The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/
That website confirms one of my greatest fears about this sort of thing (which I am otherwise moderately thrilled about): that scrolljacking is going to be widely employed. And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right (whatever “right” means), though I have encountered two in the last decade that were quite close, but still definitely failed.
I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure.
With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it.
With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.)
It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge.
I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.
> That website confirms one of my greatest fears about this sort of thing (which I am otherwise moderately thrilled about): that scrolljacking is going to be widely employed.
The right fix is to ensure that the major browsers (and editors) handle this properly so that there is no urge to hijack scrolling. Mongolian is not the only vertical script.
> And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right
Horizontal scrolling seems to work just fine (macOS with Magic Mouse; same with trackpad). The fact that they included a workaround for those who don't have input devices with horizontal scrolling is a nice touch, yet it didn't interfere at all with my horizontal scrolling.
But that’s just the thing, and why scrolljacking is so bad—I’m on a platform with excellent horizontal scrolling facilities, and it’s ruining that. Based on my experience in this space, but not their code which I haven’t seen, I guess that this will affect at least all Windows users with precise touchpad scrolling. From my perspective, it’s a terrible trade-off. User agents need to handle this better, urgently.
I’m saying that at a minimum I expect all Windows users to be affected by this.
It’s not a Microsoft problem at all: it’s that the web platform simply doesn’t support getting this type of scrolljacking right. It’s just not possible due to how scrolling is handled in the browser, how wheel events work, and the platform’s propensity to asynchrony (so that not only is it not supported, it can never be supported). The best you can achieve is to detect OS and browser and guess at how it’s going to behave, and emulate its functionality. And quite apart from how such things change over time, that’s not guaranteed to work at any particular time: such configuration is flexible per OS, and hardware (which you can’t detect reliably) can influences how it will do things as well. Inertia is a particularly good example of that: it varies in all of these ways, by hardware, by OS, by browser and by configuration in all three of these places. Now I don’t have macOS handy, so I can’t see how it handles the scrolling there. Perhaps that site’s developers (or some library they use) has done that emulation and tuned it for macOS, but not elsewhere.
I primarily interact with the web on desktop clients. This solution has been implemented perfectly for me. While I agree with your ideal, my guess is that it may take at least another decade for user agents to adopt a good solution for this, and until then, some scrolljacking will be necessary to improve my user experience.
Obviously it shouldn't interfere with touch scrolling, which is sometimes also done on laptop device screens (which typically conform to the desktop experience by default).
That's beautiful, thanks. My wife is Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script is used widely in signage, posters, dual-language leaflets and such so I'm quite familiar with the look of traditional Mongolian script. In fact until now I had no idea Mongolia itself largely used a different script.
Mongolia adopted Cyrillic during its early communist years which saw heavy influence from the USSR. They started adopting their traditional script in schools again a few years ago, but the older people didn't know how to read or write it unfortunately. I saw the traditional script being used sparingly in Ulaanbator around 2017 but as for the rest of the country I don't think I saw it at all, except in Buddhist temples (which were also mostly destroyed during the communist era unfortunately).
I like that, that is, the new take on UI with having vertical script. I mean there was a design website posted on HN the other day (it was a list of colors I believe) which also had vertical (English & Japanese) text.
The closest I've worked with is a booking website for an international parcel delivery company. We offered the application in idk, dozens? of languages. Hebrew was one of them, it's a right-to-left language and our whole website became right-to-left when switching to that, so the main menu was on the right instead of the left, things like that. Great work by our CSS people.
Fascinating, thank you. It's interesting how the Arabic numerals in the dates are flipped 90°, as opposed to in some right to left scripts where they are just reproduced as is. I've always thought this would hinder the flow of the reading, but I suppose small numbers (for most people) are instantly recognised rather than being parsed left to right.
Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.
I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first, but if it did then the historical transmission into Europe may have entailed two flips of numeric endianness.
> I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first
The Sanskrit language (exemplifying the "Hindu system") had the same pattern as English for the teens, i.e:
11: ekadaśa = eka (1) + daśa (10)
12: dvadaśa = dva (2) + daśa (10)
13: tridaśa = tri (3) + daśa (10)
etc ..
In Sanskrit this pattern (least significant non-zero digit spoken first) continues through to larger numbers.
so:
20: vimśati
21: ekavimśati
120: vimśati-śatam
1121: ekavimśati-śatam-sahasra
etc.
But it's important to remember that the spoken rendering of numbers in all these languages precedes the written representation by millenia. People have been counting much longer than they have been writing. Of course later ways of speaking the numbers may have been influenced by writing systems, but the spoken rendering of basic smaller numbers tend to be relatively stable over time.
> Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages
But I thought they originated in India, where left-to-right scripts were in use, which is why Arabic is bidirectional with the digits written left-to-right.
So in German the number “21” is spelled “einundzwanzig” which means “one and twenty” compared to “twenty (and) one” in English. If you were to say “einundzwanzig” to me I’d most likely write down the 1 immediately and then put the 2 in front of it, if it’s utmost important to get the number right. This is really common also among the Dutch (they have the same thing) as well.
And one of our most common mistakes when speaking English is saying the number wrong. For example, 85 is pronounced fünfundachtzig, five and eighty, but it would not be uncommon for a German to misspeak in English and say fifty-eight.
I wonder if this has anything to do with what you wrote?
Could be inherited from arabic as cited by another (does all western numbering system derive from hindu-arabic?). What really intrigues me is why specially the tens are reversed. If it were some practical utility or reliability feature (saying the most important first/last?) I'd expect a fixed order throughout. Maybe it's just a random irregularity.
Wait, so 1,672 in arabic script would have appeared the same way, but would have been read as (something like) "two seventy six hundred and a thousand"?
The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/
I found that surprisingly interesting.
Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.
Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system.
This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji).
If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
> Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese)
What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in the 15th century by King Sejong.
However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today, usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong), but in newspapers it may be written as 大統領, which are the matching Chinese characters.
Also, most Korean parents choose Chinese characters to write for their children's names, which read (more or less, as Korean does not have tones) the same as the Korean characters.
I navigate from time to time to Korean website, very few occasion they actually uses Chinese characters, except:
1. Some countries names. 中(China)/美(US)/日(Japan)/北(North Korea)
2. Blue House (think of it as Korean's White House, representing the headquarters of the administration), sometimes referred as 青(Blue).
3. The president's surname, sometimes referred as 文(Moon)
Except for those very limited cases, I don't think Korean people are actually using Hanja anymore, it almost feel like some sort of emoji for then, that they probably can't read it, just comprehend the meaning.
As to Korean names, yes I think they still have a Chinese name registered somewhere, but no longer required and not shown on their government ID card.
This is their current situation, but historically this has not been the case. Korean for a very long time was written with Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese.
The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam:
> The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later
The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace.
I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
Why is it ridiculous? Why does it need to be cleaned up? I'm not sure what the problem is (I don't think I would classify you not finding it visually elegant as a problem).
If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, there are many exceptions to that, but the mix of scripts has benefits for parsing text.
Obviously, the Japanese writing system is not a single constructed system like Hangul, but I don't see any reason why it is inefficient (aside from, perhaps, the time required to learn kanji for school children).
Generally writing systems with higher workloads to read/write lead to less native literacy rates due to people with learning disabilities not being able to get over the hump, not to mention less foreigners learning the language due to the higher barrier of entry.
