
Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet - yorwba
https://news.mn/en/791396/
======
yorwba
The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically,
which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian
president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text:
[https://president.mn/mng/](https://president.mn/mng/)

~~~
ah-ha
Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer
to Chinese writing.

~~~
yorwba
Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that
did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through
a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also
borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing
system.

This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that
it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script
(similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference
between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an
example:
[http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic](http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic)
It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and
Mongolian scripts in informal writing.

~~~
nordsieck
> Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that
> did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese)

What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an
alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and
Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.

~~~
tnova
To add to what has already been said:

Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in
the 15th century by King Sejong.

However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on
an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today,
usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean
word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong), but in newspapers it may be
written as 大統領, which are the matching Chinese characters.

Also, most Korean parents choose Chinese characters to write for their
children's names, which read (more or less, as Korean does not have tones) the
same as the Korean characters.

~~~
tanilama
I don't think that is the still the case anymore.

I navigate from time to time to Korean website, very few occasion they
actually uses Chinese characters, except:

1\. Some countries names. 中(China)/美(US)/日(Japan)/北(North Korea)

2\. Blue House (think of it as Korean's White House, representing the
headquarters of the administration), sometimes referred as 青(Blue).

3\. The president's surname, sometimes referred as 文(Moon)

Except for those very limited cases, I don't think Korean people are actually
using Hanja anymore, it almost feel like some sort of emoji for then, that
they probably can't read it, just comprehend the meaning.

As to Korean names, yes I think they still have a Chinese name registered
somewhere, but no longer required and not shown on their government ID card.

------
WilTimSon
UI issues aside, I think this is quite fabulous. Preserving their traditional
alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I
look at it. Although I do wonder how easy it will be for the whole nation to
switch from one alphabet to another when they're so drastically different. I
don't suppose any Mongolians are here to give their input?

~~~
sametmax
> Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is
> a good thing, no matter how I look at it

There are downsides to any situation. E.G:

\- cost

\- available resources for education and work

\- adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand
each other

I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing.

It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create
way more problems than it solves.

Language preservation is overrated. Sure, it's nice. But compared to one day,
having the entire earth speak the same language, be able to communicate and
understand each other better? Small price to pay.

It get why they do it. Mongolia is a very peculiar culture, and I don't think
it benefits much from mondialisation. Quite the contrary. And it's a way for
their society to break from a painful part of their history.

But to me, it seems, at least on the long run, a step backward. Every time a
language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity. There are
enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very
structure we use to exchange information.

Granted, the cyrillic alphabet is not very universal, but it is certainly more
common than the traditional mongolia alphabet.

Now since I don't live there, I may be missing some crucial informations.
Maybe the population still massively use the old alphabet unofficially and it
makes sense. Maybe the use of the cyrillic alphabet brough problems I can't
see.

So of course, I'm not the right peson to judge the situation.

But I wanted to bring a counter point to this the enthusiastic parent comment.
We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not
sure it benefits our specie.

~~~
lonesword
> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity

And that's not necessarily a good thing. It is not just a language that dies,
but a part of the culture also dies with the language. I do get the appeal of
the world having one language, but attaining it at the cost of diversity would
be a _big_ price to pay.

I speak a southern Indian language called Malayalam (34 million speakers).
There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these
words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live. Now if everyone in my town
starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they
think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture. I am not claiming
that change is bad, simply arguing that preserving a language might help
preserve a culture.

[1] IIRC there's been some scientific literature on this. I'll look it up and
edit this post when I get time

~~~
bmn__
> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English

I've often seen this claim, for all kinds of languages, sometimes even between
two standard varieties of a single language. For a particular reason, I like
to dig deeper. Invariably, the people making this claim are not very educated
in linguistics, so it's not wonder this statement comes out wrong. And it is
wrong. I challenge them to disprove me with a single counter example, and they
are eager to do so. Typically the conversation goes like this:

Them: "You see, in my language we have ⅏⁝⏏⌸." Me: "And what does it mean?"
Them: "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor
and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." Me: "You
just translated it perfectly, congratulations."

