The current script was political, of course, but so is the decision to change it.
Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, exposing themselves to Russian cultural dominance); or switching to Latin, and implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Turkey.
It's not a question with a single definitive good answer. Different ex-Soviet republics tackled it in different ways. The article points out that Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan switched, for example, but e.g. Kyrgyzstan did not.
The other problem with every switch (including the previous ones) is that it affects all existing written materials, especially books and textbooks. When Soviets originally switched most Central Asian republics from Arabic to Latin back in 1920s, they used it to great effect to control what kind of materials the new generations would have access to, very similar to what Ataturk did in Turkey. Same thing applies today: switching the alphabet allows the new governments of these countries to define the majority of the written corpus that their citizens will have ready access to.
> Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, exposing themselves to Russian cultural dominance); or switching to Latin, and implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Turkey.
Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago.
Most nationalists or people aligned with Russian views use Cyrillic here and others use Latin. Having to learn both at young age (7 for Cyrillic, 8 for Latin) gives you more options in life. You can easily read anything on the Internet and learn western languages. On the other hand, you can go to Russia or Bulgaria and quickly find your way around. One can even argue that this opens up your views, so when you see Greek for the first time, it doesn't look like a bunch of weird characters but you start seeing similarities (esp. with capital letters) and it's makes you want to learn the ones that seem completely alien (like Sigma or Omega).
> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago.
I disagree because current synchronic digraphia in Serbia is a mess. You have people using Cyrillic script in Latin documents, Latin script in Cyrillic documents. You have people religiously using Cyrillic and Latin. People who prefer Latin and make fun of people using Cyrillic.
You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša).
Learning English (and it's alphabet) gives you mush more options in life than being a speaker of a language which uses a Latin based script (or Cyrillic, or any other script).
> You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online
So do all the other countries and they make different kinds of "sins" regarding to proper writing.
> who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša).
This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. Also, a lot of hardware is still sold without proper keyboard layout (you can change it in software, but then you have to remember which of the curly brackets is used for what letter). On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower.
These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.
> This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that.
There was proper support for Cyrillic and Latin basically from Windows XP. Also many other Linux distros supported our scripts from early on.
On the mobile front, there was also a support for both scripts relatively early on. I remmember using both Cyrillic and Latin keyboards on Android 2.1, in 2008.
> On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower.
On the older devices which had physical buttons, sure. But on Android with QWERTZ/ЉЊЕРТЗ software keyboard that simply isn't the case anymore.
> These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.
Not directly but indirectly. If we had just one script, there would be more software solutions because it would be easier to develop them. Nowadays you mostly get some kind of support with/for Serbian Latin or no support at all, as you said.
Kyrgyz here. For an average PC user it was/is really hard to find option in the system settings where you could choose another keyboard layout. Especially when OS is in Russian and Russian alphabet lacks "only" 3 Kyrgyz-specific symbols: "ө", "ү", "ң". Many of the users don't even suspect that there is a support for Kyrgyz in Windows, Ubuntu and later versions of Android.
I don't understand why virtual keyboards (e.g. on Android) cannot have letters with diacritic along with normal letters (not hidden behind long tap popup). That should not be difficult to do.
They can and do (maybe not standard on Serbian phones, though). My German Android keyboard has extra keys for äöüß. They make typing somewhat harder, because all the keys have to be smaller to fit
Usually carrier provided phones come preconfigured with the Serbian Latin as the base language and come with a fully-fledged Latin keyboard with all of the extra letters visible.
Some phones from the carriers (LG phones notably) come with the default Android Serbian Cyrillic localization and Cyrillic keyboard.
If you buy a mobile phone without a contract, you will go to the first time setup wizard which will ask you what language you want to use. You will, among other languages, have Српски (Serbian) and Srpski (Serbian Latin). Depending on what you choose, you will get the appropriate keyboard.
There are also other keyboards which provide an easy way to input both Latin and Cyrillic characters from one keyboard application. Also, every key is large enough because we don't have a lot of letters in contrast to English (30 letters). The biggest alternative keyboard application is the Google's GBoard application[1][2].
Autocorrect for Slavic languages is a somewhat hard problem due to all the different conjugations (wrong word?) you can impose on a word. In English for instance, a noun can be in singular form, or in plural form. In Slavic languages, it can be in many forms - (singular, plural, dual) * (all the cases) * ("a", "the" -- if the language has the distinction). Adjectives then get all these, but times the three genders they need to agree with. Verbs can be conjugated in many ways, too. So a good autocorrect system needs to be grammar-aware to know that the word you're correcting is e.g. an adjective that's agreeing with a feminine singular noun in the accusative case. None of them do that from what I've seen. It's not all bad, since you mostly know what you're trying to write and just picking the closest word by levenstein distance does the job, but it can definitely be done better. One downside is you need to have every variant of every word in the dictionary which kind of makes it needlessly large in size, and I've sometimes found variants missing and had to add them.
Polish is the most popular Latin script Slavic language and has quite a nice market. After using Google keyboard for a few years I still daily add new words to it's dictionary. With English it is very rare.
Many times autocorrect has word only in present-masculine form. Or it doesn't have subjunctive form. Even for words I consider common. I can only imagine how it can be for less popular Slavic languages.
Nice clarification - I've been using declension/conjugation interchangeably for the last year or so and I'm glad to see it resolved pretty unambiguously!
I see, thank you for the insight. It seems to be a similar but much harder problem to the German dictionaries which don't know how to deal with compound words. Android is also missing a lot of forms for verbs in second person singular.
Bah yes, this drives me nuts. I don't get it, compound words aren't rocket science, and even some level of grammar awareness shouldn't be so hard considering the rather low expectations towards autocorrect when it comes to correctness.
Is your name Kostic or Kostić ? There's one reason. The other is that typing out diacritics is a chore and people get what you mean without them anyway. Especially for programmers - we do most typing in English which doesn't use them, it's not in my "muscle memory".
I am talking about casual messaging - for formal writing you probably do come off as illiterate if you don't bother to use them.
Kostić but I use Kostic when I write English. If I use Serbian Latin (when I communicate with Croatians, for example) I would write down Kostić.
The problem with not writing out diacritics is that Serbian is a language with a fully phonetic alphabets. You don't need to ever guess how words are written or read. You lose greatest feature of the Serbian language if you don't use diacritics, when using the Latin keyboard. I shouldn't, ever, guess how a Serbian word is read when I see it.
My Norwegian teacher tried to tell me the same thing thirty years ago. For Norwegian it is manifestly untrue because pronunciation varies from valley to valley.
There are dialects but those dialects all use the same number of voices (one voice equals to one letter) so they can be expressed with the Cyrillic or the Latin script.
There are also regional accents but accents aren't different enough to pose any kind of problem when communicating.
Hell, even other language standards created from the Serbo-Croatian language aren't different enough to pose a problem when communicating. :)
For Polish (on computers) we have a keyboard layout called "polish programmer" widely adopted many years ago affectively making the original "polish typewriter" layout (that mapped diacritics to separate keys) almost extinct.
For typing diacritics AltGr is used (eg. ą = AltGr+a).
Typing without diacritics is considered clumsy at least within the groups of people I interact with.
On mobile it is a bit more relaxed, but the dictionary autocorrection is sort of OK. Conjugation, declension etc. complicates things, but you have the stem + most common suffix autocorrected, so usually it is a matter of erasing last 1-2 letters and changing them if needed. Also the Markov chain alike logic of autosuggestion quite often is right with the inflection.
This is not "uneducated" people, this is people getting used to type in like that in the 90s and not loosing the habit - or possibly simply perfecting the speed. It's not about keyboards only, but about software simply not having support for non-ASCII characters. Even in 2017, there's too many American companies that won't accept non-ASCII names (even like mine, which fits into Latin1).
