
Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180424-the-cost-of-changing-an-entire-countrys-alphabet
======
vbezhenar
I'm ethnical Russian living in Kazakhstan and I think that it's not a very
wise decision. As correctly written in the article, overwhelming majority of
Kazakhstani citizens speak and write Russian well. I just don't see any point
with this change, but costs are tremendous, you have to rewrite every single
book including learning books, you have to replace every street plate. When
overwhelming majority of people speak Russian and Russia is the most important
trade partner, I think that it's only logical to have Russian as one of the
official languages in the country (with Kazakh language, of course). Instead
Russian language has strange status as a "language of international
communication" and basically they are trying to suppress its usage, many
plates are not include Russian translations, etc. For example in Canada only
38% of population speak French, nevertheless French is an official language.

~~~
kolinko
The difference is that there is little political/military threat from France
towards Canada.

I'm Polish, and thanks to the latin alphabet we're using, the country has it
much easier to be close to the west. People have easier time learning English,
and it eases the communication a lot. If we were using cyrylic, the country
would be naturally leaning more towards Russia - which, considering the
history, wouldn't be good.

I don't know too much about Kazakhstan, but perhaps it's the same thing? The
country trying to build moats between them and Russia?

If we were in a similar situation (that is - using cyrylic instead of latin),
I be pro-change. A few billion in costs of such changes, even for a poor
country, will produce a good ROI, considering greater independence and better
international trade.

~~~
azangru
> People have easier time learning English, and it eases the communication a
> lot

Is this really so? Are you sure having a different alphabet would make it
harder for people to learn a western language? I am Russian, and I can safely
say that pretty much every literate adult in Russia who has at least a basic
school education can read Latin letters just fine, because there is no way
around it; the alphabet is taught at school.

If an argument is to be made at all, it's probably that it may be harder for
the foreigners, never trained in reading Cyrillic, to start reading it, but I
am not sure it's of particular concern. I wouldn't expect significant numbers
of people flock to learn Russian (or Kazakh) as a foreign language anyway,
because why should they?

~~~
pc2g4d
The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans. I
can only imagine it makes Kazakh even more daunting. I don't think Cyrillic
letters pervade American culture in quite the same way that Latin letters
pervade Russian culture, so it's not quite the same.

~~~
azangru
> The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans.

It may be a barrier, sure, but it is a microscopic barrier (33 letters, mostly
Greek-based, many in common with the Latin alphabet) compared to the
complexity of a language (any language) itself. Would you say that Americans
would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish? Or Latvian? Or Polish?

Just as a side note: I once had to take a course in classical Greek. It took
us one lesson (or maybe two) to learn the Greek alphabet. Compared to the rest
of the course it was... I am finding it hard even to say 'peanuts', for it
would be an offense to peanuts.

 _(I am more inclined to think that it 's up to us to standardize on an
international language — and I would much rather it were English — than for
different nations to learn each other's languages. But that's, of course, just
my opinion.)_

~~~
kbenson
> Would you say that Americans would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish?
> Or Latvian? Or Polish?

 _I_ would say that Americans (and people in general) are more likely to
_attempt_ taking up those languages, if given a fairly equal choice between
them and others that also require learning a new alphabet. For the same reason
(although on a lesser scale) that they might shy away from Chinese or
Japanese.

It's one more hurdle.

~~~
kwoff
In terms of hurdles, of those four I think Danish is a clear winner there.
Finnish is "ah, hell no" as far I know. :) In terms of usefulness, I'm not
sure - maybe Polish. (That seems quite complicated grammatically, like other
Slavic languages.)