I remember reading it in something semi academic many, many years ago, so you'll have to google it.
I think it was linked to dyslexia and languages with spelling and maybe japanese, and how china simplified it's characters led to higher literacy, although that might have a few confounding variables.
Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well
> There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script
No, actually there was two pushes in modern times. One advocating the use of romaji (or even French) which did not succeed.
Then there was a set a post-WWII reforms that aimed to simplify the script by: standardizing kanji use (eg 言う instead of 言う or 云う), standardization of kanji readings (当用漢字), kanji stroke simplification (新字体), dropping the old kana usage (旧仮名遣), standardization of kanas themselves to get rid of 変体仮名. The convention also shifted from using katakana everywhere where kanji are not used to the mix of kanji/hiragana/katakana of today. So yes, the Japanese script changed quite a lot recently.
Ridiculous comment. The Japanese writing system as a lot of issues, but visual elegance is not one of them. On the contrary the mix of different kind of characters is really convenient to easily parse sentences and give limited information about word origins. It also provides endless possibilities of word plays.
> On the contrary the mix of different kind of characters is really convenient to easily parse sentences
There is also an advantage that most foreigners do not realise. The mix of Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana create natural delimiters in the sentence and make spacing useless.
Reading Japanese fully written in Hiragana is currently much harder due to the lack of delimiters between words. The mix of hiragana, katakana and Kanji allow a very high density per character.
Indeed, mixing different shapes as letters makes reading text much easier. Blackletter, on the other hand, while beautiful in its uniformity, is notoriously hard on the eyes.
It wasn’t such a bad fit for Vietnamese, whose syllabic structure is basically the same as Chinese languages. Actually Han and Chu Nom were used for a way longer time than Quoc Ngu is. And the change to a latin based alphabet is more due to colonization than anything. For Korean you right though.
The absurd number of diacritics one must append to Latin letters in order to use that alphabet for Vietnamese is the best evidence that Vietnam should have had its own rationally constructed system like Korea.
Read more about Hangul, it was never designed to look like Chinese. It has many interesting design decisions which are unique and not found in any other script.
Not so quick, there are design decisions that deliberately carry over certain fundamental features from Chinese:
1. The script is not linear at its unit of writing, but fills a square with its base components from left to right, top to bottom (「한글」, not 「ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ」; analogue 「韓字」, not 「十早韋宀子」).
2. One unit represents precisely one syllable.
3. Vertical writing retains the orientation of units (not rotating 90°).
(1) and (3) also apply to Egyptian hieroglyphics... They're pretty generic design decisions for languages with composing characters. And (2) is just a syllabary, which is certainly not unique. Any composed syllabary that is meant to read left-to-right, top-to-bottom will likely meet (1) and (2).
Vietnamese only became Latin alphabet recently (100 years ago). In fact it's always completely jarring for me to see Latin or Cyrillic characters for languages like Vietnamese [1] or Turkish [2]—about as jarring as it would be to see English written in Arabic characters. So much that, if you asked me what alphabets these languages use without giving me much of a chance to think, I would probably still intuitively reply that they use something close to Chinese or Arabic, completely forgetting the whole story changed a hundred years ago.
I understand the feeling for Vietnamese which is a tonal language, and indeed has a ton of "weird" annotations on the basic characters which make the usage of the latin glyphs pointless.
But Turkish seems to fit a latin script quite well, and the previous Arabic/Persian wasn't a "native" script for a Turkic language either, I think.
Why does it make latin glyphs pointless? Isn't it better to have a closer match to the phonemes that one actually has to say than having ideoglyphs? (Which are harder to learn, because writing and speaking becomes only loosely coupled.)
Disclaimer: I know stuff all about Tiếng Việt, but it seemed really hard to learn how to hear and say the sounds when I tried for a few days with private lessons. Using so many diacritics modifies the Latin alphabet so much that it becomes something else...
It would be interesting to compare Khmer script with Vietnamese.
The Khmer alphabet seems to have 33 consonant letters, 15 vowels, 16 "dependent vowels" (which look to attach like an accent to a consonant), and 12 diacritics.
Since I don't have any knowledge of either language, I don't know if this is better.
Thanks! Since there are already many different languages using latin script I'm not surprised that this very heavily annotated version too differs. (I'm Hungarian, so maybe that's why I prefer explicit markings for pronunciation.)
The "weird" annotations are (almost) all part of regular Latin glyphs, which is unsurprising since the Portuguese who created modern written Vietnamese patterned it after Portuguese.
If weird annotations can work for slightly different phonemes in Orthographia Bohemica and for Zamenhof, I'm sure you would be able to use them for tones as well.
You can, it's how it's done, but it means someone who knows any other language using the Latin script still can't read it.
A speaker of French, Polish, German, Hungarian or Turkish can muddle through trying to pronounce another European language using the Latin script and get 95% of it but will have no idea of how to read Vietnamese.
These are also common ones. It's also transplanted onto a bunch of other less well known non-sinitic languages like Khitan, Jurchen, Okinawan, Zhuang etc.
Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others.
Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ...
Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ...
Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
A clearer statement is that writing was only invented/discovered in isolation three times that we know of--by the Mayans, the Chinese, and somewhere in the middle east.
Well, Japanese uses syllabaries.
The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".
I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty.
It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“
Wow this is one of the very few websites I've seen in recent years that makes good use of the huge horizontal screen estate on modern displays. Love it!
I think it would be because most browsers are made by US based companies. These different modes should be options out of the box, and should have been now for a long time considering the web is international.
Curious. Left-right scrolling works as expected, however up down turns into left-right but with vertical overscroll. seems like they need an extra "overscroll-behavior-y: none;"
I checked the English version, looks totally different, but the images are the same and I guess the content is as well.
There is a link on the menu bar, the address is:
UI issues aside, I think this is quite fabulous. Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it. Although I do wonder how easy it will be for the whole nation to switch from one alphabet to another when they're so drastically different. I don't suppose any Mongolians are here to give their input?
> Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it
There are downsides to any situation. E.G:
- cost
- available resources for education and work
- adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other
I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing.
It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves.
Language preservation is overrated. Sure, it's nice. But compared to one day, having the entire earth speak the same language, be able to communicate and understand each other better? Small price to pay.
It get why they do it. Mongolia is a very peculiar culture, and I don't think it benefits much from mondialisation. Quite the contrary. And it's a way for their society to break from a painful part of their history.
But to me, it seems, at least on the long run, a step backward. Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity. There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information.
Granted, the cyrillic alphabet is not very universal, but it is certainly more common than the traditional mongolia alphabet.
Now since I don't live there, I may be missing some crucial informations. Maybe the population still massively use the old alphabet unofficially and it makes sense. Maybe the use of the cyrillic alphabet brough problems I can't see.
So of course, I'm not the right peson to judge the situation.
But I wanted to bring a counter point to this the enthusiastic parent comment. We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity
And that's not necessarily a good thing. It is not just a language that dies, but a part of the culture also dies with the language. I do get the appeal of the world having one language, but attaining it at the cost of diversity would be a _big_ price to pay.
I speak a southern Indian language called Malayalam (34 million speakers). There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live. Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture. I am not claiming that change is bad, simply arguing that preserving a language might help preserve a culture.