It's the same with Czechs: 15-20 years ago, typing without diacritics was perfectly normal. Some people still do.
Or, you know, people do a lot of typing in English or on English keyboard (when programming), and don't care or even want to switch keyboards to type something with diacritics.
> On the other hand, you can go to Russia or Bulgaria and quickly find your way around. One can even argue that this opens up your views, so when you see Greek for the first time, it doesn't look like a bunch of weird characters
Yes, as an American who has learned Cyrillic via Bulgarian, I find that traveling in Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, etc is much easier because I can read this script (not to mention the similarity of many Slavic words). I'm definitely a fan of learning languages with different scripts—hell, it even helps you as a programmer when testing your input fields, layout, etc!
I understand the social and political motivations behind wanting to change the script, but I'd be sad if I didn't get to see Kazakhstan with the beautiful кирилица (Cyrillic).
Still though, Cyrillic was imposed on Kazakhstan and was adopted fairly recently, it's not the same in Bulgaria. Fully agree on the rest though. And nice blog! И аз съм живял в България за няколко години. :)
> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago.
Not true. It wasn't decided centuries ago. But it was done in 1954. in order to distance Yugoslav communists from Stalin's USSR. In fact it was done to placate the US. In fact this move by Kazakhstan, where they are courting the favour of the West, was done by Serbia 63 years ago.
> Most nationalists or people aligned with Russian views use Cyrillic here and others use Latin.
This sentence alone makes it painfully obvious of how things are in Serbia: little countries aren't allowed to have history and its citizens self respect.
Ivo Andric put it well: "Prolonged slavery and bad rule, can confuse and distort the understanding of a people so that the common sense and their judgement weaken and become twisted. Such disturbed people can no longer distinguish good from evil, but their own benefit from the obvious harm."
Political and maybe ultimately economical. Latin script isn't much attractive due to southern Europe but mostly due to the enormous economic success of USA following the British Empire. Kazakh or any other nation want their children to learn English as it matters the most in addition to their mother tongue. Russian children too want to learn English for most. So any other secondary power in the world is shadowed by English. Slowly people don't want to learn French or German or Russian because they are those Nationals themselves striving to learn English as the business academic and travel language.
So the success of American economy drives the success of English and Latin script. Imho.
English has reached enough of a critical mass by now that even if north America and the UK would fall off the surface of the earth tomorrow, it would take a few generations for another language to take it's place as a medium for international exchange. Newton wrote in Latin more than 1000 years after the empire left Britain.
Bad second language English (like e.g. mine, I feel quite at home in writing, but you should see me navigating the linguistic perils of a US supermarket checkout, not funny) is close to useless when talking to native speakers, but it can be invaluable as a common ground with other non-native speakers.
Yes, but for different reasons. In practice it means tons of corrupt government contracts to cronies to republish textbooks, remake signage, update software and all government services to new alphabet, etc. Millions of dollars in contracts and kickbacks.
English is also the language of pop culture. Most popular movies are made in the US. So is a lot of pop music. The most popular science fiction authors write in English. Large parts of the Internet are English.
Not saying you are wrong but there may be a bias if you are English speaking. As a person with a another language as english as my first, lots of the internet I see is in my native language. Lots of new music and movies is as well.
In the spirit of trading anecdotes: I'm Russian and I read and write an order of magnitude more in English than I do in Russian. Naturally, speaking is a different matter.
A lot of small countries have a local film industry, but don't expect large-scale unlimited budget productions like you'd see in Hollywood.
Generally, if you are a small country, you have to pour a lot of money into the industry to be able to even compete with Hollywood, otherwise the small market size doesn't make it worthwhile to produce anything. It's essentially the state paying for a public good, where the good is culture in your own language.
Swedish. Edit: The market for scandinavian language entertainment is perhaps 15 milion people. Not a lot and theese industries is in no way a golden ticket to unlimited fortunes but the output is pretty consintently high quality stuff.
I absolutely adore the melodic way Swedish and Norwegian sound (I know they are mutually intelligible). I also like Finnish, but i know that is Uralic and completely different. I really wish I could pick up the language. Is there anything high quality outside crime dramas and the like?
Books. Plenty of really good classics around. If you want simpler Swedish, perhaps start with Astrid Lindgren (children's books primarily) or Tove Jansson (also children's books in the book stores, but they have many undertexts and are appreciated on more levels the older you get).
What I find really interesting is that non-English speaking countries dub basically everything yet English speaking countries subtitle most of the time. Sometimes even things in English get subtitled (e.g. The Full Monty for the US market).
As a native English speaker dubbing drives me nuts. I want to see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon subtitled not dubbed.
Why the preference? I know the French are super paranoid about the cultural hegemony of English. Is this the case elsewhere?
Interesting. I had the opposite perception. Most Europeans I know (Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, British) prefer subtitles on movies (even when they are foreign non-English movies), whereas the impression I have gotten of Americans through e.g. news broadcasts and talkshows, have been that everything is dubbed into English (for example interviews from the EU parliament or other foreign countries). I am sure it depends on the context, but now I wonder if there are any statistics on when things are dubbed vs subtitled.
I am not sure if Europeans in general prefer subtitles. Most of my friend in Germany do. However, they are younger and well educated. Most people from my parent's generation probably would prefer dubs. It turns out that almost everything in Germany gets dubbed. You really gotta go out of your way if you want to see subs.
I wouldn't say news broadcasts and talk shows are a fair comparison here, as those are often watched passively (while cooking, cleaning, getting ready, chatting with friends) as opposed to film or dramatic television which are usually watched actively.
Dubbing also destroys immersion, which is bad for a story, but irrelevant for an interview. Rare is the dub where all the voice actors get all the emotion in the voice correct.
Actually it has a movie industry. Many movies from Czechoslovakia period are being considered "classic" and are still popular, with quotes from them being used all the time.
For foreign movies, there were also cases, when the dubbed versions were better (sounded better) than originals - for example Louis de Funès movies or MASH.
I'm Czech and a very large portion of the country doesn't speak any other language (not even Russian or German) at all, and they don't suffer from it at all.
What vacri said; also, nowadays, some people choose Russian (you have to pick one foreign language that you'll learn next 7 years - parents do the choice) because it's relatively simple compared to English for Slavic native speakers.
This may have been true at some point but I feel English would not have remained so popular without other reasons.
The language and writing system are simpler than most languages I've encountered. Most importantly in this age, English is easy to use with keyboards.
Looking at Latin languages there's a lot of time spent learning word conjugation. English has little gender, no formal/informal tenses, a single, mostly phonetic writing system. It doesn't have mutually unitelligble dialects. I don't know of any other widely spoken language with these attributes.
The writing system is simpler than most, mirroring comments of others here that English autocorrect works better and many of them ignore "extra" letters from their language when typing online. This extends even to Eastern countries which largely type using "pinyin", "romanji", etc... even though it's cultural taboo to send these messages without translating them to the symbols they represent first.
Some English language attributes may be a result of it's historical popularity rather than the cause, but either way I have heard these attributes make it easy to reach a broken but usable level of speaking ability.
I think everyone who learned English has memories of pronouncing a word for the first time while reading it repeatedly. The fact that this is a usable way of learning words shows the it's fairly phonetic.
Contrast this to Chinese for example, where the symbol has almost no relation to pronounciation and some dialects are unintelligible even though the written form is exactly the same.
I think you're making a bit of a weird comparison by comparing English to supposed languages that have mutually unintelligible dialects. Mutually unintelligible ways of speaking should be considered different languages, not dialects.
Of course, politics interferes with this. For example, saying that the many ways people speak in China are "dialects of Chinese" is the PRC government's view, but linguists say they're deluding themselves. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan, Hokkien, and so on are different languages.