Chinese, if you don't care about writing it, is simple grammatically (though a
few concepts are hard to wrap your head around).

~~~
_delirium
Danish is "ah, hell no" if you want to try speaking it out loud...

------
rauanm
(Disclaimer: I'm kazakh and passively pro-switch)

I'm gonna ignore political aspects of the switch and focus on pseudo-
scientific side. (my personal views and thinking)

Except for words and phrases adopted from arabic or sort of persian (also
arabic, but 'persianised'), our language is agglutinative and mostly follows
vowel harmony. (that might not tell you much, but basically means we don't
need any special letters or stacks of letters to hint the spelling - we have
kind of built-in elements of style when it comes to phonetics)

After a long period of using arabic alphabet and brief period of latin-based
alphabet (yes, we had that until Stalin decided to change horses midstream -
for everyone in ussr), we changed our alphabet to cyrillic. (and when I say
'we', I usually mean soviets did that for us)

While doing so, we just took all of 33 letters from russian alphabet and added
our own 'custom' letters. This lead to drastic repercussions, because instead
of conforming new words and terms to proper lexical and phonetical rules, we
adopted everything literally unchanged from or through russian. (no need to
remind you that there were no independent science, culture, or literature)

Fast-forward to our days. We have long and clumsy alphabet. We write and spell
letters we don't need, sometimes basically speaking two languages at once (it
feels like spanglish or franglais, except we don't always have an alternative
- it either sounds awkward, doesn't exist, or is so archaic no one knows or
cares for it).

My take is giving up and saying well we sucked dick for 100 years so might as
well keep doing it is not the answer.

I personally have no idea if there's a way to pay off the technical debt and
fix the upstream. Cyrillic is subjectively harder to read or spell because of
all the crufty legacy, and the way I see it we don't have a linguistic
institution making decisions and defending the language for the sake of the
language and its beauty. (god I envy frenchmen and their zealous protection of
la Langue).

~~~
jaratec
Out of curiosity, were there attempts/proposals for adopting the Orkhon script
(or variant)? Wouldn't it be more natural/easier to use for a turkic language?
Link to Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_alphabet)

Edit: spelling

~~~
rauanm
I don't think there were any attempts to adopt runic scripts, but proposals
are plenty. Some people say gokturk would be most natural to use. (albeit,
unlikely to happen - why would you switch to brainfuck when everyone uses
javascript?)

In fact, it wouldn't be just adopting, but actually getting back to roots.
It's lost history I doubt we'll ever get back. I have no clue what's written
on the stele in that wiki article, but I remember seeing someone's
'transliteration' of the text and it's shockingly comprehensible.

------
niftich
Hearts and minds. The immense monetary cost and hassle of doing so is weighed
up against developing a closer connection to Turkey and Azerbaijan, ostensibly
[1]; but the cultural subtext of easing consumption and learning of other
latin-script media and art from the wider world.

There's an element of sticking it to the Russians, an element of exploiting a
generational divide unlike other leaders who stuck with their aging power
base, and an element of a leader wanting to make a permanent mark on the
state, but they mismash into an ambitious scheme that continues Kazakhstan's
to be a relevant actor and independent participant in the world stage.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124215#14124449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124215#14124449)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> The cultural subtext of easing consumption and learning of other latin-
> script media and art from the wider world.

That’s not really the motivation here. English learning has boomed in
Kazakhstan for many years now even without a script reform, the younger
generations have no problem with the Latin alphabet. Kazakh-language texts on
social media are often liberally sprinkled with English phrases in the Latin
alphabet regardless of Kazakh itself still being written in Cyrillic.

~~~
dennisgorelik
It is not convenient to switch between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets while
typing.

Using the same alphabet for both languages adds extra convenience and ease to
text communication.

------
emodendroket
The costs are not purely economic -- you will have people struggle to read in
the new script and make old texts inaccessible to young people. Additionally,
this isn't a case like Chinese where Romanization has the benefit of making it
easier to acquire literacy. What is the benefit of this change? I find the
claim in this article that using the same script to write their language is
going to bring them closer to Western Europe and the US pretty implausible.

~~~
pradn
The benefit is to more easily draw international tourists and conduct business
around the world. Most rich countries use the Latin alphabet, so it's a bid to
move away from the Russosphere.

~~~
emodendroket
Does it really make a difference to you if all the (from your perspective, as
a visitor) unintelligible gibberish is written in Latin script rather than
some other script?

~~~
y_molodtsov
I guess all people who think that way should visit Hungary and try to read the
signs there.

~~~
mynegation
When glyphs are recognizable, it is still better. If not for informational
messages, at least names of the locations can be somewhat recalled. Let's say
I drive and I need to go to Székesfehérvár. I have only a slightest idea how
to pronounce it, but I will recognize it. Much harder to do if you need to
drive to กรุงเทพมหานคร

~~~
emodendroket
Surely the government could easily print romanized place names in addition to
Cyrillic ones, if this is the primary concern.

------
parliament32
Here's a country changing their alphabet to boost their international
compatibility... now if only the US would switch to the metric system.

