Slavic countries have used Cyrillic in 19th or 20th century (Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia), and none of those have switched.
Not "switched" per say, but several of the countries you listed have both Cyrillic and Latin versions of their alphabets. Both of them are in common use.
Also, while you mention Serbia and Macedonia, you fail to mention the other ex-yugoslav states (Croatia, Bosnia, Slovania) all of which used Cyrillic prior to the breakup of the country, and which now (iirc) only reckognize the Latin version as their official alphabet.
Re: WOW (Score:5, Informative)
Per se. To paraphrase Old Biff "you look like an idiot when you spell it wrong"....
Re: (Score:3)
More to the point, it wasn't even used correctly. "Per se" does not mean "exactly" or "specifically" or as generic space filler. "Per se" means "by itself" and is usually used to say something has an intrinsic property vs a property it has that is not intrinsic. It's used to say things like "an orthographical error is not a huge problem per se, but when it confuses the meaning or syntax of a sentence it can be."
Which brings me to the next point, which is that if you're going to be a pedant, at least be pe
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
the other ex-yugoslav states (Croatia, Bosnia, Slovania) all of which used Cyrillic prior to the breakup of the country
Seriously? When exactly did Slovenians and Croatians in Yugoslavia ever use Cyrillic?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: WOW (Score:2)
Didnâ(TM)t Croatia switch to the Latin alphabet in the mid-19th century (Yugoslavian times being a linguistic blip)?
Re:WOW (Score:5, Informative)
China's effort to switch to Simplified. Vietnam's conversion from some form of Chinese to Latin.
Re: (Score:2)
Almost forgot about the latter.
It's interesting how the people in Vietnam, Korea, Japan and a few others "imported" Chinese characters and then all chose different paths of modifying/extending/replacing it to suit their own cultural needs.
Re:WOW (Score:4, Interesting)
In VietNam's case, they had some prompting from the French.
Re: (Score:3)
Portuguese missionaries devised the quoc ngu.
The main reason it took over was not french influence so much as the fact that most people were illiterate so it would be their first written language, and the fact that it was simple much more suited to their language than the chu nom.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't process "Zontar" as any more fake than "Alistair" or any other variant of "Alexander".
Re: (Score:2)
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
From what I recall in language classes, while Korea and Japan imported the Chinese characters and used them as-is while simply grafting their own pronunciations to the characters (and eventually developing their phonetic-only alphabets to augment), Vietnam took a different route and rearranged the characters to fit their spoken language better while retaining meaning. The end result was something highly confusing and difficult to learn (for the time period). When the Portuguese showed up preaching Christia
Re: (Score:2)
Of course we have to oversimplify things here to keep the topic from detailing, but ,,,
You're right on the Japanese and Vietnamese, though the Koreans chose a different route, replacing it with familiar looking characters of their own, that are also syllable-based, but where each character represents a structured combination of the letters/sounds. Basically, if you know the "letters" and the pattern in which to read Korean characters you can already read the words out loud, even without any understanding of
Re: (Score:2)
Korean and Japanese characters differ greatly from the Chinese ones, at least in modern day. I can always spot the Korean ones because they use a lot of circles.
Because at one point, Korea had a king that decided they needed their own phonetic language and had people create Hangul [wikipedia.org]. This was done to make the written language easier and increase literacy of his people.
Re: WOW (Score:2)
Simplified Chinese was a major OFFICIAL change, but at approximately half of the changes just changed the appearance of printed characters to match the way people had been writing them for YEARS using ballpoint pens and pencils.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Only thing I can think of that comes close is simplification of written Chinese under Mao, but even that wasn't as radical as this. (During the Cultural Revolution, the leftists wanted to switch to a Latin alphabet, but even Mao couldn't make that happen.)
Re: (Score:2)
> During the Cultural Revolution, the leftists wanted to switch to a Latin alphabet, but even Mao couldn't make that happen.
The Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
That's for dictionaries and teaching.
Re: (Score:2)
It's also the main system for typing, so much so that some are forgetting how to write the characters by hand [phys.org].
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, I do, but cursive is getting rarer and rarer. It's not even taught in schools anymore. They cite lack of time because so much of what they have to teach comes from above (The state) It's gotten to the point that college students don't know cursive. We may have to train "translators" to read older documents one day.