[1] IIRC there's been some scientific literature on this. I'll look it up and edit this post when I get time
> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English
I've often seen this claim, for all kinds of languages, sometimes even between two standard varieties of a single language. For a particular reason, I like to dig deeper. Invariably, the people making this claim are not very educated in linguistics, so it's not wonder this statement comes out wrong. And it is wrong. I challenge them to disprove me with a single counter example, and they are eager to do so. Typically the conversation goes like this:
Them: "You see, in my language we have ⅏⁝⏏⌸."
Me: "And what does it mean?"
Them: "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot."
Me: "You just translated it perfectly, congratulations."
What they mean is: "there often is not a single corresponding foreign word or phrase for a word or phrase in my language", and that's fine; but very far removed from "untranslatable".
Obviously it's not literally "untranslatable" meaning "unexplainable".
But it's about how certain concepts are easy to say in one language -- they fit like a glove -- and hard to say in another. So if they're hard to say, you wind up not saying them, and it changes what people communicate, which changes the culture.
In Brazilian Portuguese you can say "ai que saudades!" or "que malandragem!" which, poorly translated mean respectively, "I missed you!" and "What scoundrel-ness!"
But those translations miss the entire connotation and strength and context -- they're just plain inaccurate. And yes you can take an entire paragraph to explain the nuances of what they actually mean... but not in normal conversation.
Even when I'd speak in English with Brazilian friends, sometimes to explain a certain social situation we had to revert to Portuguese words, because there just aren't English words that fit the frames people understand Brazilian social situations in.
So the main claim that losing language means losing culture still stands 100%.
"Untranslatable" obviously doesn't mean the concept can't be explained if you're given a few sentences or paragraphs. It means there isn't an equivalent word or phrase that can be employed in normal everyday usage.
You can also think of it when translating movie subtitles, which I've done a little of in the past -- you only have a "normal" amount of on-screen space to fit your translation in. Some words just don't have anything you can translate to in the reasonable space. They're untranslatable.
Brings up another thing: when folks 'translate' a piece into English and substitute English phrases for the original author's idion. Frustrates me no end. I may have wanted (always want) to learn something about the culture the piece was written in/for. Such bastard translations wall me off from even guessing what the author said or meant. Just some watered-down elevator-music meaning, because the translator thought I was not smart enough to understand the original.
Maybe on the surface, but different words have different contexts and emotional attachments in different regions even with the same language. If the world spoke english, a combo of loan words and different words having different meanings in different places would naturally emerge I'm guessing.
Not to mention, English is highly elastic and seems to have little issue "borrowing" words from other languages that don't have a reasonable translation in English. Schadenfreude is a good example. It's German, few people could tell you the actual direct translation into English, but generally people know what you mean when you say it.
You precisely made a point, it's easier and natural to say "⅏⁝⏏⌸" rather then "The pain you feel when you stumble around in the dark in drowsy stupor and step onto a plastic construction toy brick with your bare foot." It is the nuances and connotations in a particular language the bring out the 'true' meaning.
In one of the languages I speak, "hucci" means stupid, but in fun, loving way. Stupid just doesn't cut it.
That is linguistic relativity / Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1], and intuitively I think it does hold. On the most simple level, there are groups of people who do not have a name for a certain color and they simply can not distinguish them from a related color which may be very obvious to us. And in fiction there is of course Newspeak from 1984.
So yes, I think killing off all other languages apart from English / Mandarin / Esperanto is a bad way to go, I'd rather go for early bi- or triligualism.
If there's no word for the colour you're perceiving then surely you make one or transliterate one? That's going to tend to create linguistic enclaves but mutual intelligibility should survive.
You can place where I grew up in the UK to within about 20 miles based on the word we used for lunch. Like the difference between bagged lunch (en-us) and packed lunch (en-gb) I suppose.
Yes, but this is about script. Some languages like Turkish and Vietnamese are doing fine adopting the foreign Latin script as Languages.
Sometimes people want/demand change in the direction of modernity too. I think during 1911 revolution in China, the people were really fed up with the system in place for centuries that they wanted it totally rid off; there was very serious discussion about adopting Esperanto as the language of the new republic.
> there was very serious discussion about adopting Esperanto as the language of the new republic.
No, there wasn’t. As a former Esperantist (very dedicated and active at the organizational level in UEA), I remember a lot of these claims being pitched to the public about how Esperanto was so esteemed here or there in history that it was almost used officially, but if you actually looked into the facts, never was serious consideration given to using Esperanto. At best there was just one or two government officials involved in these historical events who were Esperantists themselves, but they had no influence in this regard.
These are the sort of disingenuous claims about Esperanto that Marcus Sikosek sought to debunk in his book Esperanto sen mitoj, and they do more harm than good to Esperanto and they make the movement look kooky.
Esperanto, no, but there were several attempts at an alphabet. They all foundered because "Chinese" is actually a language family as diverse as the Romance languages, but that use Mandarin in ideograms as their writing system.
Vietnamese is one language. Imagine that French and Italian decided to agree on a writing system but insisted that the word for "dog" had to be spelled the same way in both.
Your [1] could be Walther J. Ong's Orality and Literacy? It goes into differences between cultures rooted in written/oral language, and has several examples where words that are "missing" from or present in a language reflect the way the speakers think and reason.
But I believe there is nothing in our current situation that is worth more than having a united humanity, which can only happen if well all can understand each others.
> There are some things that are simply untranslatable to English - these words/concepts are closely tied to the way we live
It's ok, you can use the native word in an english sentence. English does that all the time: "je ne sais quoi" (french), "taxi" (turkish), "pizza" (italien), etc.
> Now if everyone in my town starts speaking only English suddenly, it would definitely affect the way they think[1], function, and would inevitable change the culture.
Yes. Change is inevitable anyway. But we can choose to change in one direction. I think the direction of uniting the human specie is the best choice.
> preserving a language might help preserve a culture.
I'll exchange my own entire french cultural heritage in a blink if suddently I could make the entire world speak one common language.
But it doesn't have to be.
A culture is not this immutable things we think it is. Most thing we call ancestral are really just the result of a continuous transformation process that have the same flavor, and so that we identify as stable. Even centuries old religions have been changing all the time.
So culture will change as well. It will adapt, and keep what is meant to be kept, then drop the rest.
We will lose some valuable things in the process, but to gain much more.
One thing that I've noticed over the years is that foreign words readily slide into English, yet English words look and sound very jarring in other languages.
My second language is Spanish, and seeing an English word in Spanish text just looks wrong to me, never mind that Spanish is full of Arabic loanwords.
Perhaps it could also be because English is your first language (if I assumed correctly) and it stands out more as familiar as opposed to say Chinese words in Japanese? I won't deny that English is a Borg of a language though.
Most of the examples are newer words like "internet" or "chat", which are the same or similar in both languages. Spanish does have "proper" equivalents ("la red" and "la charla", respectively), but the loan-words are used pretty often. Because Spanish has fewer loan-words, the examples I gave don't sound like "real Spanish". This is less obvious in English because we have already abandoned any pretense of uniformity.
> In my country, language protection is a big thing. It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english
The latter does not inevitably follow from the former. "Language protection" has been a big thing in Finland inasmuch as the Finnish intelligentsia has historically preferred coining new words from Finnish roots instead of adopting foreign vocabulary (so tietokone for ‘computer’) and there is heavy state subsidy for local cultural productions in Finnish, but Finns nevertheless have great proficiency in English.
> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.
What? Latin died as a native language by splitting up into a large series of dialects across Europe that were no longer mutually intelligible by the late first millennium. Europe did not gain any uniformity by that process.