~~~
emodendroket
Not like people are going to refuse to trade with the US because we have
customary units, realistically. That's the benefit of being the world's
richest country and not a small Central Asian one.

~~~
parliament32
Foreign trade is, interestingly enough, considered the most important reason
to convert the US to the metric system:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States#20th_century)

Apart from trade though, this issue might cause some countries to hesitate to
work with the US for scientific research or related initiatives:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure)

~~~
emodendroket
The world's largest consumer market, among other things, more than make up for
the inconvenience of specifying that a screw is one-eighth of an inch.

------
zokier
Did they seriously go with dotless i, the character that is endless source of
fun for any case mapping code. Would í have really been so bad? All the other
accented characters are using ´ ffs.

~~~
gnulinux
Used dotless, dotted i all my life never had any problems. What endless source
of fun are you talking about?

~~~
M_Bakhtiari
Convert ı to upper case and you get I. But convert I back to lower case and
what should you get? i or ı?

~~~
gnulinux
This is a very strange question. In English you get i. In Turkish or Azeri you
get ı. There is a very fundamental difference between ı and i and basically no
native speaker mixes them up. When you're learning English, for example, you
mix up and write capital İ instead of I. The rule is basic: ı <\--> I and i
<\--> İ. No magic going on.

~~~
M_Bakhtiari
You don't always have the luxury of knowing the language of the text you're
processing. You may well encounter both English and Turkish words in the same
text stream, and you don't always have the means to distinguish between them.

It's the same problem with Han unification. It's fine if you have 100%
Japanese, Chinese or Korean and set your font accordingly. But it all breaks
down when you try to mix two or more languages in the same stream, unless you
have some external means of distinguishing between them.

~~~
gnulinux
This might be true but Turkish alphabet was designed in late 1920s when
computers barely existed. Maybe they could update it now? I find it hard to
believe they would do it though.

EDIT: I guess you could make a case about Kazakh alphabet not inheriting this
feature. But having written systems for both Turkish and English I don't find
this a huge deal. I guess this alphabet reform has mostly nationalistic
motivation and Kazakhs might have wanted to fit their alphabet to similar
languages like Turkish or Azeri for which the alphabet is tested and we know
it works.

------
my_first_acct
A couple of comments on the article:

1) The article doesn't mention the latinization scheme that was initially
proposed last year by the committee of linguists that was tasked to study this
issue. Their proposal used only the 26 letters of the English alphabet; since
Kazakh has more than 26 sounds, the additional sounds would be represented by
digraphs (pairs of letters). President Nazarbayev over-rode the committee, and
proposed the "apostrophe" version (mentioned in the article). After much
outcry, the final version (with diacritical marks) was adopted. So here is the
evolution of the letter currently written with the Kazakh Cyrillic "ә": ae,
then a', then á. Note, by the way, that "ә" does not exist in the Russian
version of Cyrillic; in order to write Kazakh in Cyrillic, additional letters
needed to be introduced back in the 1930s. My opinion: the digraph proposal
was the most forward-looking. I'm guessing that most young Kazakhs will end up
skipping the diacritical marks when they send text messages, whereas they
would have used the digraphs.

2) The article is a bit confusing, in that it mixes up two different
initiatives. The first initiative (the main focus of the article) is to
convert Kazakh to the Latin alphabet. The second is to reduce the use of
Russian in favor of Kazakh. (At some point, President Nazarbayev expressed the
goal of educating all children in 3 languages: Kazakh, English, and Russian).

3) The article (and most of the comments) seem to be focused on the question
of whether latinization would improve Kazakhstan's economic ties with European
and Turkic nations. But Kazakhstan's most important neighbor is China, and it
is safe to assume that more Chinese are familiar with the Latin than with the
Cyrillic alphabet, so latinization makes sense in this regard as well.

------
DenisM
90 years ago similar Latinization was attempted in Russia itself:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_U...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_in_the_Soviet_Union)

~~~
Baeocystin
Cyrillic was heavily altered to be closer to Latin script in the 18th century,
too.

[https://www.quora.com/What-changes-did-the-Russian-
Emperor-P...](https://www.quora.com/What-changes-did-the-Russian-Emperor-
Peter-the-Great-make-to-the-Cyrillic-alphabet-and-why)

------
PunchTornado
Isn't it better/easier to type at a keyboard using a latin alphabet rather
than Cyrilic?