So here you should be comparing English to Mandarin Chinese, not to every language that gets called "Chinese". Mandarin has even less inflection and word variation than English. It's true that its writing system is a mess, though, and it's even messier that it's used to write other languages that don't have their own standardized written forms.
There are many languages less phonetic than English, Chinese is just the best example I can think of. I was just pointing out that English spoken and written are close enough that you can learn one from the other.
I think Chinese is an example that's so extreme, it's not really very useful for such comparisons.
Anyway, if we look at European languages, English is the one that's extreme in terms of how non-obvious the correspondence of its script and its phonetics are. It's not just that the mapping is very arbitrary - French can be similarly arbitrary in dropping consonants, for example - but it's also very inconsistent. You think you've learned how some combination of letters is pronounced by looking at some word and then hearing it... and then you find out that the same combination can be pronounced in three more ways.
There are still patterns behind all it, and eventually you grok them, but they're way more complicated than "this letter plus this letter gives this sound", which is typical of other languages - or at least such simplified rules can be used to speak in a way that others will understand. Not so in English - you have to learn all those exceptions and subtle rules to be understood.
> switching the alphabet allows the new governments of these countries to define the majority of the written corpus that their citizens will have ready access to.
I'm very cautious with this kind of statement. Up to the 40s (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fraktur&oldid=771... also cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antiqua%E2%80%93F...) German was mostly written in Fraktur instead of Antiqua. Nevertheless (being German) I can read Antiqua without problems. Yes, Fraktur and Antiqua are much less different [1] than Antiqua (Latin alphabet) vs. cyrillic alphabet vs. Arabic alphabet from your example, but do you consider the citizens as that stupid that there won't be lots of people that teach themselves all the alphabets that are used in text that they want to understand?
[1] they are not equal (i.e. not "just different symbols for the same letters") though. For example in Fraktur there exist two kinds of s (a long one and a round one) with strict rules when to use which. Or there exist ligatures that have to be used: these correspond to specific "combined consonant sequences" with specific sounds (different from the sounds of the individual letters) in German, such as ch, ck, ſt und tz (a subtlety that gets lost if you write German in Antiqua) - cf. for example https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fraktursatz&oldid... (in German).
There are at least some other interesting countries using Latin script from the perspective of every country everywhere.
Ability to distinguish between and produce Latin characters is an ability approximately everyone literate I've met in South East Asia has, too, and I suspect that's true of much of South and East Asia.
Well yes, but the reference to Turkey is intentional. Kazakhstan is a founding member of the Turkic Council [1][2], and a sort of pan-Turkic alignment helped by sharing a language family is a strategic goal, to create a camaraderie of states along an oblique axis to the economic union Kazakhstan enjoys with Russia, Belarus, and friends [3]. Russia tends to treat Kazakhstan as a sure ally, but no vastly outnumbered sure ally wants to appear like a pushover with no other friends.
Definitely, though, the fact that the Latin alphabet eases the consumption of culture, science, commerce from a variety of Latin alphabet countries is a huge plus, but it helps to also understand the local context.
Learning the Latin script isn't particularly hard nor is the script itself that useful in understanding languages like English. Learning scripts, especially the roman script which only has 26 letters takes about a day. Learning a language takes a lifetime. My experience is with rural India, where even barely literate people know the english letters thanks to road names, bus numbers, government forms and the like. (Roads named the IV-A cross or buses numbered 215C are a dime a dozen Bangalore.)
I believe the Turkic languages are somewhat similar, so this move will immediately give Kazakhs a route into Turkish media and literature. This is probably a good thing given the decline of Russia and Russian.
As a Turk I can tell you to what extend I understand the other Turkic languages without any study:
100%: Turks from the balkans, Cyprus, Crimean tatars, Iraki and Syrian Turkmens, and Azeri turks from nothern Iran and Azerbaycan
80%: Turkmens form Turkmenistan
50%-60%:Uzbekistan(no vowel harmonization really weird :D) and Uigurs from western China
30-50%: Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan
10-30%: Turkic tribes from Siberia.
Of course it is much more easy to read and understand the latin transcription of these languages.
It's not hard to have basic knowledge of a new script with a limited number of characters. But operating with it on a daily basis is another matter. My reading speed in Japanese kana is about one-tenth of that in English (not even counting the kanji, most of which I don't know), where my Spanish reading speed is probably at least half of English. Maybe it would be higher with a more regular exposure to the character set, but it's still liable to be a difficult transition for many people.
Sure, going from recognizing letters to actually reading is what I meant by learning language. If you have some degree of familiarity with a language, you're no longer looking at individual letters and pattern matching them with symbols in your head. You're able to take in a word or multiple words at a time.
And at least some of the English/Japanese difficulty is due to fact that you're also changing systems of writing, going from an alphabet to a pictographical system. Comparing that with English to Spanish is almost unfair because of the fact that so many English words of French and Latin origin have very similar cognates in Spanish. I'd imagine you'd have similar troubles if you tried to learn Hindi/Devanagari for instance. Devanagari is an abugida, so you'd need to learn all of the letters in the alphabet and a whole bunch of "modifications" to the consonants that denote adjoining vowels.
But this isn't like learning a language. These folks are simply learning a new system to express their primary language. The one they are fluent in. It is more like learning how to express english using Russian letters on the page: Difficult at first, but not so bad.
Sure, there will be some bumps in learning how to do things like spell and learning the rules, but it won't be that bad. Once the system is learned, it'd be more like writing difficult words by sounding them out.
First of all, the vast majority of Japanese kanji are not pictographs, but ideograms. But I wasn't referring to reading that at all -- I was referring to my reading speed in just kana, which is a syllabary. Each symbol represents one syllable (mora), and there are only 48 of them in each of two sets, hiragana and katakana. That would be analogous to the number of characters to learn in two cases of a cyrillic alphabet.
As for cognates, well, you'd be surprised how much English is floating around in the Japanese lexicon these days.
That's a side benefit (esp. wrt English), but the ability to easily understand other related Turkic languages in written form, at least partially, is the more immediate result. Turkey had historically been trying to unify Turkic alphabets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_Alphabet), and while they haven't been 100% successful in that goal, it certainly did a lot to promote cultural exchange between the nations that buy into it - and thus, indirectly, Pan-Turkism.
I don't think the issue with reading materials is that big of a deal as long as the language itself stays the same. Alphabets are easy to learn. From personal experience, one big hurdle is going to be learning how to type in a different character set, for people who already have the muscle memory for a Cyrillic keyboard. Also, hopefully they take a sane approach to orthography, but characters like ы and ж and щ don't have a 1:1 counterpart in Latin.
Mapping between different orthographies is not usually that obvious though, unless they are designed to have one to one mapping, it can be tricky and lead to ambiguity or even cryptic gibberish.
It was always Cyrillic. What OP meant is that there were plans to switch all Soviet languages, including Russian, to Latin at one point - this was considered beneficial by "first wave" Bolsheviks, who believed in worldwide communist revolution in near future, and unification in a single world state, and assumed that Latin would be the common script of that state.
Later, when Stalin ditched all that, and came up with "socialism in one country" and revival of imperial patriotism, these attempts were scrapped, and Cyrillic became the common script for all Soviet languages instead (even those that were already Latinized). This was in line with the new national policy, which presented the Russian nation as the "bigger brother" of other ethnicities, e.g.: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945...
Not exactly all of them. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia retained Latin script for their languages, and I think Armenia (which is now using its own alphabet) used it during Soviet times too, though I am not 100% sure.
Armenian and Georgian had their scripts. So at least 5 SSRs out of 15 had their official language in non-Cyrillic script, who knows how many other languages did too.
> Also here is an English language version of your Wikipedia link: ..