If you are referring to the idea that children need to spend their precious school hours only on "useful subjects", then you ought to consider that many young people these days mainly learn English through osmosis while watching television programs etc. at home. So, whether time during their school day is spent focusing on aspects of their native language or not doesn’t make a difference for their ability to communicate internationally.
As for "Efficient communication is probably the most important factor in peace", that kind of idealism doesn't hold in practice. The peoples of Yugoslavia could efficiently communicate with each other because they shared essentially the same language, but it still didn't stop them from descending into brutal warfare. Even today, peoples of two antagonistic countries can often communicate with one another in English, but they go on despising each other nevertheless.
> There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information.
Strongly disagree. Who are we to decide which aspects of someone else’s culture are worth saving, and which can be thrown under the bus in the name of efficiency?
Why not architecture, or dress, or food, or religion? Are you only taking issue because this one has a particular impact on computers?
> We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
What is our purpose, without culture? We’re not robots.
All of these have a very limited use as a means of conveying information, mostly because the medium itself is static.
> or religion?
Funny you would mention religion. Christianity, Islam and Judaism mention the tower of Babel or something similar to it, implying that splitting the humanity into many languages was God's punishment for defiance.
"6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."
If we are to believe this, then returning to one language for the entire humanity would simply be a return to our most natural, original state as was meant by our creator.
> we have such a terrible ability to speak english
Curiously, native English speakers have a terrible ability to speak French (even though they are not as protective of their language). Personally, I think that this is because these two languages, despite being “neighbors” and in some respects related, are at different extremes of some kind of phonetic spectrum. (Learning the written language, on the other hand, is a breeze and fun.)
I don't think the rumored bad English-speaking capacities of the French are coming from the protection of the French language, but rather from an inadequate teaching methods and funding.
> - adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other
Even if it was true, why would this matter? Just because you share an alphabet doesn't mean you can understand each others culture.
> It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves.
Such as?
> Mongolia is a very peculiar culture
What's peculiar about it? It's no more peculiar than any other culture. But I'm guessing you meant it's a unique culture. But even then, it's not. It's part of the greater nomadic central asian culture.
> Language preservation is overrated.
If that was true, we'd all be speaking latin. Thank god for language preservation, otherwise, we wouldn't have shakespeare, mark twain and the world's most productive language. Think about all the art, history, culture, value that would have been lost had people like you succeeded in the past.
> Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.
Simply not true. The "death" of latin brought linguistic/cultural/etc diversity. When european nations started teaching in their own national languages and when they started worshipping in their national languages rather than latin, it created more diversity.
> We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
Why doesn't it benefit our species? You act like if we all used the same alphabet and spoke the same language, we'd have some kind of utopia. You act like people who speak the same language don't have wars with each other, don't brutalize each other and have cultural differences.
It seems like you've bought into the globalist monoculture nonsense. Where we all think alike, talk alike, eat in the same fast food joints and live alike in cities that all look alike. For our species sakes, I hope not.
> What's peculiar about it? It's no more peculiar than any other culture. But I'm guessing you meant it's a unique culture. But even then, it's not. It's part of the greater nomadic central asian culture.
Mongolia’s elites adopted Buddhism and their intelligentsia has historically looked to Tibet. That has greatly set Mongolian culture apart from the peoples of Central Asia, who adopted Islam. Also, Mongolic is a completely different language family from Turkic.
>If that was true, we'd all be speaking latin. Thank god for language preservation, otherwise, we wouldn't have shakespeare, mark twain and the world's most productive language.
I'm not sure this is a compelling argument.
We have contemporary musicians who have written and performed songs in different languages, not just their own. Indeed, we have many examples of non-native English speakers doing very well in US charts that have album sales in the millions. Therefore I am pretty confident that Shakespeare and Mark Twain would have been fine if they had to write in Latin.
Even if not these two specifically, who would have the temerity to assert that we would not have had different but equally talented people writing in Latin in their place?
It's not a matter of talent. It's a matter of language. Shakespeare and Twain couldn't write their books in latin because their writings are tied with the language itself not to mention the culture with the language helped to define.
So they might have written great latin literature, but we'd still lose out on great english language literature.
It's stilly to say we should get rid of spanish, german, russian, etc literature since we'd still have great english literature. Nobody in their right mind would say that. Just because if everyone spoke latin and we'd have great latin literature doesn't mean that we don't lose anything. We'd lose english literature.
On the other hand, when I am reading a book in Classical Greek with accompanying translation to English, I more often than I would like to catch myself reading the translation - not because I do not understand the Greek text but because the translation is so delicious!
Easy to learn? It has gender and number and a lot of inflection which are hardly easy for many of the world's speakers. Pidgin English appears to do a better job at what Esperanto claims to be ideal for.
I'm a huge fan of diversity in language and culture (assuming a given culture does not oppress its people).
No matter how convenient it is for me, I do not want the entire world to only speak English and follow western culture trends. I would much rather have the diversities that make the world rich.
Not only that, but I can assure you, Westernized culture absolutely doesn't "have it right." We have power for historic reasons and that power, I would argue, has unrightfully supplanted alternative ways of life that may arguably be better. We need other languages, we need other cultures, we need other forms of government policy. These diversities give us references to look upon and improve our own culture in ways or fix things that just aren't quite right.
I'd be mostly fine with the huge bagload of loanwords if we could at least have a spelling system that made sense for our language, like we used to... 1000 years ago.
Latin alphabet but with some accents, and the eth/thorn/yogh/wynn/ash (ð/þ/Ȝ/ƿ/æ) characters that English used to have, and Icelandic still has some of.
According to Wikipedia, the territory now called Mongolia was conquered by White Russians in 1920. Before then it was controlled by the Chinese Republic and before that the Qing dynasty (the rulers of which were ethnically neither Chinese nor Mongolian). In response, the Red Russians assisted Mongolian communists in conquering the country. The assistance included the sending of Russian troops.
That makes much more sense though, you're changing from something less known to more know, easier for tourists etc. Changing to a less approachable vertical system is different...
While I agree with you, that is a very occidental point of view.
I think it is important that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not tourists. If people there is more familiarized with this vertical system than left-to-right with a latin alphabet, I do not think it is fair to call it "less approachable".
What if being more fluent in English leads to better economic outcomes for Mongolians, and hence more secure access to resources?
I notice that in our family and friends of immigrants, the parents who were fluent in English and able to access all the resources in English, were able to provide their children better advice and their kids are more economically successful than those who didn’t have that resource.
1. They can do both, learning a separate script that's as simple as the Latin one is not a huge investment.
2. You're talking about people who immigrate to an English speaking country, correct? Good advice for people living in Mongolia surely is available in Mongolian.
Mongolians today learn English, at least the guy who went to Sweden to work as a chef that I talked to a couple of years ago did.
Within the last 50 years, the language of the place where my grandparents and parents came from lost pretty much all of its economic significance, and that place has 100 million+ people. As the child of an immigrant in the US who was taught the alphabet and characters and raised completely in the US, I am more literate in the native language than the children who grew up there!
All of their parents sent them to English schools, and all business is done in English. You use the native language to talk to old or poor people, but nothing that can make you a living.
So in my experience, all that time I spent learning that native language more than what I needed to for casual conversation was a waste of time.
I don't see what's "human" or not about the different rate of return of different languages. If it tickles your fancy, go for it. But language is a tool, one that is almost useless if you have no one to use it with. So I have a tool which I basically can't use anymore.