There was once a guy trying to type Russian on my computer and he had to go to
a website to type it. While when using a latin alphabet you can easily type
Romanian with a US or French keyboard or whatever latin based keyboard.

This benefit is huge.

~~~
Asooka
Well, for Bulgarian, there are two different keyboard mappings one can use to
type cyrillic with. The typewriter layout, which nobody uses. And the phonetic
layout, which just maps the latin characters on your keyboard to their
cyrillic equivalents where appropriate, plus about half a dozen character
mappings where the latin character doesn't have a cyrillic character, so it's
mapped to a cyrillic character that doesn't have a latin counterpart. I'm not
sure how it is in Russian, but I suspect they have the same system.

~~~
Fins
There is a phonetic Russian keyboard, but i don't know of anyone other than
foreigners who can't be bothered to actually learn anything using it.
Everybody else uses typewriter layout. I would be very surprised if it were
any different in Bulgarian.

------
eu
Moldova went through a similar transition in early 90s:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Reversion_to...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Reversion_to_Latin_script,_and_beyond)

------
antimora
I am surprised nowhere Uzbekistan's efforts to switch were mentioned. They
started processes in 1991, and still the majority are using Cyrillic,
including the government officials.

------
forkerenok
Don't have an opinion on the news itself, but find it amusing that the title
picture features journals exclusively in Russian.

~~~
fanzhang
Is that right? It's not just Cyrillic, but actually Russian language? If so,
that's pretty funny.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Copy-pastable Magazine title (I just copied from a Cyrillic alphabet): Пекарь

Seems to be something about bread.

~~~
nbabitskiy
It's Лекарь (doctor), not Пекарь (baker). It's actually borrowed germanic
root[0]

[0] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/læce](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/læce)

------
OliverJones
Why? Thumbing their national nose at Russia? Trying to align themselves
economically more with Europe and America?

And, will the Unicode for the new alphabet use existing glyphs from the Latin
planes, like "A"? Or will they stick with the Cyrillic planes for letters that
look the same, like "A"?

------
kmbriedis
As a tourist I am pro-change, because it can be nightmare visiting Cyrillic
countries - every street sign, label, bus stop name etc. just doesn't make any
sense and hard to remember if you don't know Cyrillic

------
MistahKoala
I was expecting to see some mention about the Russian government's public
reaction to such a move. It has the appearance of both a snub to Russian
culture and pride, and further encroachment of Western institutions.

------
swrobel
I'm really curious about how this will be implemented from a software
standpoint. Will the language use the same ISO (or whatever body determines
them) browser language code like en-US or will there need to be two separate
codes that exist in parallel, one for the old cyrillic version, and one for
the new latin one.

Are there any modern examples of this sort of transition having to be
implemented? I think we all think of the set of possible language codes as
something that has been static for a long time, but this shows that it can be
rather fluid.

~~~
rspeer
BCP 47 language codes [1] have three major parts: the language, the script,
and the region. Canonically, the language is two or three lowercase letters,
the region is two capital letters or three numbers, and the script is four
letters in title-case.

These values can be filled in from context. "en-US" means the same thing as
"en-Latn-US" because it's always written in the Latin alphabet. "ja"
(Japanese) means the same thing as "ja-Jpan-JP" (Japanese, as used in Japan,
written in the combination of scripts that is unique to Japanese). You _could_
refer to romanized Japanese as "ja-Latn", though this is really rare.

But there are a few language codes where you should specify the script.
Particularly Serbian, where the Latin and Cyrillic scripts coexist. In that
case, you distinguish them as "sr-Latn" and "sr-Cyrl".

So the language codes for Kazakh will be "kk-Latn" and "kk-Cyrl". Which one
"kk" means by default may change at some point.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47](https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47) \-
if you find yourself referring to "ISO language codes" in the present day,
this is what you actually mean.

~~~
stordoff
> "ja" (Japanese) means the same thing as "ja-Jpan-JP" (Japanese, as used in
> Japan, written in the combination of scripts that is unique to Japanese).