Re: (Score:2)
My own cursive uses manuscript capitals. But as was taught in elementary school, capital Z is a 3 (as in Cyrillic), Q is a 2, and G is the logo of General Mills cereal.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Informative)
Thought I'd drop by and clarify on this point, as someone who speaks Chinese (simplified Mandarin / mainland Chinese). Sadly Slashdot doesn't support UTF-8 so I can't demonstrate the details reliably. I will try to use some, but I dunno how they'll turn out. I'll try to stick to ASCII + descriptions + links.
True pinyin cannot use the Latin character set (ex. ISO-8859-1) because it lacks several glyphs that contain necessary diacritic marks for its vowels. Written pinyin requires several different diacritics to be accurately represented, always written above vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and French u (u with two dots above it)):
* A straight line (crummy ASCII example: hyphen: -) indicating 1st tone /) indicating 2nd tone
* A rising line (crummy ASCII example: forward slash:
* A rising-falling line (crummy ASCII example: letter v: v) indicating 3rd tone
* A falling line (crummy ASCII example: backslash: \) indicating 4th tone
* No diacritic means no tone (which some call "5th tone")
Here's a reference [wikipedia.org] for pinyin tonal depiction on Wikipedia.
There are several variances of romanized Chinese created over the years -- Yale, Wade-Giles, Sin Wenz, and several couple others that slip my mind. For example, I can't read most of them, but can (grudgingly) read Wade-Giles when forced to (some 1960s educational books were written in this format); I was taught pinyin in (American) school. I do not believe Chinese today are taught any of these variances; they are, however, taught pinyin as children. Whether or not they remember it is an entirely separate matter. :-)
Here is a better Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on actual Chinese romanization methods. The variances if compared side-by-side look innocent/minor but are actually quite annoying if encountered in bulk.
Anyway, to combat the limitation/annoyance of diacritic marks, many people online use a bastardised combination of pinyin and Wade-Giles, allowing for romanized Chinese using pure ASCII. You may see this version occasionally. Again, lack of UTF-8 on Slashdot makes this hard, but the sentence "tonight I went to the Beijing language institute" would, in this format, be written as jin1tian1 wan3shang4 wo3 qu4 le bei3jing1 yu3yan2 xue2yuan4. No number means a word without tone (ex. particles).
There's also what's called bopomofo [wikipedia.org] which is the system Taiwanese use. Please note the tonal marks section. Cantonese (Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, etc.) use the Jyutping [wikipedia.org] system.
By the way: Korean Hangul has the same problem -- several romanization variances [wikipedia.org] with no widespread standard. Someone will probably chastise me for this, so I'd better correct myself (kind of): the Korean government deployed a standard called RR or MoC2000 for street signs, and wants it adopted in all other mediums (textbooks, etc.). But adoption has been extremely slow outside of road signs, and it's a fairly new/recent method (though to their credit: RR doesn't use diacritics). I learned Korean only a few years after the introduction of RR, so I got a strange intermixed combination of Yale and RR. But not even South Koreans seem to get it right: take this street sign [wordpress.com] for example, which reads "Dohwa Jct" and "Dowon Stn"... except the "do" is the same character in Hangul; someone added the "h" by mistake (because habits). Easier to just use actual Hangul, especially because it's super easy to learn; King Sejong was remarkably intelligent, focused on making something even "country bumpkins" could remember.
Asian linguistics lesson over.
Tone contours reflect lost consonants (Score:2)
Writing is a form of speech compression and the context conveys meaning as well
Converting a color image to grayscale is also compression, but good luck "decompressing" a black-and-white photo of a flower garden.
so it is not necessary to represent every little tone
Tone contours in Chinese languages reflect consonant distinctions that have been lost over centuries [wikipedia.org], in a process called cheshirization [wikipedia.org]. Several words with completely different meanings, such as "mother", "horse", and "preceding sentence is a question", may be pronounced identically apart from tone contour. Use the wrong tone, and a question becomes an insult against the liste
Re:WOW (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Interesting...as I understand it, the Cultural Revolution was basically an expulsion of anything Western...I'm surprised they wanted to convert to a Latin alphabet.
Your understanding is not entirely incorrect. The Cultural Revolution was not anti-Western as much as it was anti-capitalist and especially anti-traditionalist [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The Red Guards were basically Antifa with government backing.
