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.
