
Draft of new Latin-based Kazakh alphabet revealed - mparramon
http://www.inform.kz/en/draft-of-new-latin-based-kazakh-alphabet-revealed_a3063712
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hal9000xp
I've born in Uzbekistan. In 1990s Uzbekistan moved their entire language to
Latin-based alphabet. Even I was small kid I knew it's just a stupid sign of
nationalism.

Changing your official language to a new alphabet is pretty expensive thing
(especially when your country's economy is collapsed and your country has
extreme inflation). You have to change all official signs, texts and reteach
whole population.

Another stupid thing Uzbekistan did is to publicly burn (literally) soviet
school books while not having a good replacement. I remember looking at those
burning soviet math books in my school's backyard.

And it's all done instead of what? Instead of:

1\. Teach population of proper fluent English as a second/third language along
with Russian;

2\. Making competitive free-market economy without clan-type quasi-government
monopolies which run by top government official's relatives;

3\. Attracting and protecting western investors;

~~~
Sommersonn
Or they've simply wanted to finish what was started in 1920, but was halted by
Russian nationalism?

~~~
int_19h
It's worth noting that Russia (then USSR) was the one that introduced the
Latin alphabet in 1927 in the first place. Before that, it was Arabic. So,
arguably, if they wanted to fully reverse the effects of imperialism, no
matter the cost, they should go for Arabic.

From a practical standpoint, though, Arabic doesn't make sense - it's more
complicated to learn, vastly more different from the alphabets of all
neighboring languages (starting with the whole right-to-left thing), and most
other Turkic languages use Latin-based alphabets these days.

But if the choice of Latin is dictated by pragmatic considerations, then it's
reasonable to compare it to Cyrillic on the same grounds.

~~~
Sommersonn
It's worth noting that Latin was introduced by Asian republics, not Russia or
USSR - they forced cyrillic on all republics.

~~~
int_19h
It's more complicated than that.

The original attempts to latinize (replacing Arabic) writing systems in those
republics were, in fact, carried out by USSR, and it was very much a top-down
thing, not some local initiative. USSR had a massive country-wide latinization
campaign in 1920s for basically all languages spoken anywhere in the country
that didn't already use Cyrillic. Long-term plans were to latinize
_everything_ , including Russian itself (this one went as far as a final
proposal by a committee in 1930).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Union)

For Turkic languages specifically:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C3%B1alif](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C3%B1alif)

And part of a broader ideological push:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya)

It makes perfect sense when you realize that Soviet government, at that point,
viewed itself as a first comer in a blaze of worldwide communist revolutions,
that would ultimately produce a single worldwide federated communist state.
Per Marxist dogma about industrial workers being the vanguard of the
revolution, the expectation was that the center of gravity would shift to
Western Europe once revolutions happened there. Communist utopias of that time
period generally assumed that such unification would result in adoption of
some common language, and that Latin script would be used for that language.
So adopting Latin for Soviet languages made sense in preparation.

When Stalin abandoned the concept of "world revolution", and switched instead
to "socialism in one country", with a heavy dose of Russian nationalism
underpinning the new ideology, all this was scrapped, and (then already
established) Latin writing systems were replaced with Cyrillic ones, from
roughly mid 1930s onward. Those Cyrillic writing systems are the ones
inherited by the Asian republics at the dissolution of the USSR.

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forinti
One of the things I like about the cyrillic alphabet is that it has symbols
for diphtongs. Portuguese (my native toungue) fixes this with diacritics
(melancia, and distância - the diacritic wouldn't be necessary if the 'ia' in
distância used a symbol to indicate it is a diphtong). French mixes vowels up
in lots of different ways and English spelling is a mess.

Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. Mind
you, I am not a linguist.

~~~
munificent
> Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler.

That is also challenging though because you run into a _lot_ of cases where a
syllable is a diphthong in one regional accent, but not another.

For example, in Southern US English, "ride" is often pronounced something like
"rahd". In the former, the "i" is a diphthong, but in the latter, the "ah" is
not.

Conversely, some vowels become dipthongs. A short "i" in Southern accents
often gets pronounced more like "ee-uh". Imagine Foghorn Leghorn saying "pin"
as "pi-uhn" and you've got the idea.

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PeanutNore
Here (Pittsburgh) the vowel in "down" or "town" is a monophthong instead of a
diphthong like it is pretty much everywhere else.

I wonder if part of the reason for the diversity of regional accents in
English is because pronunciation is more loosely encoded than in languages
that have more vowel symbols or modifying marks, or strict phonetic
pronunciation. Written English doesn't really provide many strong indicators
that a particular pronunciation isn't standard.

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supahfly_remix
Does this indicate a potential change of sphere of influence, like Turkish not
choosing Arabic script and Vietnamese not choosing Chinese.

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dmurray
Very much. The Kazakh president pushes the Kazakh language and Kazakh culture
and stresses the distinctions with those of Russia. It's also a practical
modern choice though, as the Latin alphabet is more widely used worldwide and
Kazakh is not a Slavic language so it gains little from being written in the
same script as Russian.

