[HN Gopher] The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and chal... ___________________________________________________________________ The Sovietisation of the Mongolian language and challenges of reversal (2020) Author : Thevet Score : 49 points Date : 2021-05-06 19:08 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (blogs.bl.uk) (TXT) w3m dump (blogs.bl.uk) | pbhjpbhj wrote: | I'm really disappointed in the images in that piece, so low-res | you can't read the text. For the BL that's pretty awful. | | I noticed that the top line of the compared newspaper parts also | appears to change, but it's so badly rendered and so small as to | be almost unreadable. | | Why would they do that? | | Aside, whilst it says "Copyright British Library Board" the | content is/should be free-gratis and free-libre reproducible | under the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. | Really it should have a better imprint, something like "free | distribution and reuse allowed under this policy" with a link. | Even better would be if they'd adopted a more widely recognised | license. | dmitriid wrote: | A similar change happened in Moldova (which first was Autonomous | Moldovan Republic as a part of Ukraine and then Moldovan Soviet | Socialist Republic within USSR after WWII). | | Moldovan was declared a language similar to, but different from | Romanian, and was given a Cyrillic script [1]. Even though | Moldovan is at most a dialect of Romanian. | | The Soviet Union was very direct but also very effective in | changing entire cultural substrates of millions of people over a | very short period of time. Giving languages under its influence | Cyrillic scripts was a part of that. | | Note: it's not all bleak and bad, as many indigenous people got | their alphabets for the first time in history. | | [1] Wikipedia has a very detailed page on this: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1 | pbhjpbhj wrote: | One of the interesting parts of the OP is that they say Soviets | moved to Latinise the scripts of all people as a move to unify | Communist groups (second para under "Linguistic Revolution"). | Then they simply say "Cyrillic became the preferred, unifying | writing system" without explanation. | bloak wrote: | Wikipedia says in the article on "Languages of the Soviet | Union": "After 1937, all languages that had received new | alphabets after 1917 began using the Cyrillic alphabet." | | If you've got a bilingual society I can imagine it makes life | easier if both languages use the same alphabet, particularly | in the days of mechanical typewriters. But think too about | road signs, for example, which could be written in the local | language but still mostly comprehensible for Russian speakers | who don't know the local language if it's the same alphabet | (though there's still the classic problem of "Why are half | the streets round here called Einbahnstrasse?"). Learning to | read a new alphabet _at speed_ is surprisingly difficult. I | 'm surprised by how hard it is for me, anyway. | Mediterraneo10 wrote: | Roughly, latinization was a Lenin-era policy. However, when | Stalin came to power he had different goals and philosophy | than the preceding regime of Lenin. For one, Stalin abandoned | the idea of spreading world revolution in favour of | "socialism in one country", which in large part was about | keeping the USSR (and, as its satellite, Mongolia) walled off | from the outside world for the sake of tighter control. | | For speakers of the USSR's Turkic languages (Kazakh, Tatar, | Crimean Tatar, etc.), latinization was therefore seen as | harmful, because these languages are often fairly mutually | intelligible with Turkish of Turkey, and a common-ish Latin | alphabet would mean these peoples would be susceptible to | anti-Soviet ideas coming from Turkey. Therefore, the Stalin- | era language authorities not only gave them a new Cyrillic | orthography, they gave each language a different Cyrillic | orthography than the rest to fragment them even further. | | In the case of Mongolian, Cyrillic helped better separate | Mongolian of Mongolia from the mutually intelligible dialect | of Mongolian spoken across the border in China. | thedudeabides5 wrote: | Sounds pretty imperialistic for an ideology based on anti- | imperialism. | ncpa-cpl wrote: | Mongolian script is unusual because of its orientation. | | How do UIs handle the script? For example mobile chat | applications. | retrac wrote: | Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are | primarily written vertically, right-to-left: | https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png The common exception is | technical works, and translations, which from the early 20th | century onward are often horizontal and left-to-right to allow | using the Latin alphabet, math equations, etc. | | Well, not quite. That was the situation until _very_ recently. | It 's now mostly horizontal. Almost everything on a computer is | horizontal. The first Korean newspaper to switch to horizontal | text did so in 1988. It was universal by the mid-90s. Japanese | is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist | holdouts in novels and some print newspapers. But horizontal | text is ascendant there too. | | While those languages are basically compatible with writing in | any direction, this massive shift is almost entirely because | software can't handle vertical text. It was terrible when | computer typesetting first took off. Even today for publication | quality, it probably requires specialized software. So the | answer is basically that UI's don't handle it. It's almost | always a disaster in software. The traditional writing system | of several major world languages is simply not properly | supported by most software, and much still fails completely. | | An observation to close with: Perhaps a little ironically, the | Mongolian script is derived from the Syriac script that went | along the silk road route, and is distantly related to our | Latin alphabet. It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other | reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese | that way. It seems that rotating to get along is a recurring | theme. | scarmig wrote: | This is based off 30 minutes of naive research; if someone | knows better, please correct me. (No better way to get | information than to say something wrong on the Internet.) | | Most of the time, major or more sophisticated apps will just | use