Incidentally, I noticed that Facebook has both ja-JP and ja-KS (for Kansai-
ben) recently, which I haven't seen elsewhere before.

~~~
rspeer
Language codes made up off the top of someone's head are my peeve. If anyone
else wanted to support Kansai dialect, they wouldn't necessarily (and probably
shouldn't) make the same decision to pretend that it's a country with code KS.

It's not like the standards left them with anything to work with, but "ja-x-
kansai" would have been quite acceptable.

At least it's not as bad as code I've seen that used "zh-SC" and "zh-TC" to
represent Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese, because they either didn't know
about "zh-Hans" vs. "zh-Hant", or didn't leave room for script codes in their
database. (In my post I neglected to even mention Chinese, by far the largest
example of a two-script language.) If you read the codes "zh-SC" and "zh-TC"
literally, they're distinguishing whether it's "Chinese as used in Seychelles"
or "Chinese as used in the Turks and Caicos Islands".

And it's not as bad as the OpenSubtitles language code "ze", which after some
examination, I have to conclude means "this might be Chinese or might be
English, we're not sure, we found it on a shoddily pirated DVD".

~~~
jwilk
Even if they didn't have room for script codes, they could still use zh-CN /
zh-TW.

------
lopmotr
Whatever the cost, surely the biggest value is moving closer to a single
global script which is more of an ideal to me than practical. Lots of
languages have changed their old scripts to latin or latin-based, and whatever
the cost when they did it, we benefit now - people in China can read a Turkish
person's name and roughly get it recognizable without having to learn
anything. A few generations later, nobody will care about the cost of
conversion but people will keep benefiting.

------
baybal2
Doing a short gig for the national revenue office there now. Their previous
contractor ran away with $40k, and left them with a JPEG picture instead of a
tax return portal.

The first version of a new script (one with apostrophes) was beyond
unreadable.

------
M_Bakhtiari
What a pointless waste of time and money. Funny that they link halfway to
another pointless waste of everybody’s time and money, Sweden’s switch to
right-hand traffic, instead of actually addressing the problem of steering
wheels being on the wrong side, which could have been solved simply by
mandating new cars have the wheel on the appropriate side which would have
cost the taxpayer practically nothing.

------
zby
English is not very well suited for the Latin alphabet! Learning writing in
English is much more difficult than in Polish for example despite the
additional letters in Polish. Especially with vowels - come on: 'a' can mean
'æ', 'ɑː', 'ɑ', 'eɪ', 'ə' \- and it is also used in 'ea' where it has even
different pronunciation.

------
madeel
Adopting a consistent/stable writing system is more important standardizing on
Latin.

Main goal is to be phonetically consistent with reading. I highly doubt the
beauty of expression in Arabic/Hebrew can be represented outside their
respective scripts.

Bastardizing on Latin does not give Kazaks anything more than Turkey getting
the EU membership.

~~~
kingofhdds
>Bastardizing on Latin

It's ugly, and emotionally loaded language which doesn't bring us towards any
bright idea. In majority of languages where Latin is the base for their
writing systems, there are diacritics, or other graphical changes. I wonder if
you want also to tell French, and German guys that they 'bastardized' Latin,
or is it only Kazakh who are not allowed to use the script with additions?
Besides, Cyrillic had to be heavily modified for Kazakh also, and I guess any
script, which realistically exists in modern world.

~~~
madeel
It's how it is. Chinese/Japanese regardless of it's character hasn't stopped
them from carving our respect or economic might the world. So liberalization
on an idea for the sake of liberalization is deem to go nowhere.

~~~
kingofhdds
Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to communicate. What
liberalization? This comment is neither answer to the mine, nor continuation
of your own above.

~~~
madeel
liberalization: How liberals seems to interpret adoption of western systems as
cure to all problems. In this very case latinization.

~~~
kingofhdds
Now I see the meaning of your commentary, thanks! Still, I don't see how it
could be related to what I wrote here, or even to what you wrote opening the
thread.

Also, let me tell you: trying to explain every phenomena in terms of liberal
conspiracy is rather unproductive. The world is way more complex than that.
Actually, in post-Soviet countries conservatives (in politological meaning)
are often pro-Western, and lefties are anti-. And you probably the first man
on Earth who called Nursultan Nazarbaev's regime "liberal".

~~~
madeel
Liberalism is not right or left it's the proliferation of thoughts in manner
which creates confusion.

Conspiracy is a abusive word for anything society deems expulsive from the
status-co.

World is not complex it's the expression of meaning related to facts are over-
loaded.

Example,

If you call injustice injustice you solve the problem complexity problem in 1
step.

If you describe societal injustice as systematic with various traits, laws and
blah blah, you end up doing the govt's job. Regardless of democracy or
choosing any fancy term to fill the blank.