I'm not blaming my elders or anything, I'm sure they were most well intentioned and they don't know the future, but I think my time could have been better spent. And I know there's many things I've wasted my time on, but I am simply stating my belief the future utility of some languages is not worth the cost of keeping them alive.
What is not human is measuring the "rate of return" of what you learn exclusively in economic terms. Culture is a thing, although not always a very profitable one. There are people (particulars, governments, and even the UN) spending money to conserve languages. Also, I find quite extreme that you consider being able to talk with old and poor people a "waste of time", just because it won't help you to make a living.
A language is a tool, but it is also much more. In particular, it is much more than a tool to make money.
I don't know you, maybe you are a wonderful person. Maybe you could have done better things with your time than learning that language (I do not know how much time you invested or your possibilities to use it), but reading your comment made me feel bad.
>Also, I find quite extreme that you consider being able to talk with old and poor people a "waste of time", just because it won't help you to make a living.
I didn't mean to imply that language is only worthwhile if you make money from it. But time is a finite resource, and unless you really like learning different alphabets or something, there is no utility gained for 99.9% of people in learning one that no one else is going to use.
Learning how to speak a language is orders less time intensive than a reading and writing an alphabet. I'm glad I speak it fluently, and can converse with elders and poor people. But reading and writing it will never come into use for me.
But people there are already familiarized with left-to-right system they currently use with cyrillic symbols. And I meant not just for tourists, but in more general sense of being part of global world, especially for smaller nation.
>I think it is important that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not tourists.
This very charitably assumes that this is the will of Mongolian people and not just the will of the government.
Nowhere in the article does it mention that there was a referendum on this, and I am certain that almost anyone on HN would agree that one is necessary for a change as serious as this, upheaval of the language itself would have very serious consequences that could potentially last centuries.
You are reading things I did not write. I said that what it is important is that the system they are changing to is better for Mongolian people, not that the system the government is proposing is better. In the next paragraph, you can see that I even used a conditional.
I do not know anything at all about Mongolian writing systems to know what would be better. I was just pointing out that assuming that people in Mongolia could prefer their old system instead of English, and that is the opinion that counts. I agree with you that this opinion is not necessarily the one of their government.
A referendum may be necessary but, again, I do not know enough about the situation to know if this is the case. For example, if the party in power had been elected by a large margin and this was the main point of their program, it may be not so necessary, although I still think it would be the right thing to do according to democratic standards.
The history is a bit more detailed than that. The traditional script is derived from the Old Uyghur alphabet, widespread at the time in the region, by a captured man when Genghis Khan defeated Naimans, so adopting it is a direct result of establishing the Mongol Empire and its colonies, Rus' being one of them. (and was necessary to run the empire, because the Mongols didn't have writing before that). Chinese Evenks still use this script since these times, for example.
>I do wonder how easy it will be for the whole nation to switch from one alphabet to another when they're so drastically different.
The software support is more concerning than that, I guess. The traditional script is being taught in schools, and is often used along with Cyrillic. The idea of returning to it is not new either. In Inner Mongolia, its use is obligatory in many cases.
In a fit of nationalism, a former colonial power takes a step to sever ties with its continental neighbor. Does it still sound good when you look at it that way?
Sounds even better! Is there some example of colonialism which you think is worth preserving, to the destruction of their culture? Should Ireland stop being Irish, should Korea become a Japanese colony again, or should we reunite the USSR?
While I agree Hong Kong would probably be more free under the British, I think Hong Kong is not a good example. They would be best off free, not a PRC colony.
"During the Italian rule, infrastructure to connect major cities, railways, public and private companies, and dams providing power and water were built; this along with the influx of Italian settlers and labourers, was the major cause of rapid urbanization growth. Also, the Italian government abolished slavery, a practice that existed in the country for centuries."
And this wasn't even the British Empire, these were the literal fascists of Mussolini.
"On March 17, 1991, in a Union-wide referendum 76.4 percent of voters endorsed retention of a reformed Soviet Union. The Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova boycotted the referendum as well as Checheno-Ingushetia (an autonomous republic within Russia that had a strong desire for independence, and by now referred to itself as Ichkeria). In each of the other nine republics, a majority of the voters supported the retention of a reformed Soviet Union."
It's not like European countries like UK and Spain do not have member regions/nations that are very happy with the will of the majority, e.g. Brexit.
Not sure if you understood me. Mongolia is the former colonial empire. This script glorifies its heyday of oppressing people all over Asia and the middle east.
But yes, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa obviously benefited hugely from colonialism and nobody would want them to revert to stone-age tribal society.
> UI issues aside, I think this is quite fabulous. Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it.
Because it helps preserve the country's unique culture and history, freeing it of the influence of a state that imposed its rule on them. I know some people prefer languages to be uniform but I don't see 'everyone speaks the same language' as a good thing. As a secondary option, yeah, it would be nice if everyone spoke English or whatever becomes the choice eventually. But I want culture to flourish and this is part of makes countries stand out.
Why don't you consider mutual intelligibility across nations to be good? I love the diversity of the many languages we have, but that's not really a useful aspect of the World - greater cooperation seems to me to be a noble target for the human race and commonality of language seems to aid that. People can share their unique culture with me because they speak a language (native, domestic, or otherwise learnt) that I can understand.
Mutual intelligibility for the sake of information exchange is good, but we can have both. Most Europeans already have both. In the EU (the organization) it's Euro English.
The person above you has not said that mutual intelligibility is bad.
You want people to share their culture with you, yet you are fine with them throwing away something which acts as one of the backbones of their cultural history for the sake of an imagined increase in cooperation.
And also, why does everything have to be useful? The useless things in life are often the best. Like ice cream, poetry, wasting an afternoon away, or hacking. In fact that's why I work, to enjoy the useless things in life.
Not everything has to be useful: you used the same technique there you implicitly criticised me using ;o)
Communication, is for communication. Yes, it's good to have localised codes, domain languages, private communications; quirky ways to make crypto-poetry, or to create artistic expressions.
But we, IMO, should be very wary of placing those above or ability to communicate effectively with as many people as we're able.
In Welsh counties of the UK school children are forced to learn Cymraeg, a language that doesn't help them access any other cultures, not communicate with any other people they can't already (except literally one or two pre-schoolers).
Cymraeg is very interesting and holds together part of the story of UK, my home country, but for communication it's a bad choice.
I've no problem with people choosing to learn languages for purposes other than communication; but forcing schoolchildren to learn a second language that's near useless [compared to global modern languages] as a communication tool, that's awful.
Yes to historic languages; no to forcibly separating peoples through choosing purposeful separation via language.
I once saw a Mongolian book (written in Cyrillic alphabet) and it was very jarring.
It looked like half of the letters were Э (pronounced like a very deep Eh). It is a low frequency letter in Russian, mostly commonly seen in short words like это ("this") and virtually always at the front of a word. But there every word was long and liberally sprinkled with multiple Эs. Looked completely alien. In fact, looked like a square peg of an alphabet in a round hole of a language.
That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word. Russian could be much easier to read closer to proper for non-natives if only Russians would write э everywhere where it reads э. For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English yet they use different letters.
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's funny to read a post complaining of the bad relation between written word and pronunciation of a language when said post is written in English :)
I don't know about English but other languages have a central body that manages the language, eg implementing spelling reforms.