What they mean is: "there often is not a single corresponding foreign word or
phrase for a word or phrase in my language", and that's fine; but very far
removed from "untranslatable".

~~~
crazygringo
Obviously it's not literally "untranslatable" meaning "unexplainable".

But it's about how certain concepts are _easy_ to say in one language -- they
fit like a glove -- and hard to say in another. So if they're hard to say, you
wind up not saying them, and it changes what people communicate, which changes
the culture.

In Brazilian Portuguese you can say "ai que saudades!" or "que malandragem!"
which, _poorly_ translated mean respectively, "I missed you!" and "What
scoundrel-ness!"

But those translations miss the _entire_ connotation and strength and context
-- they're just plain inaccurate. And yes you can take an entire paragraph to
explain the nuances of what they actually mean... but not in normal
conversation.

Even when I'd speak in English with Brazilian friends, sometimes to explain a
certain social situation we _had_ to revert to Portuguese words, because there
just aren't English words that fit the frames people understand Brazilian
social situations in.

So the main claim that losing language means losing culture still stands 100%.

"Untranslatable" _obviously_ doesn't mean the concept can't be explained if
you're given a few sentences or paragraphs. It means there isn't an equivalent
word or phrase that can be employed in normal everyday usage.

You can also think of it when translating movie subtitles, which I've done a
little of in the past -- you only have a "normal" amount of on-screen space to
fit your translation in. Some words just don't have _anything_ you can
translate to in the reasonable space. They're untranslatable.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Agreed.

Brings up another thing: when folks 'translate' a piece into English and
substitute English phrases for the original author's idion. Frustrates me no
end. I may have wanted (always want) to learn something about the culture the
piece was written in/for. Such bastard translations wall me off from even
guessing what the author said or meant. Just some watered-down elevator-music
meaning, because the translator thought I was not smart enough to understand
the original.

------
eps
I once saw a Mongolian book (written in Cyrillic alphabet) and it was very
jarring.

It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It
is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like
это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word
was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In
fact, looked like a square peg of an alphabet in a round hole of a language.

~~~
qwerty456127
> always at the front of a word.

That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in
the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to
proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it
reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the
third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English
yet they use different letters.

~~~
kace91
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's funny to read a post complaining of
the bad relation between written word and pronunciation of a language when
said post is written in English :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Roughly, through what means should we fix it though? :)

~~~
notechback
I don't know about English but other languages have a central body that
manages the language, eg implementing spelling reforms.

Eg German and French have a simplification every few decades (done by a
central process) and a regular process for introducing/recognising new words.
In German the words are based on common usage; in French more by committee
decision as they want to avoid too many loan words - so "digital" in German is
"digital", in French it's "numérique" which was invented specifically to avoid
"digital" being the main word, but either way the spelling was normalised at
some point).

~~~
cmehdy
The Académie Française tries really hard to be prescriptive, and perhaps that
works for the handful of elitist writers hanging out around Saint-Germain-des-
Prés but it definitely can't keep up with the connected world, the language
that is actually spoken and used by everyone, and often gives in by being
descriptive with a noticeable lag and awkwardness. It is more of a self-
congratulatory circle of elites trying to uphold a (400 year-old) tradition
for the fun of it, and the population often decides to use vastly different
words regardless of what is considered a "real word" in French.

~~~
huhtenberg
It also happens a (400 year-old) tradition that was quite intentionally set up
to be overly complex so to prevent unwashed gray masses from learning "proper"
written French and to keep it reserved for the elite.

I can't find a link right now, but there was an interview with a French
linguist who explained the history of the grammar and how it came about. Was
quite an eye opener and helped making some sense of why it is so bizarre.

~~~
qwerty456127
It's easy enough for a foreigner to learn it in a year (so all what's left is
to expand the vocabulary and polish the pronunciation). How can it be hard
enough to prevent natives from learning "proper" written French? Was it also
illegal to teach them so being hard enough to be impossible to figure out
intuitively was sufficient?

------
nemoniac
The Irish language should consider returning to its tradidional alphabet too.
Gaelic type has a certain elegance.

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

~~~
s_dev
I used seán as a username once. I gave up after I realised it was fine on my
own personal computer but once I jumped on to an azerty keyboard or something
simpler tasks just became more difficult -- finding the letter with a fada
just results in searching the charmap rather than keyboard.

You can have fadas in URLs e.g. seán.dev using a technique called Punycode.

Ogham is another Irish script and is vertical but unique in Unicode because
its space charcter is a line - the only language to do so.

~~~
aeyes
One of the few features I like on a Mac is that you can hold a key and it pops
up a little menu which lets you chose many common variations of the letter
without having your fingers do gymnastics on the keyboard.

This can be done without key combinations or a charmap: aáªàäâãåąæ

Is this possible on Windows or Linux? I constantly toggle between 3 keymaps.

~~~
skosch
That's clever, I like it. Not sure if something like this exists for Linux,
but using compose keys is standard—e.g. to type å, I hit (in sequence)
RightAlt, a, o.