No, it's a different article, and I link to it too.
> Was something else used for Russian prior to Cyrillic?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
It's elder than Cyrillic, but it was very little used in ancient Rus and was mostly used by south and western Slavs where Slavic writing was originally created.
Earlier versions had a few more characters, and Old Slavonic / Church Slavonic has different vocabulary and verb forms vs. today's Russian. Similar to the differences between Olde English and today's English.
> Similar to the differences between Olde English and today's English.
I think that you're thinking of the Modern English of Shakespeare's era or Middle English (e.g. 'Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote'), not Old English (e.g. 'Hwæt we Gar-dena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon').
Middle English is very similar to Modern English, and can be read with relative ease. Old English has to be studied as a foreign language.
My understanding is that Church Slavonic is nearly indecipherable to someone who knows modern Russian, which would make Old English the correct comparison. However, I am not fluent in Russian and am relying on others' characterization.
OCS is not as completely foreign to Russian speakers as Old English is to English speakers; I would compare it more to Chaucer than to Beowulf, although whether you can understand a specific text depends very much on the subject and the context. Since Biblical quotes and expressions are so common, OCS terms may be familiar to even secular Russians.
Note, however, that OCS does not have an ancestral relationship to Russian - it is a Southern Slavic language, most similar to ancestors of today's Bulgarian. Old Russian texts (such as The Tale of Igor) are written in a different language - Old Russian (which existed long before the split into Russian, Ukrainian and so on, so the name "Old East Slavic" is sometimes used).
Cyrillic is nice since it has extra letters that were added for central asian sounds. Spelling is more clear than when you use latin letters. With latin letters some single letters get replaced with double letters, or multiple sounds are overloaded onto a single letter.
It's a pity they don't switch to Orkhon script instead of Latin given their roots. There's a movement already to learn Orkhon as it's the traditional writing of the area and already developed with the sounds of the Turkic languages. (As an example, here's a Kazakh music video with subtitles in both Orkhon script and Türk alfabesi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUE05sRwrA). As long as they are going to the trouble of switching orthographies they should make it more meaningful than simply replacing Russian influenced letters with western european ones.
Turkish written with Latin script nearly has ideal phonemic orthography (the outlier is ğ, which is unvoiced or, sometimes, I believe, like a glottal stop).
Is this a form of rebranding? Has a nation ever undergone a significant attempt at rebranding?
I was joking with my colleague about how Russia probably just wants Ukraine to add a buffer between the West and Moscow. He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland." Got me thinking about the seemingly absurd concept of disregarding all national history and focusing exclusively on "brand". Find a great sounding country name, a cool memorable flag, a catchy national anthem, a relatable alphabet.
If you look at nations as brands, many (most?) are pretty forgettable. Countless flags that look randomly generated and lots of anthems that don't linger in your ear.
>He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland."
Incidentally, this is why they've been getting people to stop calling it The Ukraine - because Ukraine is more like a normal country name, while "The Ukraine" is like saying "The Borderland (of Russia)"
In Google Translate (English to Russian), "Ukraine" and "the Ukraine" both give the same result, namely "Украины". Not surprising, given Russian lacks the definite article "the".
However, "the Outskirts" translates to "окраины", which when pronounced, sounds very close to "Украины". "Uh cra eena" vs "Oo cra eena".
Translating Russian to English involves interpolating articles, definite and indefinite. I now have an inkling of how this controversy arose.
There's actually an equivalent of the distinction between "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" in Russian. As you rightly note, it doesn't have the definite article, but the distinction does show up in prepositions instead.
In Russian, when you speak of a named geographic region, the preposition for "in" (as in "10 million people live in ...") is used - in Russian, it's "v". On the other hand, if it's not a name, but rather a descriptive designation like "borderlands", then the preposition for "on" is used - in Russian, it's "na".
So, English "in Ukraine" becomes "v Ukraine". But English "in the Ukraine" becomes "na Ukraine". In modern Russian, both are considered acceptable, but the latter is generally considered normative, and is what most people use. Needless to say, Ukrainians strongly prefer "v", even when speaking Russian (it's unconditionally "v" in Ukrainian, where the same distinction exists). This is a regular cause of flames and edit wars on the Net between Russian and Ukrainian users.
> In Russian, when you speak of a named geographic region, the preposition for "in" (as in "10 million people live in ...") is used - in Russian, it's "v". On the other hand, if it's not a name, but rather a descriptive designation like "borderlands", then the preposition for "on" is used - in Russian, it's "na".
Except that there is no "rule" for that, other than established use, and even that is not consistent. People who insist on "na Ukraine" would somehow never say "na Serbskoi Kraine" or "na Khabarovskom Krae".
There actually is a russian phrase "на чужбине", "на чужой земле" (in a foreign land) where "на" is used when talking about another country. I guess using different prepositions is something historical, so "на" is not used anymore, but it is left in some set phrases.
In natural languages, established use is what defines rules, more or less. This particular one is not very consistent, I agree. Nevertheless, "na" is normative for a bunch of country names.
Personally, I use "v Ukraine", if only because it's a middle finger to the Kremlin. But I also don't think that the use of "na" necessarily denotes disrespect, or that people should be told how to properly speak their language.
I guess the nearest abstract equivalent to this would be the debate over gender-neutral pronouns like "xe" in English. You have one side laying arguments (many of them pretty good) as to why having such a thing is a good idea; and the other side pointing out that it just feels awkward and non-English-like.
I think I'd rather learn Kazakh using Latin letters than Irish with it's séimhiú system that h really is hard to grasp (I'm attempting to self learn it as a hobby).
I wish there were accents not just fada it would seem more intuitive hey maybe Irish would be better written in Cyrillic. Maybe there should be a Celtic alphabet just for Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton.
In Arabic, some country names get the definite article "al ال" like "(The) Iraq العراق" while most don't and "Ukraine أوكرانيا" is definitely one of them.
Interesting how this varies by language. Dutch doesn't have it (I've never learned it with a definite article), German and French still use it mostly as far as I can tell, and in English it is gradually disappearing.
Yes, or something like it. It wasn't deliberate enough to suggest "branding" to me, per se, but it did mark a change in self-perception, and a change in how Ukrainians wanted to be perceived by the rest of the world.
Slavic languages lack articles, so in Russian and Ukrainian the linguistic phenomenon SerLava describes manifests only as a choice between using the preposition на versus в (which roughly correspond to the English prepostions in and on) to say "in [the] Ukraine". Using на was standard until after Ukrainian independence, but because на connotes being in an open space or in an indeterminate area (as on sometimes does in English , e.g., on Trafalgar square, on the border) whereas в is the usual preposition signifying being inside a definite space, including being inside a country's borders, Ukrainians reacted against the usage of на, feeling it emphasized the "on the borderlands" understanding of what [the] Ukraine was.
Using в quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of в versus на became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies. The distinction between using or not using the definite article in English and other languages followed. Interestingly, I always say Ukraine rather than the Ukraine in English, but I tend to use на in Russian.
> Using в quickly became standard in Ukraine, and the choice of в versus на became a sort of liguistic tell to a Russian-speaker's political and cultural tendencies.
Doesn't seem THAT telling to me. Saying "на Україні" is very common in the Ukrainian language, and lots of Ukrainians use bits of Ukrainian while speaking Russian. I wouldn't be shocked to hear "на Украине" from a Ukrainian, and I most definitely wouldn't make assumptions about political tendencies based on it.
> He educated me on the meaning of "Ukraine" being essentially "borderland."
He's probably a speaker of Russian, so he assumes the Russian meaning of the word to be canonical. Which is rather ignorant, because the word has a different meaning in Ukrainian - it literally means 'country'. It is similar in Polish ('country' vs 'edge'/'border'/'region' in Russian) and probably other Slavonic languages.