Please stick with the facts, and quit trying to shove your nutjob politics into everything. Thanks.
Re: (Score:3)
Western things had already been expelled.
Yeah, especially Western political philosophy [wikipedia.org].
Korea (Score:3, Informative)
Korea invented a whole new writing system in the 1600s. In more recent times, China formalized a "simplified" version of their script in the 1950s and 1960s and quickly switched over to using it. It wasn't a sudden, imposed change, but over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Vietnamese has transitioned from being written in modified Chinese characters to being written in heavily accented Latin character. In a less extreme example, Japan imposed a standardized set of logographic characters after Worl
Re: (Score:2)
One of the most modern writing systems is likely to be the "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" system. It was developed around 1840, and is used to write multiple First Nations languages (Cree and Ojibwe) as well as Inuktitut (The language of the Inuit people). If you haven't seen it before, it looks a lot like runes with extra triangles, but it's a fully fleshed writing system, with full Unicode support.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:WOW (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus, most Germans can't read the handwritten letters of their grand-parents anymore, because the script is unknown to them.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
There is no single one official cursive script in Germany. There were attempts to do this, but since every state had their own ideas on how to improve things and make writing curse more fluent different scripts were introduced over the time. This can lead to a lot of confusion between generations and people from different states because all scripts are valid. Working as an assistant to a professor at a German university I get to correct exams from time to time. And sin
Re:WOW (Score:5, Interesting)
King Sejong is a celebrated Korean ruler who can literally say he invented [patch.com] the alphabet. He was also one of two rulers in the country's history awarded the titles "the Great." Sejong the Great was the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty, and ruled from 1418 – 1450.
He created 28 letters for a Korean alphabet. As time went on, revisions were made. Currently, 24 characters are used and are still under ongoing studies.
Government officials and aristocrats opposed the spread of "Hunminjeongeum," but they were outnumbered. The publication was completed in 1443 and approved in 1446. It spread among lower-class citizens, who were finally able to read and write.
After the publication of "Hunminjeongeum," longer documents followed. The next volume was called "Hunminjeongeum Haerye."
"A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days," the "Hunminjeongeum Haerye" says.
And if this Korean historical drama [asianwiki.com] is accurate (I personally have no idea if it is), I believe this is the same king who commissioned an architectural structure to serve as an almanac of the stars so that Korean farmers who couldn't read would know when to plant and harvest their crops.
Re: (Score:2)
Turkey switched from an Arabic script to a Latin-based one in 1928.
Re: (Score:2)
Romania switched from Cyrillic to Latin in 1862.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds like a huge undertaking, and seems to be a smart move but it is daunting to think of the effort involved in changing a national alphabet. I am not sure I've ever heard of such an effort before, anyone else ??
Meh. Sounds much easier than switching the US to metric!
Re: (Score:2)
Much respect for any large group of people who can accomplish such a huge task!
Re: (Score:2)
Great success! (Score:2)
Loss Of Heratige (Score:2, Insightful)
Such a switch could result in a loss of various folklore in Kazakhstan centering on the shapes and percieved symbology of the Cryllic alphabet. Also such a change seems unecessisary and wasteful of resources, it's not like those books and letters will rewrite themselves.
It seems like they plan on enforcing it on everyone somehow, as opposed to having it affect only the government or public signage (a la bilingual signs), otherwise why would that businessman bother with the change at all?
Re:Loss Of Heratige (Score:5, Interesting)
Kazakh was written in Arabic script for a thousand years prior to Soviet times. Try again.
Re:Loss Of Heratige (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
otherwise why would that businessman bother with the change at all?
Yes why would a business risk being progressive hip cool, why would they explore new things rather than sticking with something old? How many times has CocaCola changed their logo? Did Bush force them to do it last time?
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like they plan on enforcing it on everyone somehow, as opposed to having it affect only the government or public signage (a la bilingual signs), otherwise why would that businessman bother with the change at all?
Because most countries have language specified in their national laws.
Or how would you conduct efficient business in a language different to the legal system you have to comply with?
Remember Kazakh belongs to the Turkish languages and almost a century ago Turkish went from the Arab script to Latin
Also, I'm really interested why someone found your remark Insightful.
