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.