Cyrillic (in Mongolia) or be written in Mandarin (in Inner | Mongolia, CN). There are, however, web pages in the traditional | script, which you can look at to get a sense of how a UI layout | for a vertical script might work [0][1][2]. I also found a | website with a full list, with many broken links [3]. | | From an encoding perspective, Unicode historically hasn't | meshed well with Mongolian script, because of a surfeit of | homographs. From what I can gather, Menksoft supports the most | widely used alternative encoding method, which isn't Unicode- | compatible. This apparently makes searching and indexing | traditional Mongolian pages hard. | | [0] http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home | | [1] http://mongol.people.com.cn/ | | [2] http://www.nmg.xinhuanet.com/mg/ | | [3] | http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbi... | Symbiote wrote: | This site seems to use Unicode, unlike your first link. | | It's a bit disappointing that the British Library was unable | to write the titles in their catalogue in Mongolian script. | | "monggol ulus un yerUngqeiilegchi q" | | https://president.mn/mng/ | AlotOfReading wrote: | The short answer is that they don't. Android flat out doesn't | support vertical scripts so there's a library that reimplements | a lot of UI components. iOS basically doesn't, but it's | somewhat easier to work around. Chrome and Firefox can render | the characters with appropriate fonts, but that can be uncommon | and applications using them screw up. Electron apps generally | render vertical scripts LTR for example. | 1cvmask wrote: | India has been independent of colonial rule for over 5-7 decades | depending on the area and influence of English and even | Portuguese (in Goa) still persist. | smhost wrote: | I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only | untenable but actually destructive. The history of every | language and culture is one of brutality and conquest as well | as mutual exchange. That doesn't mean that we should be trying | to revert to some imagined "pure" time before the traumatic | event. | | I'm a product of brutal attempts at nation building by the | American war machine. I wouldn't be speaking English otherwise. | But that doesn't mean that this language isn't mine. If I were | forced to speak and write differently because of some political | initiative, it wouldn't be a return to authenticity. It would | be forcing me to reject a part of me that's already been | irreversibly changed. | retrac wrote: | Depends how recent it is. I have no connection to my | ancestral ethnic languages. They assimilated wholesale into | North American English culture in two generations. It's been | a full century since my ancestors spoke Finnish or Russian. | That cannot be rolled back. It's silly to even suggest. I | cannot even imagine what the final state might look like. | | But for the Mongolians, maybe it's a bit different? Elders | who are still living would remember before the Sovietization | of society. They would have learned to read and write the | traditional script as children, if they were educated in the | traditional manner. | | A forty or so year interruption. And the interruption was | across all of society. And it was imposed, basically, by an | authoritarian government following an ideology backed by a | foreign empire. Trying to reach across that gap, moving away | from some symbols, and inventing some new terms for borrowed | vocabulary, seems to be a project that's relatively narrow | and practical in scope. | | And it does seem to be what many Mongolians want. As soon as | the Communists fell, Mongolia re-introduced education in the | traditional system in school. Officially changing to the | traditional script was considered, too. But rejected as | impractical. Despite that, the popularity of doing so has | only grown with time. Given the public popularity of the | script, with or without government backing, one might | describe this as a somewhat natural evolution in the | language, occurring now that imposed language change policies | have been lifted. | retrac wrote: | For what it's worth, the use of Portuguese in Goa is hardly | because the language has any real relevance still. It's like | with Pondicherry. The official publication of the Union | Territory's government is "La Gazette de L'Etat de Poudouchery" | and the rest of the title page is also in French. (But the | actual publications are all in Tamil or English.) | | The retained use of French there is symbolic and historical. | And the locals have chosen to keep up the tradition. I'm not | Indian so it's not my place to say whether such legacies of a | colonial history should be discarded. But it strikes me as more | quaint than anything else. Such sentimental historical quirks | are surely different from when a policy of forced linguistic | change is actively in place, as happened under empire (either | in India or in Mongolia). | | As for English, well, colonization certainly moved things along | there, to put it mildly. I certainly understand why some | Indians are upset at its heavy use in government and business. | Business conducted in a global market set up in large part by | the same former colonial power. Learn their tongue if you want | any chance of getting ahead. Not a wonderful feeling. | | Still, I suspect that even if Britain had never colonized | India, assuming they still became a major power and the USA | later rose to prominence, it'd probably still be the most | widely studied foreign language in India, with encroaching use | even in government and business, as it is nearly everywhere. | smnrchrds wrote: | For what it's worth, one of my French teachers was an Indian | francophone and explained that in their region (whose name I | cannot remember) French is the dominant language and she grew | up speaking French at home. | joshuaissac wrote: | There have been attempts to phase out English and promote | Hindi, but this has been met with opposition from non-Hindi | southern states. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil... | ryancw wrote: | One thing I've always been curious about with alphabet | transitions like these is how people dealt with it. State | newspapers might start printing in the new alphabet, but at what | point did shop signs and handwritten correspondence switch over? | Did everyone over schooling age stick with the old? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-07 23:00 UTC)