~~~
cat199
"not a Slavic language so it gains little from being written in the same
script as Russian"

So, by this thinking, what exactly does it gain linguistically from being
written in the same script as italian?

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dmurray
It gains international recognizability from being written, like Italian, in
the world's most internationally used script.

~~~
dragandj
I am not sure people around the world will start being crazy about all thing
Kazakh now that those are written with a Latin alphabet.

As far as popular culture goes, Borat is the only thing most people recognize
Kazakhtan for (besides it being No. 2 potassium producer in the world, of
course) :)

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gumby
This is clever:

> The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks (glyphs
> added to a letter, or basic glyphs) as they suppose that because of rare
> use, the specific sounds of the Kazakh language can disappear.

I see nothing wrong in principle with diacritics (I use two languages that
require them daily, in addition to English) but given the dire state of
internationalization this makes it easier for foreign software to support
Kazakh, and fits their entire language in the ASCII plane.

~~~
yongjik
I guess not using diacriticals makes computing easier, but it's silly to claim
that use (or non-use) of diacritical marks can make sounds disappear.

If specific sounds in Kazakh disappear because "they were written the same",
it merely means that the particular sound distinction was already being phased
out in the spoken language. If the sound distinction is gone, separate symbols
won't save them. It will merely become yet another opaque spelling rule for
children to memorize.

English "th" represents two different sounds, and English speakers manage just
fine, because in its sound system they are totally distinct and never confused
with each other.

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dragonwriter
> English "th" represents two different sounds

Three main ones (excluding compounds where it's really a “t” next to an “h”
that aren't related): in IPA terms, they are θ,ð, and t.

> and English speakers manage just fine, because in its sound system they are
> totally distinct and never confused with each other.

English speakers do okay because they learn fairly quickly that written
English isn't phonetic and you just have to memorize spelling, not because of
a lack of ambiguity.

Nothing about “Thai” vs. “thigh” vs. “thy” tells you which “th” sound each
uses (and in pronunciation, the “th” sound is the only difference between
them) except knowing what each word is as a rule unto itself.

~~~
PeanutNore
To say nothing of the regional accents in England where "th" is often
pronounced the same as "f".

~~~
Asraelite
In which case it would still only be three distinct realizations: [f v t].

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kmm
25 can't be enough, Kazakh has 9 phonemic vowels. I presume the six Latin
vowel signs will still get diacritics?

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messe
Looks like they're using digraphs instead:

    
    
        To ensure fullness of the Kazakh language sound system, the scientists included 8 digraphs,
        [...]
        The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks

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pavel_lishin
I only see seven vowels in the graph.

I also only see four digraphs, for consonants only.

It looks like U is replacing У-with-a-line, and W (!) is replacing У

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namelost
W for У is natural because that's how it works in Arabic.

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int_19h
But Kazakh is not in any way, shape or form related to Arabic. Nor is there
widespread knowledge of how to write Arabic among the population.

~~~
namelost
No doubt, but the academics who designed this alphabet definitely can write
Arabic, and the letter W was going spare anyway.

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guelo
Is this a political act intended to reduce Russian influence?

~~~
lightbyte
Perhaps they just want to have a greater choice in keyboard selection?

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desireco42
Seems you already have cyrillic alphabet everyone uses.

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yladiz
Cyrillic can't represent all of the sounds that Kazakh has. It borrows some
symbols but even now it uses symbols that don't exist in Cyrillic. If you ever
go to Kazakhstan you'll see that each official sign, such as in the Almaty
metro, has 2-3 languages: Kazakh, Russian, and sometimes English.

~~~
miaklesp
But 25 characters of Latin alphabet would represent it better?

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yladiz
There's also 8 digraphs, which, while not really distinct in English,
represent distinct sounds.

~~~
cat199
soo.. one can't do digraphs with cyrillic glyphs? yeaaah..