Eg German and French have a simplification every few decades (done by a central process) and a regular process for introducing/recognising new words. In German the words are based on common usage; in French more by committee decision as they want to avoid too many loan words - so "digital" in German is "digital", in French it's "numérique" which was invented specifically to avoid "digital" being the main word, but either way the spelling was normalised at some point).
The Académie Française tries really hard to be prescriptive, and perhaps that works for the handful of elitist writers hanging out around Saint-Germain-des-Prés but it definitely can't keep up with the connected world, the language that is actually spoken and used by everyone, and often gives in by being descriptive with a noticeable lag and awkwardness. It is more of a self-congratulatory circle of elites trying to uphold a (400 year-old) tradition for the fun of it, and the population often decides to use vastly different words regardless of what is considered a "real word" in French.
It also happens a (400 year-old) tradition that was quite intentionally set up to be overly complex so to prevent unwashed gray masses from learning "proper" written French and to keep it reserved for the elite.
I can't find a link right now, but there was an interview with a French linguist who explained the history of the grammar and how it came about. Was quite an eye opener and helped making some sense of why it is so bizarre.
It's easy enough for a foreigner to learn it in a year (so all what's left is to expand the vocabulary and polish the pronunciation). How can it be hard enough to prevent natives from learning "proper" written French? Was it also illegal to teach them so being hard enough to be impossible to figure out intuitively was sufficient?
What you need is some guy to make a few half-assed changes to spellings that don't actually come anywhere close to fixing the problem, but are just enough to create incompatibility with other users of the language. :)
> For example consider the word "энергия" (energy) - the first and the third letters sound the same in this word and the same they sound in English
Apparently, as recently as in the 1950s, both palatalized ("soft") and non-palatalized ("hard") /n/ in the second syllable of this word were recognized as variants of the normal pronunciation in Russian dictionaries.
This has and always will be the case with spelling vs pronunciation. Pronunciation tends to change much faster over time than does spelling.
> That's because е is usually used to represent the same sound if it's not in the beginning of the word.
This is far from being a general rule. Your example is an exception. Consider "мера", "монета", "обмен" and so on. You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases.
You cannot change "e" to "э" in these cases and you should not. What I mean is using "э" where you can, phonetically. Using "е" in those cases actually is "changing" although has made it into the standard.
That's not what you said in the original post. Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts, as I believe input from a native speaker may be valuable to someone.
I obviously failed to communicate that properly yet that's exactly what I meant.
> Also I would appreciate if you stop downvoting my posts
That's not me. For a spectrum of reasons I believe it's great if whoever having a relevant idea/opinion shares it, even if it's wrong, let alone different from mine. So I don't downvote anybody ever (but in some extremely rare exceptions perhaps).
That's because 'e' also usually makes previous consonant softer(not in your example though, because it's a loan word I guess), so you'd have to put 'ь' everywhere then.
usually makes - so why not use 'e' only in the cases when it actually does? I don't say 'э' should always be used in place of 'е'. I mean why not use 'э' when it sounds 'э' (without the preceding letter softening) and 'е' when it really sounds 'е'? The Russian writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
> The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
As the sibling comment says, it doesn’t, at least not anymore. It is to a large extent traditional. The current Russian writing system is essentially the same as it was in the early 18th century, when it determinedly deviated from the Church Slavonic. There was a spelling reform right after the Bolshevik revolution in the early 20th century, but it was not particularly significant — they just abolished a couple of letters and forbade the use of a particular letter in the end of words. Since the 18th century, the Russian pronunciation has of course evolved (and anyway, there is no such thing as the Russian pronunciation; there are always dialects). Which, inevitably, has led to deviations between the spelling system and whatever was the standard pronunciation at the time.
> The Russians writing system tries to be phonetic but doesn't seem to do well this way.
It does not? Creating a fully phonetic writing system that is also consistent is an impossible task. For example, different dialects can interchange "o" and "a" sounds, how this should be solved in a "proper" phonetic system?
I am a native Russian speaker and a former Korean language major. I would estimate that the modern Korean writing system has roughly the same amount of exceptions and non-phonetic spellings as the Russian one.
For example, the letter ㅎ (h) is not pronounced in a lot of cases. Some other consonants are reduced depending on their position in the syllable, etc.
The illusion that Korean is "pronounced as written" is created by the fact that Koreans are extremely happy when you learn to speak their language at all. I as a Russian speaker would also rather hear you pronounce Russian words as they are written than not try to learn Russian at all :) But as soon as you start working on sounding as close to native as possible, that illusion of simplicity quickly breaks down.
Aside, I wonder how long UK dialects will survive: my kids often come out with US Americanisms - of both word choice [garbage] and pronounciation - because of the media they consume.
I do not know much about UK dialects, but someday US will speak a Kiwi-influenced dialect. Received Pronunciation will survive due to preservation efforts.
The exact same happens with all the languages that use the latin alphabet: They may all use the same alphabet but the frequencies and patterns of letters are very different.
In fact that's how we tend to recognise a language even if we don't speak it at all.
I used seán as a username once. I gave up after I realised it was fine on my own personal computer but once I jumped on to an azerty keyboard or something simpler tasks just became more difficult -- finding the letter with a fada just results in searching the charmap rather than keyboard.
You can have fadas in URLs e.g. seán.dev using a technique called Punycode.
Ogham is another Irish script and is vertical but unique in Unicode because its space charcter is a line - the only language to do so.
One of the few features I like on a Mac is that you can hold a key and it pops up a little menu which lets you chose many common variations of the letter without having your fingers do gymnastics on the keyboard.
This can be done without key combinations or a charmap: aáªàäâãåąæ
Is this possible on Windows or Linux? I constantly toggle between 3 keymaps.
That's clever, I like it. Not sure if something like this exists for Linux, but using compose keys is standard—e.g. to type å, I hit (in sequence) RightAlt, a, o.
I have síntí fada in my name too but I also frequently write in languages that use other accents so I have my keyboard mapping set up in software to type them easily. For example AltGr-a-' for á.
As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or "thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at least sound out words in the current script, but pretending Mongolian is pronounced like Russian won't get you anywhere. The language bears virtually no resemblance to any other major language, and even recognizable loan words seemed to be few and far between.
Based on my experience producing right-to-left content and fixing related software bugs, I'd say they are mostly unaware of the complexities involved.
Any software they use today should be adapted to work with the traditional script. How are they going to mix their new script with Latin-based or Cyrillic scripts? What about adding math to the mix? I hope they invest in solving these issues, it would be very interesting to see the outcome.
They are fully aware of the complexities because six million people in Inner Mongolia in China already use this script.
The current situation is this: "As of 2015 there are no fonts that successfully display all of Mongolian correctly when written in Unicode" [1], meaning that specialized software using Private Use Areas of Unicode are the only way to typeset it.
From the date, in Arabic numerals, on the president of Mongolia's website, it looks like they solve that by simply rotating lengths of none Mongolian-content 90° to fit.
If you're learning to read Latin (etc) script for the first time, it doesn't much matter what it's orientation is - they're just symbols.
If you're learning letters then orientation matters unless you have extremely strict orthography. E M W 3 can all be written the same but have different orientations, for example.
My comment was about orthography, how letters are manually written; the context was learners who don't already know an alphabet.
It's not uncommon to write capital-E with cursive strokes so it's a reflected or rotated 3, and lower case m and w are sometimes written similarly - so as to be very close to rotated versions of the same character.