"Country" in Ukrainian is "krayina", not "ukrayina".
FWIW, since the word "Ukraine" is first attested in written form as early as 12th century, its etymology has to be derived from the (then still common) Eastern Slavic of that period, rather than the modern meanings of either Russian or Ukrainian. And in that language, "ukraina" - "оукраина" - did mean "borderlands"
BTW, it doesn't appear to have become the name of the territory, and later the country, because it was borderlands of Muscovy/Russia. Rather, it seems to have originated in the western parts, because they were the borderlands of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russia historically preferred the term "Little Russia" (Malorossiya) to imply cultural affinity and justify territorial claims, to the point of proscribing the usage of "Ukraine" in imperial times.
Moscow was founded by Duke of Kiev Yuri Dolgorukiy as a border post. So the Russian border land interpretation is not even funny. One of the first written uses was in Kiev's 'litopys' in relation to the death of grand son of Yuri Dolgorukiy.
I don't know how accurate this is, but I found this on Wikipedia:
> The traditional theory (which was widely supported by historians and linguists in the 19–20th centuries, see e.g. Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary of Russian) is that the modern name of the country is derived from the term "ukraina" in the sense ‘borderland, frontier region, marches’ etc. These meanings can be derived from the Proto-Slavic noun *krajь, meaning ‘edge, border’. Contemporary parallels for this are Russian okráina ‘outskirts’ and kraj ‘border district’.
However:
> Some Ukrainian scholars, such as Hryhoriy Pivtorak, Fedir Shevchenko, Mykola Andrusyak, Serhiy Shelukhin believe that the name is derived from ukraina in the sense of ‘region, principality, country’. Many medieval occurrences of the word can be interpreted as having that meaning. In this sense, the word can be associated with contemporary Ukrainian krajina, Belarusian kraina and Russian and Polish kraj, all meaning ‘country’ (see Translations, 'region of land').
So different people have different interpretations.
The problem with the latter explanation is that it doesn't explain where "u" came from. Etymologically, "kraina" is indeed "country" or "land", that's true. But "u" is a preposition meaning "at", "by", "near" (in both languages - it's unchanged from Old East Slavic). So "u+kraina" would mean something like "near the country"... which sounds a lot like borderlands, does it not? At which point we're back at square one.
In general, when linguistics gets politicized, and there are multiple competing theories with various implications, take a look at the geographic spread of each. If it's politically relevant for one country, and one particular theory is only popular in that country, it's probably being promoted for political reasons. If it's widespread in academic circles of many different countries, including those that don't have any stakes in any associated politics disputes, it's more likely to be factual.
"So "u+kraina" would mean something like "near the country"... which sounds a lot like borderlands, does it not? "
It doesn't really. Ukrainian meaning of "u" is different from Russian, it's more like a Russian "v". For example "u lavtsi" translates to something like "in the shop", but never "near the shop", at the same time in Russian it would be "v lavke". It's just that heavily pushed "borderland" narrative makes it hard to think straight about this, especially for Russians.
In modern Ukrainian, sure. In modern Russian, the word isn't correctly formed, either.
But we're not talking about either one of those. The word is much older than that - about 8 centuries old if you count back to the first time it can be found in written text, and about 4 centuries if you count to its first use specifically to refer to Ukraine.
For what, the territory that's now the country Ukraine?
I'm not saying that 8 centuries ago, that territory was called by that name. Why would it be, when it was still the heartland of Kievan Rus? I'm saying that the word "оукраина" was used to mean borderlands then, such ones as they had.
And then 4 centuries later, that exact word became the name of the border territory of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that covers pretty much the entirety of today's Western and Central Ukraine, in the language of people inhabiting that territory, said language being a direct descendant of the language spoken 4 centuries before...
I would dare say that a straightforward explanation is that the word retained its meaning, and was used in that meaning, because at that time it really was applicable to the territory in question. All the dots connect here in obvious ways. In contrast, if we assume that "ukraina" was derived from "kraina" for "homeland" instead, and try to backtrack, we need to explain how "u-" got there, and why the fact that the result matched the word that historically meant "borderlands" is entirely coincidental. I've seen some very convoluted explanations of this that could work, but Occam's razor still applies - between two explanations that both match observed evidence, the simpler one is preferable.
Which is probably why the "borderlands" etymology is widely accepted among linguists throughout the world, while various alternative theories all seem to have Ukrainian authors. I get that this is a very politicized question in Ukraine, especially since Russian nationalists and irredentists have been trying to interpret the "borderlands" etymology to imply that Ukraine was historically self-identifying as a border territory of Russia - which is, of course, blatantly false. But I don't think that starting with a premise that is more politically palatable, and then backtracking from there to recreate the (less likely) etymology to fit, is a good way to deal with it.
No, I'm using the historical meaning of "u", from before Russian and Ukrainian were even distinct languages. Here's the "Tale of Igor's Campaign", 12th century, in the contemporary East Slavic:
Игорь ждетъ мила брата Всеволода.
И рече ему буй туръ Всеволодъ:
"Одинъ братъ,
одинъ светъ светлый -
ты, Игорю!
оба есве Святъславличя!
Седлай, брате,
свои бръзыи комони,
а мои ти готови,
оседлани *у* Курьска напереди.
Note last line. English translation:
Igor awaits his beloved brother,
and Fierce Bull Vsevolod speaks:
“You are my one brother,
Igor,
my one shining light;
we are both sons of Sviatoslav.
Saddle, brother,
your swift horses,
for mine are ready,
saddled ahead *at* Kursk.
Ukrainian translation:
Дожидає Ігор брата Всеволода.
Каже йому буй-тур Всеволод:
«Один брат,
один світ світлий,
Ігорю,
Обидва ми Святославовичі.
Сідлай, брате,
свої коні бистрі,
Мої-бо вже готові стоять,
*Під* Курськом осідлані.
The word "ukraina" was first attested at roughly the same time these lines were written.
No offence but pretending that google translate is a proper way to evaluate translations of almost 1000 year old text is beyond funny. It's obviously before Russian lang. existed since Moscow was founded 400 years after this text was written. At this time Kiev was not under any external power so you theory of the origin of the name is also very questionable.
First of all, where do you see any Google Translate above? Both are professional translations of the original. And the first snippet isn't Russian - it's Old East Slavic (from which both Russian and Ukrainian eventually came).
And of course I'm not claiming that the word "ukraina" was used to refer to what today is the country Ukraine back in 1200s - that would be ridiculous, for exactly the reasons you cite above. No, my point rather is that the word "ukraina" - "оукраина" - is attested in documents from that period to refer to areas that they (the Kievan Rus state) considered borderlands, and has fairly obvious and transparent etymology of "u+kraina", both parts of which are also attested in written sources.. It is solely about the etymological origin of the word - that, yes, it does in fact mean "borderlands" historically - not about the origin of the name "Ukraine" for the country. That came much later.
As for the latter, it shows up first somewhere circa 1600s, and it first appears in Polish sources (as self-designation of people inhabiting the territory). At that point, the entire Western and Central Ukraine was a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - and for them, it was definitely "borderlands" in all senses. Geographically it was the easternmost territory of the state. Culturally it was significantly different from Polish heartland - language, religion etc - and further east and south there were culturally alien Turkic (Tatar) tribes. Militarily, it was a buffer zone between the Commonwealth and the Tatars, and to some extent with Russia, with constant low-key hostilities.
It's exactly the kind of area that would be called e.g. "the Mark" in German-speaking parts of Europe. Indeed, when the revived Polish state later occupied large parts of Western Ukraine after WW1, they referred to it as "kresy wschodnie" in Polish, literally meaning "eastern borderlands" - old habits die hard.