------
9nGQluzmnq3M
If you're not familiar with Mongolian (and I dare say most people aren't),
give this a listen:

[https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U](https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U)

As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I
find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief
visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or
"thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at least sound out
words in the current script, but pretending Mongolian is pronounced like
Russian won't get you anywhere. The language bears virtually no resemblance to
any other major language, and even recognizable loan words seemed to be few
and far between.

~~~
Koshkin
Sounds like a dialect of Portuguese to me...

------
mehdix
Based on my experience producing right-to-left content and fixing related
software bugs, I'd say they are mostly unaware of the complexities involved.

Any software they use today should be adapted to work with the traditional
script. How are they going to mix their new script with Latin-based or
Cyrillic scripts? What about adding math to the mix? I hope they invest in
solving these issues, it would be very interesting to see the outcome.

~~~
detritus
From the date, in Arabic numerals, on the president of Mongolia's website, it
looks like they solve that by simply rotating lengths of none Mongolian-
content 90° to fit.

If you're learning to read Latin (etc) script for the first time, it doesn't
much matter what it's orientation is - they're just symbols.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
If you're learning letters then orientation matters unless you have extremely
strict orthography. E M W 3 can all be written the same but have different
orientations, for example.

~~~
detritus
Those four glyphs look entirely different to each other to me, no matter which
way around I orient my head... :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
My comment was about orthography, how letters are manually written; the
context was learners who don't already know an alphabet.

It's not uncommon to write capital-E with cursive strokes so it's a reflected
or rotated 3, and lower case m and w are sometimes written similarly - so as
to be very close to rotated versions of the same character.

~~~
detritus
Yes, and OP's comment was in relation to higher level computer representation
of combined forms, so as interesting as your comment is, at this point it's
simply picking threads for the sake of self-amusement.

------
crazygringo
I'm curious what best UX practices are around vertical alphabets, or if there
even are any.

Handling left-to-right localization is "easy" enough with translations and
making sure you can handle a little extra text overflow. And right-to-left is
fairly "trivial" in simply mirroring the UX wireframe. Extra work, sure, but
nothing too conceptually complicated.

But what are best practices for handling vertical scripts? Is it basically
just rotating the UX 90° and working around the fact that images (like photos)
are going to fit into your layout with a reversed aspect ratio? Because while
it seems like that might work OK for some webpages, it won't for apps that are
designed specifically for portrait or landscape mode on a phone/tablet...

Also, is Mongolian the only script that can _only_ be written vertically? I
can't find any others on Wikipedia. (Chinese was originally vertical, but is
easily adapted to horizontal.)

Culturally I celebrate diversity, but from a UX localization standpoint the
additional layer of complexity is... yikes.

------
keiferski
I think (and hope) that as translation tech gets better, we'll see a renewed
interest in local languages and dialects.

~~~
sametmax
I think it will have the opposite effect.

Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and
losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others
can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and
dialect?

Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do
they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work it is to
translate materials to a language, it will stop to be done: let the automatic
system do that for you!

Then, people will be able to mix and travel more, exchange more, and so they
will.

In this env, and using translation again and again, people will start to pick
up whatever language is the most common.

Eventually, what is not useful will diseapear, only artefacts that we can
translate automatically, will remain.

~~~
fiblye
Waves of nationalism come and go. If you've got a big enough population, you
can easily promote your native language as superior to others because it can
express X, Y, and Z beautiful concepts easily while filthy foreign languages
can't.

There were a few campaigns where various western countries tried promoting
their alphabets over native writing systems. Some succeeded (e.g. Vietnamese)
and many others failed. Trying to completely change the language is an even
bigger stretch. Places like India have a long history of English, but few
Indian people speak pure British English. Most will throw a mix of perfectly
pronounced English words in the middle of a sea of their local language.
English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so
many people.

~~~
Koshkin
> _perfectly pronounced_

Doesn’t India have its own English dialect - similar to the US, Australia,
etc.?

~~~
chrismorgan
Indian English is very similar to the British English of shortly before India
gained independence from the British Empire (1947). That means it often sounds
formal or old-fashioned. The reason for this is because linguistic change
occurs almost entirely in places where that language is the first language,
and English is only ever a second or subsequent language in India.

There has been _some_ synchronisation with other English locales due to the
effects of globalisation, but not a great deal. Beyond that, it does have some
deviations from British English as it was in the days of the Empire, mostly
due to grammatical misunderstandings becoming common and thus standard, or
linguistic patterns from local languages making their way into English; the
two examples that spring most immediately to my mind (as an Australian
currently in Hyderabad): “very less” instead of “very little”, and a
gratuitous “only” suffix where other dialects would either omit it or place it
earlier in a sentence.