Unicode (Score:4, Informative)
Hilariously, a good example of why Unicode would be beneficial on Slashdot ("smart" quotes being a bad example) and no one has mentioned it:
The example of the new way of writing Qazaqstan Respyblikasy in the summary is incorrect.
Re: (Score:2)
No need to rush, I'll have this replacement for Unicode finished in a year or two and I'm sure the ISO will quickly adopt it. Maybe for Slashdot's 25th anniversary?
Bolsheviks ideas come to fruition (Score:2)
Actually they did it for the Kazakh language in 20s, but finally it was returned back to Cyrillic.
Both, Cyrillic and Latin alphabet originated from the Ancient Greek alphabet. Cyrillic though remained a bit closer to it.
Nowadays a printer can print in any alphabet. So there will be no economy on typewriters as there could be in the early 20th centur
Re: (Score:2)
Not a bad idea at all! (Score:3)
Turkish (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article it looks like they will be using the Turkish (i without a dot). Just goes to prove how much research went into the decision, since that is the one of the most problematic letter for computers to process correctly. It makes it impossible to determine the lower case of letter "I" without knowing the locale, and very easy to do it wrong when using the incorrect locale. And obviously the letter I/i is everywhere, including the text of programming languages and data interchange formats. You will get into hilarious situations like trying to lower case "RESPÝBLIKASY" and having to use a different locale for the tags and for the contents, or else you end up either with with the wrong I or the incorrect spelling of Respýblkasy with i.
So, good luck with your change, you'll need it.
Re:Turkish (Score:4, Funny)
...and Slashdot has just stripped the letter I am talking about from the comment, making it look like nonsense. Which kind of illustrates what kind of problems I'm talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
This is more a Slashdot problem than a general internet problem. The majority of websites support UTF-8 encoding and have very decent Unicode support.
Bananas (Score:2)
Esposito: From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.
Russia (Score:3)
They've seen up close what a shared ethnic and cultural heritage brought the Crimea region of Ukraine.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cyrillic has a similar size alphabet to Latin, so I doubt there'd be any significant difference in how easy/hard it would be to learn, understand, or type in their native language. However, after the switch it could make it a little easier for Kazakhstan people to learn other languages based on Latin alphabets, since you can skip
Good move (Score:2)
Kazakhstan used its own variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, with ~6 extra letters compared to Russian. Finding fonts that support Kazakh was a pain in the ass because of this.
The accents on capitals seen in the new alphabet are a lot more common, so will be easier to support.
Now if only Kekistan would follow suit (Score:2)
ntr
Why? This is basically pointless. (Score:2)
I don't get it. Cyrillic is awkward to learn if you're used to Latin script. I did this the past two years when visiting Moscow. It was quite fun. Spelling through and finally recognising "Starbucks"written in Cyrillic is funny. And fun. Also getting around the metro without a dictionary. Fun, challenging and still easily done because you have to be a moron not to understand Moscows metro layout.
But as for the script itself: it has different glyphs and some switched out meanings, but it's trivially easy to
No matter what they use ... (Score:2)
... it won't render properly on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:What's the reasoning? (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? Spanish and English both employ the Latin alphabet.
The Kazakhs are a Turkic people who traditionally used the Arabic writing system. Cyrillic writing was imposed on their very non-Slavic language only relatively recently (ca 1940 IIRC).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's hard to print Arabic, Chinese, or Hindi on retro video game consoles. Their graphics are based on "text mode", with usually space for about 256 different 8x8-pixel glyphs defined by the program. Most glyphs loaded into a console's video memory represent bits and pieces of a level's map, but 32 to 64 tend to get reserved for the text in score bars and dialogue. Arabic needs a lot more than that for the connecting forms of its letters. Hindi is written with Nagari script, which uses many ligatures. Chine
Re: (Score:2)
What, in this day and age? I donÂ(manishsuckscock$TM) believe you!
Re: (Score:2)
Double l is also considered a letter in its own right. So llama sorts after luz.
Correction: s/is/was/, they changed it recently. Looks like my dictionary is out of date.
Re:Horrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
By your reasoning, Kazakhstan should also revert to Arabic script.
And your complaint about Turkish letters having diacritics and/or different sounds than they do in other languages is just silly. Exactly the same things are true of any other language using the Latin alphabet.