The first written mention is Kiev litopis that was way before the polish source, and it would be pretty pointless for Kievans to refer to themselves as borderland. I guess given the politicization of debate it's hard to find any objective info. From point of view of western neighbors it is possible that your interpretation makes sense but it does not explain why Kiev's litopys would use this name. On the translation some of words that have actual meaning are just transliterated which gave me the impression that it was google translation.
Again, the first written mention of what - the word "ukraina", or the use of that word to refer the territory that's Ukraine today? I tried to draw that distinction as clearly as I could above.
So far as I know, all uses of the word "ukraina" in Kievan sources do not refer to the territory as a whole, nor to territories near Kiev, but rather those that were borderlands with respect to Kiev as the capital (e.g. Halych). Of course, I may well be missing something - can you give an example of a Kievan source that use "ukraina" to refer to the country as a whole, or to its heartland?
It's debated whether or not it referred to territory as whole with most historians not supporting that idea, yet the territories it referred to were pretty much next to Kiev so the name borderland again very debatable.
> It is similar in Polish ('country' vs 'edge'/'border'/'region' in Russian) and probably other Slavonic languages.
South Slavs have multiple historical examples of Krajina(s) and they all represented bordering area, edge, (military) frontier. In a broad sense kraj/krai means area, land, place. But krajina(s) were always bordering areas.
Turkey did so in its change from an ancient empire to a modern republic. Strange though, that it is taking the Kazakhs so long to make the change. Ataturk made the change in one year; the Kazakhs are taking nearly a decade, during which time the change can be rolled back or abandoned. Mao wanted to go to Pinyin to increase literacy in China; he stopped with simplified characters. Japanese can be written perfectly well with romaji, but it will never supplant that country's writing system. My guess is that Kazakh teenagers are already writing their language using roman characters in order to text and sms each other, just like the Arab teenagers who created Arabizi (Roman alphabet plus 3, 5 7 and 9) on their own in order to use phones that did not yet support R2L script. While modern phones do so, the new writing system still persists and is perfectly serviceable.
Also, why do people insist on saying the Roman alphabet has 26 characters? B looks nothing like b. R looks nothing like r. For someone completely unfamiliar with the alphabet, there are more than 26 letter forms or glyphs to learn.
> Turkey did so in its change from an ancient empire to a modern republic. Strange though, that it is taking the Kazakhs so long to make the change. Ataturk made the change in one year; the Kazakhs are taking nearly a decade
First of all when the turkish alphabet reform happened there was a big revolution happening, and most of the people were illiterate. Also, the ottoman alphabet was incredibly bad for writing turkish (among many causes the language has eight vowels and vowel harmony) that nobody in their right mind would oppose.
Secondly the empire was not ancient at all, in fact what Ataturk completed was started by illuminst sultans like Mahmud II and Abdulmejid I. Also, Turkey is not a continuation of the empire but the last of the states that liberated itself from it.
Among other reasons, while there are 52 symbols to learn (ignoring punctuation, numbers, and other fun esoterica), you could substitute lowercase and uppercase letters for each other without losing or changing the meaning of the word - so while there are 52 symbols, they map to only 26 letters, with contextual rules about which symbol is used for which case.
More pragmatically, I'd express it as "using any mix of uppercase or lowercase letters wouldn't obscure or change the word being expressed". (I'm sure there are exceptions where you could conflate a proper noun with another noun without proper capitalization, but since you don't get capitalization in speech, people generally can deal with it.)
e: Thinking slightly more, I'd probably phrase it as "52 symbols map to 26 letters, and the words of the language are defined in terms of letters."
Kazakh teenagers do from time to time write Russian or Kazakh in a very strange mix of latin letters, but most of them write in either Kazakh proper or in Russian (Cyrillic) since it has most of the letters of the Kazakh alphabet.
I don't think "rebranding" is a term of art but... the Koreans replaced Chinese characters with hangul; compare it with the Japanese, who despite having developed a phonetic script have kept using Chinese characters till today.
Israel is also an interesting case; it probably wouldn't exist in its present form if Hebrew hadn't been revived.
> The name "Ukraine" (Ukrainian: Україна Ukrayina
> [ukrɑˈjinɑ]) derives from the Slavic words "u", meaning
> "within", and "kraj", meaning "land" or "border".
> Together, "u+kraij" means "within the borders" or more aptly in
> English, "the heartland".
To quote wikipedia. I.e. from what I read on Wikipedia, it is the other way round: Ukraine is the heartland, Moscow would be at the outskirt.
Lots. In fact, probably more of them than not, considering national consciousness tied statehood that does not always fall along prior ethnic or cultural lines is something all sovereign states try to cultivate to stay together, and define the ingroup and outgroup. It's also used to set ideological lines, and to purge perceived connections to an earlier, now-undesirable administration.
That would be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia specifically. The much larger Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had already fallen apart by that time (1992).
Their current alphabet has 42 letters. Transitioning to Latin will either use variable length encoding for some sounds, or will eventually be reduced to the mere 26 letters. Thus I don't see using accent a good direction.
In Hungarian I see this a lot, and it is a shame. We have for example o ó ö ő for variations of the sound O in "lonely". We have a mixed model of variable length and accented characters.
ASCII and QWERTY are (the unintended) cultural equivalent of the Little Boy and the Fat Boy. Poor globalization throughout the IT industry made people adapt to it, instead of challenging it. This makes only variable length survive the "loss in translation".
Now when globalization is better, it became "cool" somehow in some subcultures (eg. UNIX related, programming related), as many ancient tools (Unix, C) lack proper support.
Current Turkish alphabet is mostly enough to convey sounds of Turkic languages (with few exceptions like Ng sound), Azeri alphabet 3 more letters for non Turkic sounds, I am Sure Kazakh people will find a way, there are already working examples.
Current turkish alphabet is bad at representing educated Istanbul turkish, and worse at anatolian dialects. For one, palatalisations, which are distinctive in many cases are either not represented or represented by a circumflex on a nearest vowel, but the diacritic also signals long vowels, even though they do not necessitate palatalisation, which is a quality of the consonants anyways.
but you can still just use regular O and any Hungarian will understand what you wrote, so i don't see accents as big issue, China should take lesson from Vietnam where anyone visiting can read their writing despite using accents, now good luck with Chinese characters when visiting China
Some of these old Eastern Bloc countries have had fascinating changes in language and written script in the last hundreds years or so. Uzbekistan is another interesting one, which currently uses Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic (actually Nastaleeq) scripts despite Latin being the official script since the 90's. I had a really fun time building the BBC Uzbek website which had to support all of these:
Everyone already knows latin alphabet. It doesn't make it any easier to learn language. Nor it would make it easier for foreigner to understand anything in latinized Kazakh language, this language is completely different from English. I guess, it has some common words with Turkey language, so may be for them it would be a tiny bit easier.
Honestly I'm seeing it as a pure political decision and huge waste of money, not something, that would have any real benefit. Making Russian and English as an additional official government languages — now that would be useful. Currently almost noone except highly educated people knows English and a lot of people don't know Russian or know it very poorly and it's sad. For Kazakhstan, Russia is a most important neighbor and it's very important to keep common cultural values.
It probably is 99% political, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a waste of money.
Cyrillic is/was a big part of Russia/USSR's identity from the west -- see things like "BORДT", faux Cyrillic [1], cheap exported Russian vodka, "СССР" on t-shirts, etc.
If Kazakhstan wants to appear less Russian, swapping the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin will be very effective.
(I know the Latin alphabet but only a few letters of the Cyrillic one. It's far easier for me to read signs in Viet Nam than it is in Russia, even though I can probably pronounce Russian much better than Vietnamese. When I don't understand a word written in Cyrillic, it takes me 20 times longer to type it into my phone's dictionary.)