Concerning fiblye’s point: in cities, you’ll hear a fair smattering of English
words when people are speaking their local languages. In rural areas this
happens much less.

------
knolax
I'm glad they made the correct decision of moving back to a script actually
suitable to their language. I always found it ironic that Mongolia the country
used Cyrillic despite the significance the creation of the Mongolian Script
under Ghengis Khan had to their ethnogenesis.

I find it worrying that some in this thread oppose this move on technical
grounds. As an industry, software has to acknowledge that technology is
subordinate to the needs of people, not the other way around. Especially in
this case where the technical barriers are wholely artificial.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The desired use of technology by the people is exactly the reason to adopt an
alphabet that enables ready access to technology though. If you impose a
difficult, or unique script you impose a barrier to use of, and development of
technology.

These moves seem to me like an aspect of the greater separatism and
nationalism that has been infecting many nations.

~~~
onetimemanytime
The young will revert to English when online, this becoming a net loss for
Mongolia

------
Aardwolf
How well is the script and the verticality supported in Unicode? If not well,
that could be an interesting update.

~~~
bmn__
The script is well supported, it was introduced in 1999 with Unicode 3.
Vertical writing is a concern of text rendering, so this has nothing to do
with Unicode. [https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-
mode](https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-mode)

This is still a bit lacking outside of Web pages, but generally work-arounds
are in place which come with their own problems.

HN test: Монгол бичиг ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌

------
garfieldnate
I'm very happy for them! I've always thought Mongolian writing was quite
beautiful, and it seemed like a shame to replace it with Cyrillic. The few
Mongolian people I talked to said they had to learn it in school at some
point, but they considered it difficult and had mostly forgotten it since.
We'll see how this goes. The Wikipedia page says there's a lot of work to do
to make this work out in the digital world.

Totally separate thing, but I would love to see wider Baybayin use for Tagalog
and related languages. I just love these pretty traditional orthographies!

------
LatteLazy
A similar plan was abandoned after it was launched in 1994. Government
documents and media have been available in both versions since 2011.

So presumably this new announcement is actually banning the modern alphabet?
The article isn't clear but that's implied as apparently supporting both will
end in 2024. Adding an option is a very different proposition to removing all
other options in my option but maybe the government are just announcing a plan
to keep both and doing a really bad job at communicating that?

[https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6478&Itemid=36)

Per wikipedia, the script is not well supported. This is partly because
letters have different forms depending on their position in a word. So
"academia" would need to use 3 different symbols for all those "a"s. It has 26
actual letters but a lot more symbols to learn to allow for that. And (like a
lot of alphabets) it's actually based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. So it's an
import too!

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

Per the article, 3m (of Mongolia's 3.17m) people use the modern alphabet. So
this will be a huge disruption for 95% of the population of Mongolia.

There is no current way to translate (transliterate?) names directly from one
to the other. So that will make ID documents either insecure or useless if
they're in different languages, which they will have to be since we are
talking about documents already printed...

Plus the time and effort to learn the new alphabet is time and effort spent
NOT learning useful skills in a modern economy.

The only advantage seems to be to communicate with Mongolian Ethnicity people
in China who are more likely to still use the old alphabet. Oh and something
about throwing off the USSR?

I really hope this is just a badly translated announcement that no action will
be taken...

------
noirchen
There are discussions on which Mongolia (Mongolia or Inner Mongolia) is the
true descendent of the Golden Horde. Mongolia usually claim that they directly
descend from Genghis Khan, but genetic analysis suggest that Inner Mongolians
are much closer. Now you can find statues of Genghis Khan in both Inner
Mongolia and Mongolia...

------
MichaelMoser123
I wonder if China will interpret this as an agressive act with the intent to
extend influence over inner Mongolia.

~~~
swilliamsio
Inner Mongolia already uses the traditional script so if anything this news is
indicative of increased Chinese influence and decreased Russian influence in
Mongolia.

------
rguiscard
> The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three
> million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million
> in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.

I wonder how much it deviates from the script used in Inner Mongolia.

------
pattisapu
Swimming against the trend of the erasure of any locality of script, language,
culture . . . someday I hope that we consider these things to be as precious
as they are, like endangered species.

------
ComputerGuru
It’s a very interesting script! It’s like a top-down (columnar) Arabic without
any of the later additions of diacritics and distinguishing dots.