Yes, and OP's comment was in relation to higher level computer representation of combined forms, so as interesting as your comment is, at this point it's simply picking threads for the sake of self-amusement.
I'm curious what best UX practices are around vertical alphabets, or if there even are any.
Handling left-to-right localization is "easy" enough with translations and making sure you can handle a little extra text overflow. And right-to-left is fairly "trivial" in simply mirroring the UX wireframe. Extra work, sure, but nothing too conceptually complicated.
But what are best practices for handling vertical scripts? Is it basically just rotating the UX 90° and working around the fact that images (like photos) are going to fit into your layout with a reversed aspect ratio? Because while it seems like that might work OK for some webpages, it won't for apps that are designed specifically for portrait or landscape mode on a phone/tablet...
Also, is Mongolian the only script that can only be written vertically? I can't find any others on Wikipedia. (Chinese was originally vertical, but is easily adapted to horizontal.)
Culturally I celebrate diversity, but from a UX localization standpoint the additional layer of complexity is... yikes.
Once we see the benefit of being able to communicate freely with anybody, and losing the protective aspect of being able to communicate in a language others can't understand, I think people will lose interest in local languages and dialect?
Why learn them when you can just translate them when you need them? What do they bring, except some aesthetical pleasure? Given the work it is to translate materials to a language, it will stop to be done: let the automatic system do that for you!
Then, people will be able to mix and travel more, exchange more, and so they will.
In this env, and using translation again and again, people will start to pick up whatever language is the most common.
Eventually, what is not useful will diseapear, only artefacts that we can translate automatically, will remain.
Different languages and scripts don’t just convey information, they shape the speaker and reader.[1] Sure, there’s value in a shared communication language (and International English[2] is well on the way to being that), but that mostly communicative medium doesn’t capture everything that language is.
We will develop different ways of thinking or improve the language we use.
I don't think there is anything in what we currently have that can compare to a united humanity. And this only can happen if we all can understand each others.
Why does everyone speaking one language somehow result in a united humanity? Plenty of countries speak English and yet there is zero desire or movement to unite them. Language is but one aspect of culture and unfortunately one result of widespread English usage is the destruction of local cultures by Western, specifically American consumeristic, culture.
I also don't particularly see the usefulness or relevance of everyone speaking one language for the overwhelming majority of people. Do a Chilean farmer, a Mongolian oil worker, and an American programmer need to communicate with each other on a regular basis? And if they did, would this be worth replacing thousands of years of local culture and language?
Waves of nationalism come and go. If you've got a big enough population, you can easily promote your native language as superior to others because it can express X, Y, and Z beautiful concepts easily while filthy foreign languages can't.
There were a few campaigns where various western countries tried promoting their alphabets over native writing systems. Some succeeded (e.g. Vietnamese) and many others failed. Trying to completely change the language is an even bigger stretch. Places like India have a long history of English, but few Indian people speak pure British English. Most will throw a mix of perfectly pronounced English words in the middle of a sea of their local language. English doesn't have a clear path to domination despite it being spoken by so many people.
Indian English is very similar to the British English of shortly before India gained independence from the British Empire (1947). That means it often sounds formal or old-fashioned. The reason for this is because linguistic change occurs almost entirely in places where that language is the first language, and English is only ever a second or subsequent language in India.
There has been some synchronisation with other English locales due to the effects of globalisation, but not a great deal. Beyond that, it does have some deviations from British English as it was in the days of the Empire, mostly due to grammatical misunderstandings becoming common and thus standard, or linguistic patterns from local languages making their way into English; the two examples that spring most immediately to my mind (as an Australian currently in Hyderabad): “very less” instead of “very little”, and a gratuitous “only” suffix where other dialects would either omit it or place it earlier in a sentence.
Concerning fiblye’s point: in cities, you’ll hear a fair smattering of English words when people are speaking their local languages. In rural areas this happens much less.
I think the opposite will happen, personally. Imagine that you can speak and understand any language known to man. Furthermore, you can create any language fairly easily, and in order for others to understand this language, they simply need to download a file. It seems like the choice of language would then become an aesthetic, political or simply personal choice.
Certain human languages are definitely more suited for certain topics; talking about music in Italian is no doubt richer than in English (especially considering that many English music words are just Italian imports.)
We'd also see ad-hoc private languages develop on the fly in between people or machines. This already happens on a micro-level, but technology would make it far easier to implement.
Having amazing machine translation capability doesn't make it any easier for humans to learn a language.
And the "richness of expression" argument doesn't really hold water in such a reality – if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese", then your magical auto-translator presumably won't be able to actually convey what you're trying to convey if you say it in Chinese and want it translated to English. If the translator can accurately express your meaning, then the initial premise is invalid, no?
> if there are things that "can't be easily expressed in English that can be expressed in Chinese"
I didn't say that there are things that can't be easily expressed, but rather that certain languages are better suited for expressing certain things, or at the very least, opinionated in particular desirable ways. We're talking about the form, not the content.
In any case, yeah, I might be mixing the idea of a cyborg that speaks/understands all languages with a universal translator machine. It seems like these two things will eventually coalesce, though.
I hear what you're saying, but at the same time - coming from an area with its own relatively small language (<500K speakers) - there is a definite need or interest in websites and media in one's "own language", in our case it's things like local news websites (with comment sections of course), newspapers and a TV channel. Said TV channel, like all the other regional channels, get some shared time on the public networks as well, and a block in some of the national news bulletins.
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about the state of internationalisation (i18n) in 2018. We're not there yet, but some projects (especially the Bible) have made a huge effort to try to have local dialect translations.
I'm glad they made the correct decision of moving back to a script actually suitable to their language. I always found it ironic that Mongolia the country used Cyrillic despite the significance the creation of the Mongolian Script under Ghengis Khan had to their ethnogenesis.
I find it worrying that some in this thread oppose this move on technical grounds. As an industry, software has to acknowledge that technology is subordinate to the needs of people, not the other way around. Especially in this case where the technical barriers are wholely artificial.
The desired use of technology by the people is exactly the reason to adopt an alphabet that enables ready access to technology though. If you impose a difficult, or unique script you impose a barrier to use of, and development of technology.
These moves seem to me like an aspect of the greater separatism and nationalism that has been infecting many nations.
The script is well supported, it was introduced in 1999 with Unicode 3. Vertical writing is a concern of text rendering, so this has nothing to do with Unicode. https://caniuse.com/#search=writing-mode
This is still a bit lacking outside of Web pages, but generally work-arounds are in place which come with their own problems.
I'm very happy for them! I've always thought Mongolian writing was quite beautiful, and it seemed like a shame to replace it with Cyrillic. The few Mongolian people I talked to said they had to learn it in school at some point, but they considered it difficult and had mostly forgotten it since. We'll see how this goes. The Wikipedia page says there's a lot of work to do to make this work out in the digital world.
Totally separate thing, but I would love to see wider Baybayin use for Tagalog and related languages. I just love these pretty traditional orthographies!
A similar plan was abandoned after it was launched in 1994. Government documents and media have been available in both versions since 2011.
So presumably this new announcement is actually banning the modern alphabet? The article isn't clear but that's implied as apparently supporting both will end in 2024. Adding an option is a very different proposition to removing all other options in my option but maybe the government are just announcing a plan to keep both and doing a really bad job at communicating that?