They are actually shifting back to (one of) the original alphabets.
> Nazarbayev described the use of the Cyrillic script as "political," noting that the Latin alphabet had previously been used from 1929 until 1940. Prior to 1929, the Arabic script had been used. "In 1940 … a law was adopted transferring the Kazakh language from the Latin alphabet to one based on Russian script,"
Also:
> The Kazakh language belongs to the family of Turkic languages, whereas Russian is a Slavic language. Other countries with Turkic languages, such as Turkey, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, currently use the Latin alphabet.
At the end of the day, this is not really about interoperating with the rest of the world. It's about pride and national identity.
The traditional alphabet in this case is Arabic. Latin was also pushed on them from the outside, and never broadly used prior to that, so it's also "globalizing" in that sense (remember how it was introduced in Turkey, and why?).
Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not. Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing, that is not the case with Turkish. Yes, you can write Turkish (more properly, Osmanli) using Arabic script. For that matter you can write Spanish using Arabic script and for many years many people did. But in both of these cases, you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it.
That's an orientalist claim. Vowels do exist in Arabic but some foreign learners of the language don't get the distinction between short and long vowels and how the letters "ا و ي" have dual role as consonants and vowels as well.
> you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it.
Here's a phonetic transliteration of your first sentence in Arabic
"Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not."
Great example! I had the misconception that Arabic had no vowels. I fed your Arabic transliteration into Google Translate[1], clicked on the "speak it" icon for the Arabic, and I could hear a comprehensible English sentence:
If Arabic had no vowel sounds then this should have been impossible!
[1] Ignore the English translation which is meaningless and irrelevant. In this case I'm using Google Translate for speech synthesis, not for translation.
That vowels are an afterthought in Semitic scripts is not an “Orientalist claim” at all, it’s completely mainstream archaeology. The use of some consonant letters to denote long vowels (as so-called matres lectionis) was a development subsequent to the use of a purely consonantal writing system.
With regard to Turkic, one of the challenges with using the Arabic script is not just that Turkic has a larger vowel inventory than Arabic or Persian, but the frontness/backness of vowels plays a major part in the morphophonemics. The Orkhon script that was the first used for Turkic languages was designed to reflect this, but when the Arabic script was introduced in towards the Middle Turkic era new strategies had to be thought up to reflect frontness/backness, e.g. the use of Arabic emphatic stops versus non-emphatic ones. However, the solutions that were found left a lot of room for ambiguity. I often read Kazan Tatar documents in the old Arabic script, and I can understand how the plethora of rules and exceptions confused the masses prior to the introduction of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. (The Cyrillic script now in use is hardly better than the Arabic script, though)
Then alphabets evolved from that like Latin and Greek with all the bells and whistles. Semitic scripts on the other hand remained true to its roots and didn't evolve to have dedicated vowels early on.
Arabic as a Semitic language descended from Syriac and Aramaic and thus lacked distinct vowels. Heck early Arabic script didn't make any effort to differentiate similar looking consonants as diacritic were totally missing. Case in point, Hejazi Script, one of the early Arabic scripts lacked vowels, vowel diacritics and consonant diacritics but only possessed the defining quality of cursive/adjoining writing.
However, for later versions of the Arabic script, things improved substantially esp. when it had the full support and backup of the then-young and burgeoning Islamic state, and thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets but retaining a few distinctive features like compactness.
So, yeah you can say that vowels were afterthought in early Arabic scripts but definitely not for the current system in use for centuries now and that's why I characterized his/her statement as an orientalist claim that's completely inaccurate and improper.
For Ottoman Turkish, I get the frustration that some Turkish speakers may have had with reading or writing in Arabic script. Original Arabic script is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for any language. It needs first to be extended and re-purposed to meet the requirements of the target language and with languages like Turkish with a wider selection of vowels, it gets tricky to work around the limitations of the script like vowel diacritics.
Absent these additions and workarounds, it becomes more advisable to make the switch to more accommodative script like Latin and forgo the succinctness and terseness gains of the Arabic script and that's why I view Kurdish written in Arabic script as a big mess as the developers opted to full hard code of the vowels in the script while dropping vowel diacritics altogether.
> thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets
It didn’t get all the bells and whistles of other alphabets in actual practice. Yes, in theory short vowels could be denoted with diacritics, but this was rarely done in Arabic, let alone Turkic.
> not for the current system in use for centuries now
Again, the “current system” in use for centuries in Middle Turkic and early modern Kazan Tatar and other Kipchak languages did not mark most vowels with the use of diacritics in spite of their theoretic availability.
> It didn’t get all the bells and whistles of other alphabets in actual practice.
Like what exactly? What's missing of value?
> but this was rarely done in Arabic
Because it's redundant. I know it's frustrating for beginners to guess the diacritics on the words but once you get to intermediate/advanced proficiency level of the language, you'll start to appreciate this design aspect of the language.
> Again, the “current system” in use for centuries in Middle Turkic and early modern Kazan Tatar and other Kipchak languages did not mark most vowels with the use of diacritics in spite of their theoretic availability.
How's this Arabic's fault?
To be honest with you, I am not really familiar with Ottoman Turkish let alone other Turkic languages and their evolution journey but if they didn't make any use of extended vowel diacritics or worse the baseline package of Arabic, I don't know exactly how they managed to communicate using that system.
While short vowel markings are left out, as long as different words can have wildly different voicings, it is hard to claim they are redundant. Rather, the reader is simply pressed to tell the vowel pointing from context, a skill that does not come without considerably more literacy education than for alphabet writing systems. The claim that diacritics are redundant would be more easily defended for languages like Romanian where the sounds distinguished by diacritics still usually stand in an allophonic relationship dependent on the word’s morphophonemics, but that is certainly not the case in Semitic languages today.
> How's this Arabic's fault?
The Turkic script wasn’t introduced to the Turks in a vacuum. It was brought in as part of a larger influence of Islamic culture, and because among Arabic and Persian speakers the script was almost always used without short vowel diacritics, the Turks inherited the same “right way” of doing things, disastrous as it was for literacy in their languages until the early 20th century.
The parent post has a "چ" or "cheem" character, which is neither Arabic nor required in this case. That character is used in Persian, Urdu, Pashto, etc., but not in Arabic.
A more phonetic transliteration of "Arabic is a Semitic language, Turkish and the other Turkic languages are not" is:
I don't really know enough about Turkic languages to say whether Latin is a better fit for them than Arabic, or not. I would expect modern Turkish alphabet to be better at it, if only because it was specifically designed for that purpose, and not just organically adopted the way Arabic was.
But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.
But the Arabic alphabet is already being succesfully used in Iran and Pakistan, to give a couple of examples, for languages that are very different from Arabic.
What is a native script, though? If you mean the one that is completely original, then very few languages could claim such a thing - most cultures borrowed their writing systems from someone else, and then adapted them to their needs. Most people would say that Cyrillic, for example, is a "native script" for East Slavic languages, but it's clearly derived from Greek (and its historical version more so than the modern one).
For Kazakh and their predecessors, the script in use before Arabic was Orkhon. But it was also derived from other scripts.
I agree, like many things, it's a continuum rather than a binary, but if we are going to draw a line somewhere, my heuristic would be when the script is named after a foreign language, it isn't native. So, for example, the "Arabic," "Chinese" and "Latin" scripts are native, respectively, to Arabic, Chinese dialects and Romance languages, while in Farsi, Japanese and English they are in customary use, but are not of native origin.
> Language change that shifts populations away from their historical niche and towards global systems conflicts me.