~~~
dimitrov
Probably because both the Arabic and Mongolian scripts descend from the
Aramaic script

------
blululu
Interesting news. I hope that Unicode will accommodate this change
effectively. There have for instance been some issues with the unicode
encoding of the similar Uyghur script. One thing to note is that Mongolia does
not use standard Cyrillic - they use a variant that has a few differences in
letters and accents.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet)
I once learned this the hard way while trying to help a Mongolian person
navigate the bus system of Los Angeles in the era before ubiquitous
smartphones.

------
j2i2t2u2
I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea! Do not support this move!

~~~
chrismorgan
I’m curious: why not?

------
aasasd
That's nice and all, but it will have a downside: after Nazi Germany banned
the cursive Sütterlinschrift along with the printed Fraktur in favor of
‘deutsche Normalschrift’ and antiqua, the result was that people growing up
after the war couldn't read their grandparents' old letters and notes.

------
BossingAround
While I think the change in and of itself is great, the rise of right-wing
nationalism in Mongolia is very frightening (similar to that of Hungary, for
example), and I'm afraid this is a result of Mongolian nationalistic views.

As such, it is with a hint of sadness that I view this change.

------
j2i2t2u2
I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea!

------
anovikov
One weird way of fighting the Communism! They may also start looking
suspicious to Chinese, since vertical script is also used in Taiwan.

------
boznz
Ouch! imagine trying to re-write your gui for this, I cant even think how I
would adapt one of my business programs to vertical orientation, except for
maybe turning the screen by 90degrees.

~~~
chrismorgan
On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the
comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom,
&c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with
what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-
orientation.

Browser support for the complete set of this stuff is still a tad patchy;
Firefox is best in general, but all the browsers have at least the basics.

But yeah, it mostly seems to boil down to rotating your app’s entire layout by
90°.

~~~
kouteiheika
> On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the
> comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom,
> &c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with
> what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-
> orientation.

Yeah... even if CSS itself is, the browsers are not at all, not even close.
Recently I tried to use a vertical `writing-mode` in a relatively simple
application and encountered a massive amount of layout bugs and issues; it's
pretty much totally broken in both Chrome and Firefox (unless maybe if you set
__everything __to a vertical writing mode then it might kinda work?), and no
one seems to care.

------
qwerty456127
Looks particularly pretty and mostly adorable but I'm not sure it is going to
be as legible as cyrilic (which works is the same as latin, just a little bit
different), even after a lot of practice. Needless to say it's not going to be
nearly as handy for the modern digital world. This way one can hardly be sure
the cultural value of this move is enough to outweigh the practical aspect.

~~~
gberger
> This way one can hardly be sure the cultural value of this move is enough to
> outweigh the practical aspect.

How much context do you have on Mongolian culture to be able to make this
assertion? Honest question.

~~~
qwerty456127
I do have enough. And I also have some context on quite a number of cultures
(with different writing systems, including cultures who have actually migrated
or tried to migrate from one to another) and it's obvious latin alphabet is
the most practical in the context of computers, cyrilic being just slightly
different (essentially the same in the most of the technological and practical
aspects - the only difference is it's non-ASCII and has slightly different set
of glyphs). I don't say practicality is the only significant value to consider
though, indeed the cultural value also is very important.

------
tanilama
I am curious how would IDE's adopt this vertical writing style.

This feels pretty unintuitive

------
Brosper
As a web developer I reject that change :P

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robin_reala
Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work
with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian
website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible
fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.

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eukgoekoko
> wide dispersal of compatible fonts

Would you please share a link where I can download Mongolian Helvetica?

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Freak_NL
Why? If you were designing a website with Mongolian as a language option you
would choose a font that has support for Mongolian, not something completely
unsuitable like Helvetica. The same goes for any language not written with a
Latin alphabet.

If you don't want to provide a font and just want whatever passes for sans-
serif on a computer with Mongolian fonts installed, use _font-family: sans-
serif;_ in your CSS and let the OS handle it.

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eukgoekoko
Sure, I can go with font-family: sans-serif But what if I have to add
Mongolian support for a website using Helvetica typeface for the currently
used Cyrillic script?

~~~
Freak_NL
You can't, but this is nothing new. Fonts tend to support a subset of scripts.
You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it
exists.

Here you would choose a Mongolian font and add it to the font-stack in CSS for
that language, just as you would for Arabic or Chinese. If you want a
grotesque typeface that matches Helvetica in style for Mongolian, use one.

~~~
eukgoekoko
> You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it
> exists.

This is hardly a coincedence that Cyrillic alphabet has broader support and
adoption among fonts.