Re: (Score:2)
And your complaint about Turkish letters having diacritics and/or different sounds than they do in other languages is just silly. Exactly the same things are true of any other language using the Latin alphabet.
Not quite, English is a prime example where spelling remained as is while pronunciation of vowels changed drastically from the original.
Danish is another example, they even added and removed some letters. And take French, or how else would you explain the pronunciation of the name of the Canadian prime minister?
Re: (Score:2)
By your reasoning, Kazakhstan should also revert to Arabic script.
It might be because I naturally connect most of my letters when I write, but I found learning how to write Arabic incredibly easy and natural, even though it is written right to left. The main problem with an Arabic script is the diacritic vowels that are very often dropped when writing or in print. Makes reading Arabic a real pain because the same 3 root letters can have different meanings and pronunciation based on those missing diacritics so can only be figured out through context or practice. But fin
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Horrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole idea is to leave the past behind. Turkey before Ataturk was a static, backwards culture. Ataturk brought Turkey into the modern age, with women's rights, mandatory public schools, suppression of religion, and all that good stuff. If the people had still been able to read the old texts, there would have been more resistance to feminism and other progressive ideologies.
Ataturk was a tremendously positive secular influence on Turkey, which lasted almost a century until Western powers insisted on elections, which to nobody's surprise (except the Western powers) elected an Islamist government. Now Turkey is looking to the past instead of progressing to the future.
Re:Horrible idea (Score:5, Informative)
Latin has 5 vowel symbols, but many languages have more, including English. You either put up with ambiguity or you use diacritics, or both. Ataturk did it to break ties with Persia and Iran and focus towards the west. And as statues in front of many schools show him teaching children the alphabet himself, https://www.shutterstock.com/i... [shutterstock.com], a big focus was in literacy.
Turkish is a vowel-heavy language with 8 native vowels and a few pulled in in Arabic loan words, but the Arabic script only partially represents vowels a,i, o by doubling the meaning of glottal stop, y and w, or using diacritics.
switching to Latin made sense for Turkish.
Importantly Ataturk allowed on transition time like the Qazaqs are thinking. it had to be done within months, under pain of fines. Medical words in Turkish are mostly Arabic, Maritime are Greek, early 20th century words are French, many modern words are English, computer and tech words are mostly Turkish - becuase that was also a great success of the Turkish language project, to creatively generate new Turkish words. bilgisayar=knowledgecounter=computer.
Re: (Score:2)
Keyboards, coding software, making it easier for dual language, English/Regional. Of course it opens up English speaking countries to considerable influence from non-English speaking countries as those non-English speaking countries learn more English. So no technical or social benefit for English speaking countries, in fact English media will then come under considerable competition, sheer numbers. English is simply becoming the dominant trading language but will now be subject to 10 times the current numb
Re:Horrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.
Same could be said of Old English from the same period despite using largely the same alphabet (eth and thorn not withstanding).
Re: (Score:3)
The results will be similar.
Similar to what? Relevant texts translated, and the world turning on? Have you read Bullokar's Expositor? I haven't and have no inclination to do so either. There does exist a field of people who do however study this and write in a modern style their analysis on it. If something is translatable it can also be translated. No great loss. You say this as if the Diwan Lughat Al Turk is some lost unreadable script.
By the way comparing something in 1074 CE to this is utterly stupid. Kazakh has been written in Cy
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
As a Slavic person (not from Poland) I can say that you are wrong. I can presume that you are coming from a country which has some kind of Germanic type language as primary (probably English). Because the problem of heteronyms like "tear (in the eye)" and "tear (rip)" doesn't exist in most Slavic languages. Use of additional phonemes makes them easier to read aloud, and it enlarges the western alphabet by just a bit. In my country W, X an Y are not even used in a standard language.
And we shouldn't forget t
Re: (Score:2)
In all fairness, only two of the German umlauts (o: and u:) actually account for different phonemes, with a: being essentially pronounced the same as e but used in words that have roots that used to have an a there.
And French, well, in French, what you write has nothing to do with what you say anyway. ;)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Hell, even romance languages have phonemes that aren't included in the western alphabet". ñ ç ã õ â ê î ô û to name some.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And what about its number system? (Score:5, Informative)
You've never seen a Frenchman count if you think Russians count funny. As soon as it goes beyond 70 it starts to be a fucking math project.
Re: (Score:2)