It happened before. For example it happened to my language, Romanian, which used to be written in Cyrillic script until the 1860s or so. AFAIK it was the only Romance language which used Cyrillic, which I find kind of interesting. You're right, most of the Romanian literature/newspapers written before the switch are now illegible for 99% of today's population, but it also matters that not that many books had been printed in Romanian until the switch was made, our culture was mostly an oral one.
I don't think the point does still stand with just a script change. Learning a new alphabet is orders of magnitude easier than learning a new language.
Touch typing with an alphabet that's not printed on your physical keyboard can challenging though (I still struggle a bit with that).
As stated in the article, the script they currently use was forced on them by the Soviets. Before then, they used Latin characters, and before that, Arabic.
I think the implications of switching a script are fewer than people imagine, especially between Cyrillic and Latin. These two are closely related alphabetical writing systems. People will not lose the ability to read old books, they will not change their political positions. Usually, the "new" and "old" characters correspond one to another perfectly.
I think what is more important is the "drive for expanded international recognition for the Central Asian nation that formed part of the Soviet Union until gaining independence in 1991." that is mentioned in the article. As you can see every foreign article still believes its to be necessary to mention the Soviet union, 26 years after it ended. So it might not change people's lives much, but it will change the perception of what Kazakhstan is.
Does this only affect the Kazakh language or also the Russian language they speak there? I know a small handful of people from Kazakhstan, who identify as "Kazakh" nationally but as "Russian" ethnically, and they only speak Russian (+ English). The general response about Kazakh the language I remember is that they learned it at school, but as they lived in a heavily Russian speaking area they just never cared much about Kazakh and instead focused more on English when they got the chance.
I hope this question is relevant enough to the thread to ask here: what language did the people of Turkey, and by extension most of the Turkic-speaking countries, speak before the Mongolian invasion? Are there traces of that former language in their current one? I know that there's definitely plenty of Arabic and Persian words still in use, and since Ataturk there's been a lot of French/other latin languages added as well.
Most of the teritory of turkey was a part of Byzantine empire with Greek being the main language there. Large part on the east was Armenia, and there were many other nations with their own languages, Assyrians, Lazi, Kurds, Yezidis.
Turkey successfully got rid of majority of non-muslim nations and their languages by 1920s and works on getting rid of Kurdish since then.
How far back do you want to go? In the Bronze Age, Anatolia was mostly under the domain of the Hittites, which spoke an Anatolian branch of Indo-European. Following their collapse, Anatolia was inhabited by various other Indo-European peoples, such as Phrygians, Greeks, and Persians. It was the expansion of the Seljuk Turks that brought Turkish-speakers into Anatolia, and they became the dominant people over the next few centuries. The Mongols never really entered Anatolia--the Seljuks were vassals of the Ilkhanate, but Mongolian-speaking peoples didn't migrate into the region like the Turkic-speaking peoples did.
Further afield, the Central Asian steppes were apparently first settled by Indo-European languages of various branches (Iranian and Tocharian). Alexander the Great's conquest led to the establishment of Greek as a major upper-class language throughout Bactria although it doesn't appear to have transfused down to local populations. Turkic nomads started filtering in and pushing out/assimilating the extant Indo-European speakers in the 400s or so (long before the Mongol Empire).
As for traces of loanwords, yes, many Turkic languages incorporated Indo-European (particularly Iranian/Persian languages) of extant speakers into their language, much like how French incorporated Germanic elements into its language.
You seem to have a tremendous grasp on the history of Central Asia, especially during the Middle Ages, a subject that I personally consider very obscure. May I ask if this is a personal interest of yours, given that most of your working hours are devoted to open source software?
Actually, my grasp isn't that good. Rather, I have an interest in history, particularly that outside of those areas that pass for world history in most schools (i.e., Europe), and I did alight on a course that talked about the steppe nomads over the past 6000 years or so.
> I hope this question is relevant enough to the thread to ask here: what language did the people of Turkey, and by extension most of the Turkic-speaking countries, speak before the Mongolian invasion?
The people of Anatolia spoke Greek before the Turks invaded.
So, the alphabet of Kazakh language has 42 letters, 33 of them are borrowed from Russian language and 9 are unique. The modern Latin alphabet has 26 letters. It's quite unclear how they are going to convert between these 2 very different sets.
26, you mean English alphabet? I think they might use the Turkish alphabet, which has 29 letters. Ğ, Ş, İ, Ç, Ü, Ö, also you can place a hat on the wovel to make it soft. Moreover, there are other "Latin" letters from German, Spanish and French alphabets.
Wikipedia gives the form of romanization currently used on Kazakh government websites [1]. This extends the standard 26-letter Latin alphabet by adding diacritical marks to some of the letters (the way many other languages do, that have more sounds than 26 letters can express).
I seem to recall reading that as part of the romanization effort, Kazakhstan will also consider spelling reform, so that there will probably not be an exact one-to-one correspondence between the current Cyrillic spelling and the new Latin spelling.
Actually most languages have more sounds than letters. Some use diacritical marks, others use multiconsonant groups ("ch" in Spanish, "th" in English), and another option is just not to care (in English most letters can represent various sounds and the mapping is often arbitrary, requiring one to know the word in order to know how it's pronounced).
At this point it may be appropriate to remind of the ortographical reform proposal for English, attributed to Mark Twain (though probably not really written by him).
In addition, some of the Cyrillic letters currently used represent two phonemes rather than one - notably letters like "ё", "ю", "я". These would be more naturally represented by "y" + vowel in a Latin-based alphabet.
Latin script doesn't prevent this. Depending on how it's Latinized, it could be just as easy: if you're familiar with how Latin letters are pronounced in Spanish, it's pretty easy to guess the spelling of unknown Spanish words.
He or she probably means the script, not the terseness of Russian. If you look at English and Russian text you will notice that Russian has longer streaks of letters of the same height/depth compared to English.
I don't have any numbers, but it probably depends on whom you ask. According to Wikipedia (in Russian) [1], 84% of the people in Kazakhstan can speak Russian, and 74% can speak Kazakh. Ethnically, 22% of the population is Russian, and 66% is Kazakh [2]. In urban areas, it is not unusual to encounter ethnic Kazakhs who speak Russian but not Kazakh.
It is likely that the Russian language will continue to play a strong role in Kazakhstan, so many people will probably need to know both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets, once the transition takes place.
Russian is still the most important language in Kazakhstan, although that could shift in the future.
My wife is from Kazakhstan, but her ancestors are from Ukraine, and they moved to Kazakhstan during the USSR. Her family only know a few words of Kazakh, and this is relatively common for people who were born and grew up in the USSR. Right now, you cannot get a good job in the city unless you are fluent in Russian, although there is a lot of pressure to move everything to the Kazakh language.
In the past, the pressure was so strong that some official government forms were only made available in Kazakh. But they have reverted that decision, so now everything is still available in both Russian and Kazakh.
and now only if China wish to join a party and went full pinyin with accents like in Vietnam, that would make life in China and tourism much easier for everyone, after all they already simplified characters anyway, so let's not pretend current writing system has some historical value being younger than my grandma
Why is this downvoted? It's true, isn't it? And as far as I know they had plans to make English the 3rd official language (along with Kazakh and Russian).
Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, exposing themselves to Russian cultural dominance); or switching to Latin, and implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Turkey.
It's not a question with a single definitive good answer. Different ex-Soviet republics tackled it in different ways. The article points out that Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan switched, for example, but e.g. Kyrgyzstan did not.
The other problem with every switch (including the previous ones) is that it affects all existing written materials, especially books and textbooks. When Soviets originally switched most Central Asian republics from Arabic to Latin back in 1920s, they used it to great effect to control what kind of materials the new generations would have access to, very similar to what Ataturk did in Turkey. Same thing applies today: switching the alphabet allows the new governments of these countries to define the majority of the written corpus that their citizens will have ready access to.