Except in the 1st case people have a clear goal knowing their is a better
future possible by overcoming the injustice to find a new path. While in the
2nd case a few generations are wasted trying to only comprehend what's the
complexity all about.

------
bushin
"Munalbayeva Daurenbekovna, head of the National Academic Library"

Butchered her name. Latin alphabet didn't help.

~~~
evincarofautumn
For the curious: Үмітхан Дәуренбекқызы Мұңалбаева, which I think is Úmithan
Dáurenbekqyzy Muńalbaeva in the new alphabet.

~~~
mda
If you speak Turkish, you can actually read and understand second version.

------
partycoder
Turkey went through a similar process. Reasons included a desire to increase
literacy rate and a creating a new national identity.

This doesn't really apply to Kazakhstan, a country that already has a good
literacy rate.

~~~
lmm
Forming a national identity is still pretty important for Kazakhstan, which
lives in the shadow of Russia. That Nazarbayev apparently deferred to the
popular will on this issue is promising if the nation is to outlast him.

------
spacenick88
I wonder if since this is a pure script change there will be such a clear and
simple transliteration that it's possible with a finite state machine. I.e.
regex replace

------
Yizahi
To those wondering "is it that bad like some people claim" here how it might
have looked for you:

Хере из эн экземпл оф текст траскрайбед фром латин то кириллик.

------
solarkraft
> There is also budget for developing a language converter IT program to
> recode Cyrillic script into Latin in the third quarter of 2018
> (approximately $166,000)

what

------
KAdot
It will take a while to switch everything from Cyrillic to Latin. Serbian is
the only modern language that uses both Cyrillic and Latin right now.

------
dennisgorelik
Why wouldn't Kazakhstan use pure 26-letter Latin alphabet?

There is a big advantage in using the same keyboard that English language
uses.

~~~
qwerty456127
Using pure 26-letter Latin alphabet means using multi-letter combinations to
represent particular sounds and/or using same letters to represent very
different sounds in different contexts. Both things feel very ugly. I am not
really familiar with non-european alphabets but Č (Czech, Croatian, Latvian)
looks much better and easier to read than CH (English), CZ (Polish), TCH
(French) or TSCH (German, I'm not even sure I've spelled it correctly, it may
happen to be even longer and more weird in German). And you can fit more in a
twit this way :-) When I was a student speed-writing huge amounts of text on
lectures I went even further, e.g. using Ŋ in place of NG in Eŋliš :-)

~~~
dennisgorelik
> Both things feel very ugly.

Both things ("multi-letter combinations" and "same letters to represent very
different sound") are inevitable anyway -- with or without diacritic
characters. After learning the language - I do not notice any of these two
problems. But I struggle with switching between keyboard layouts multiple
times every day: I frequently forget to switch between English and Russian and
start typing in a wrong layout. If Russian used 26 letter latin alphabet -
there would be no "layout switch" problem.

------
Bud
In other words (in other letters?), Kazakhstan is doing more to rid itself of
Russian influence than the US is.

Ouch.

~~~
lolsal
Do you think Kazakhstan and the US have similar levels of Russian influence?

------
ALee
Test case for the US if it ever moves beyond the metric system

------
Markoff
shame Chinese didn't went full Vietnam on this

------
ibdf
Next, the US will try to adopt the metric system (again).

~~~
jsgo
I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler.

~~~
Lionsion
> I wish we would. Conversions would be so much simpler.

Not really, and you'd have to do it more frequently. The US already has a
standard, and a lot of existing stuff built to it. Adopting the metric system
isn't going to change the size of the pipes in my house's plumbing, the units
in my recipes and cookbooks, etc.

~~~
jsgo
at the most basic:

1 kilometer is 1000 meters

1 kiloliter is 1000 liters

etc.

1 mile is 1760 yards

1 foot is 12 inches

1 gallon is 4 quarts

etc.

dunno, seems simpler to me.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
With factors of 2,3 and 4 its actually easier to deal with English than
metric. A third of a meter? Good luck.

~~~
efrafa
How is calculating 1/3 of 100cm an issue? Im living on California for 2 years
and imperial system still make no sense to me :)

~~~
TomK32
Has California become and island already?

~~~
erk__
Parts of it is ;) [0]

[0]
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116225/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116225/)