Per wikipedia, the script is not well supported. This is partly because letters have different forms depending on their position in a word. So "academia" would need to use 3 different symbols for all those "a"s. It has 26 actual letters but a lot more symbols to learn to allow for that.
And (like a lot of alphabets) it's actually based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. So it's an import too!
Per the article, 3m (of Mongolia's 3.17m) people use the modern alphabet. So this will be a huge disruption for 95% of the population of Mongolia.
There is no current way to translate (transliterate?) names directly from one to the other. So that will make ID documents either insecure or useless if they're in different languages, which they will have to be since we are talking about documents already printed...
Plus the time and effort to learn the new alphabet is time and effort spent NOT learning useful skills in a modern economy.
The only advantage seems to be to communicate with Mongolian Ethnicity people in China who are more likely to still use the old alphabet. Oh and something about throwing off the USSR?
I really hope this is just a badly translated announcement that no action will be taken...
There are discussions on which Mongolia (Mongolia or Inner Mongolia) is the true descendent of the Golden Horde. Mongolia usually claim that they directly descend from Genghis Khan, but genetic analysis suggest that Inner Mongolians are much closer. Now you can find statues of Genghis Khan in both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia...
Inner Mongolia already uses the traditional script so if anything this news is indicative of increased Chinese influence and decreased Russian influence in Mongolia.
China should be happy at this, if anything, they're abandoning the Russian style.
Poor Mongolia, it aligned with USSR and now has to deal with China's rise as well. Long term prognosis is not good, as a nice chunk of "Mongolia" is already within China. Can't change geography
> The difference in alphabets has split the Mongolian people, with three million living in Mongolia and writing in Cyrillic, and nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.
I wonder how much it deviates from the script used in Inner Mongolia.
Swimming against the trend of the erasure of any locality of script, language, culture . . . someday I hope that we consider these things to be as precious as they are, like endangered species.
Interesting news. I hope that Unicode will accommodate this change effectively. There have for instance been some issues with the unicode encoding of the similar Uyghur script.
One thing to note is that Mongolia does not use standard Cyrillic - they use a variant that has a few differences in letters and accents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet
I once learned this the hard way while trying to help a Mongolian person navigate the bus system of Los Angeles in the era before ubiquitous smartphones.
That's nice and all, but it will have a downside: after Nazi Germany banned the cursive Sütterlinschrift along with the printed Fraktur in favor of ‘deutsche Normalschrift’ and antiqua, the result was that people growing up after the war couldn't read their grandparents' old letters and notes.
While I think the change in and of itself is great, the rise of right-wing nationalism in Mongolia is very frightening (similar to that of Hungary, for example), and I'm afraid this is a result of Mongolian nationalistic views.
As such, it is with a hint of sadness that I view this change.
Ouch! imagine trying to re-write your gui for this, I cant even think how I would adapt one of my business programs to vertical orientation, except for maybe turning the screen by 90degrees.
On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom, &c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-orientation.
Browser support for the complete set of this stuff is still a tad patchy; Firefox is best in general, but all the browsers have at least the basics.
But yeah, it mostly seems to boil down to rotating your app’s entire layout by 90°.
> On the technical front, CSS is extremely well-placed for this, with the comparatively recent shift from absolute axes (margin-left, border-bottom, &c.) to directional axes (margin-inline-start, border-block-end, &c.), with what those axes mean depending on writing-mode, direction and text-orientation.
Yeah... even if CSS itself is, the browsers are not at all, not even close. Recently I tried to use a vertical `writing-mode` in a relatively simple application and encountered a massive amount of layout bugs and issues; it's pretty much totally broken in both Chrome and Firefox (unless maybe if you set everything to a vertical writing mode then it might kinda work?), and no one seems to care.
The attribute used on the Mongolian president's site linked above is "writing-mode: vertical-lr;". It seems like Electron & co. may be the best options for apps.
I guess you need at least one person on your QA team who is proficient in a top-down right-to-left language and can read and use the non-standard layouts. And I believe that exclusively "top-down right-to-left" spells "Mongolian". Common Asian (CJK) languages have an _option_ to write text vertically, but they are usually written left to right in the digital media. So basically the same UI layout works for Japanese and for Norwegian users. Horizontal right-to-left languages like Arabic might flip the layout horizontally, but they don't break vertical scrolling.
Looks particularly pretty and mostly adorable but I'm not sure it is going to be as legible as cyrilic (which works is the same as latin, just a little bit different), even after a lot of practice. Needless to say it's not going to be nearly as handy for the modern digital world. This way one can hardly be sure the cultural value of this move is enough to outweigh the practical aspect.
I do have enough. And I also have some context on quite a number of cultures (with different writing systems, including cultures who have actually migrated or tried to migrate from one to another) and it's obvious latin alphabet is the most practical in the context of computers, cyrilic being just slightly different (essentially the same in the most of the technological and practical aspects - the only difference is it's non-ASCII and has slightly different set of glyphs). I don't say practicality is the only significant value to consider though, indeed the cultural value also is very important.
Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.
The real challenge would be to design a multi-lingual website for both vertical and horizontal scripts. I suspect you'd end up with two very different designs.
It's interesting to look at the Mongolian president's web page (https://president.mn/mng/): It scrolls horizontally. And see how it responds to the hamburger menu, for example.
Edit: Oh wait, the president's web page is itself a good example: Here is the English version (https://president.mn/en/).
Posted earlier in the discussion, the Mongolian President's website works well for me, in Firefox on Linux.
The mouse scroll scrolls right, selecting text works (with a horizontal cursor), the western text (dates, numbers and "Covid-19") embedded in the text are appropriately rotated.
"View source" shows the source text, and it doesn't look like there are any nasty tricks to support this.
For me, the mouse scroll doesn't work unless I enable Javascript for the site (I run NoScript). So, at least that aspect seems to be reliant on some kind of JS-based workaround, not CSS itself.
I think we can say it is. writing-mode in particular has full support in all modern browsers, and some support in IE back to version 6: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-writing-mode
In theory, yes, in practice (I speak from experience) it has a massive amount of bugs when you actually try to use it for something that is not completely trivial. And the bugs are different for every browser, so working around them is pretty much intractable.
Why? If you were designing a website with Mongolian as a language option you would choose a font that has support for Mongolian, not something completely unsuitable like Helvetica. The same goes for any language not written with a Latin alphabet.
If you don't want to provide a font and just want whatever passes for sans-serif on a computer with Mongolian fonts installed, use font-family: sans-serif; in your CSS and let the OS handle it.
Sure, I can go with font-family: sans-serif
But what if I have to add Mongolian support for a website using Helvetica typeface for the currently used Cyrillic script?
You can't, but this is nothing new. Fonts tend to support a subset of scripts. You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.
Here you would choose a Mongolian font and add it to the font-stack in CSS for that language, just as you would for Arabic or Chinese. If you want a grotesque typeface that matches Helvetica in style for Mongolian, use one.
Why would you need a specific typeface? Your goal is to get characters displaying to the user rather than tofu.
Having said that, the place to look for multiscript support in Helvetica would be Linotype’s Neue Helvetica World: https://www.linotype.com/5553118/neue-helvetica-world-family... . Unfortunately, while they currently support 103 languages, Mongolian isn’t among them. I guess if this restoration takes off it might become part of the next release.
Google's Noto project has a decent sans-serif Mongolian script typeface (https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-mong) that is pre-installed on newer Android and iOS devices.
