Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

by yorwba • 6 years ago

335 281 6 years ago

yorwba4• 6 years ago

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/

ah-ha• 6 years ago

Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.

yorwba4• 6 years ago

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.

seanmcdirmid• 6 years ago

It’s based on Old Uighur and originates from western Xinjiang. Not really invented by Uighurs, but whatever culture they succeeded in Turpan.

mytailorisrich4• 6 years ago

Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet.

The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.

bmn__4• 6 years ago

Close, it's derived from Syriac. Arabic and Syriac have a common ancestor, Aramaic.

http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script

simonh• 6 years ago

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.

mhotchen• 6 years ago

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).

mytailorisrich4• 6 years ago

Mongolian is also one of the scripts on Chinese bank notes, along with Tibetan and Uyghur, in addition to Chinese characters.

Cthulhu_3• 6 years ago

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.

chrismorgan7• 6 years ago

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.

athenot• 6 years ago

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.

I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.

gumby3• 6 years ago

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

Amen.

rckoepke• 6 years ago

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).

robocat2• 6 years ago

Here’s an example of a form: https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72

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.“

tapirl• 6 years ago

A combined influence result of ancient Chinese writing style and Arabic?

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

And yet the english characters are rotated clockwise?

rozab2• 6 years ago

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.

bangonkeyboard3• 6 years ago

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.

soperj• 6 years ago

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.

reaperducer• 6 years ago

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.

black_puppydog• 6 years ago

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!

finiteloops• 6 years ago

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;"

zaat2• 6 years ago

When the page was opened I immediately tilted my head to "correct" the page, a totally unconscious reaction, much deeper than assumption.

pmiller2• 6 years ago

Me too. The menu bar on the left hand side is a big visual clue, I think.

boznz• 6 years ago

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.

enriquto• 6 years ago

I guess if your site/program is well-designed you should only have to edit a single style file, and nothing else.

srg0• 6 years ago

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.

chrismorgan7• 6 years ago

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°.

mkl• 6 years ago

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.

kouteiheika2• 6 years ago

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.

Brosper• 6 years ago

As a web developer I reject that change :P

robin_reala4• 6 years ago

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.

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility

I don't think the support is really there for vertical writing systems.

eukgoekoko3• 6 years ago

wide dispersal of compatible fonts

Would you please share a link where I can download Mongolian Helvetica?

hanche• 6 years ago

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/).

WilTimSon2• 6 years ago

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?

sametmax6• 6 years ago

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.

hypnotist• 6 years ago

> nearly six million in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region who use the traditional script is used.

seems it is used a lot already - they are just making it a standard.

adrianN2• 6 years ago

The French language protection is the reason why the league of nations didn't adopt Esperanto as an official language. I'm quite grumpy about that.

lonesword• 6 years ago

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

dntbnmpls3• 6 years ago

- 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.

Mediterraneo105• 6 years ago

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.

ken3• 6 years ago

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.

bloak2• 6 years ago

Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity.

So when Latin evolved into French, Italian, Spanish, ... we gained uniformity? I'm not convinced!

Koshkin9• 6 years ago

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.)

baud147258• 6 years ago

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.

okasaki• 6 years ago

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.

Why is it good?

WilTimSon2• 6 years ago

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.

Cthulhu_3• 6 years ago

For a recent case, look at Kazakhstan which is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin - https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-ch....

aquadrop3• 6 years ago

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...

orbital-decay• 6 years ago

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.

lopmotr3• 6 years ago

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?

ken3• 6 years ago

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?

cmrdporcupine3• 6 years ago

Sounds great, can we decolonialize away from the Norman conquest and get back the old Anglo-Saxon orthography?

theandrewbailey• 6 years ago

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English

Frost1x• 6 years ago

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.

rcatcher• 6 years ago

de-colonializing their culture

Decolonizing from who? From Russia? Mongolia was never colonized by Russia, it was the other way around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%...

frank2• 6 years ago

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.

keiferski4• 6 years ago

I think (and hope) that as translation tech gets better, we'll see a renewed interest in local languages and dialects.

sametmax6• 6 years ago

I think it will have the opposite effect.

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.

robin_reala4• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English

keiferski4• 6 years ago

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.

Seems like a beautiful future to me.

Cthulhu_3• 6 years ago

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.

fiblye• 6 years ago

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.

kalium_xyz• 6 years ago

I fear people will stop learning languages all together and the practice will be reduced from practical to hobby.

peterburkimsher• 6 years ago

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.

https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/

eps• 6 years ago

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.

qwerty4561278• 6 years ago

always at the front of a word.

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.

aquadrop3• 6 years ago

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.

h91wka5• 6 years ago

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.

torben-friis• 6 years ago

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 :)

azangru2• 6 years ago

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.

mytailorisrich4• 6 years ago

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.

rguiscard• 6 years ago

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.

MichaelMoser123• 6 years ago

I wonder if China will interpret this as an agressive act with the intent to extend influence over inner Mongolia.

swilliamsio• 6 years ago

Inner Mongolia already uses the traditional script so if anything this news is indicative of increased Chinese influence and decreased Russian influence in Mongolia.

onetimemanytime2• 6 years ago

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

xster2• 6 years ago

Mongolian script is already on every piece of Chinese legal tender while Cyrillic is not. So it's quite the reverse.

qwerty4561278• 6 years ago

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.

gberger• 6 years ago

This way one can hardly be sure the cultural value of this move is enough to outweigh the practical aspect.

How much context do you have on Mongolian culture to be able to make this assertion? Honest question.

qwerty4561278• 6 years ago

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.

Aardwolf• 6 years ago

How well is the script and the verticality supported in Unicode? If not well, that could be an interesting update.

bmn__4• 6 years ago

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.

HN test: Монгол бичиг ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ᠌

mehdix• 6 years ago

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.

detritus3• 6 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj10• 6 years ago

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.

Geimfari• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#Font_issues

knolax• 6 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj10• 6 years ago

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.

onetimemanytime2• 6 years ago

The young will revert to English when online, this becoming a net loss for Mongolia

nemoniac2• 6 years ago

The Irish language should consider returning to its tradidional alphabet too. Gaelic type has a certain elegance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type

s_dev• 6 years ago

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.

nemoniac2• 6 years ago

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.

aeyes• 6 years ago

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.

koheripbal3• 6 years ago

There's also significant value in everyone on Earth speaking the same language fluently.

Efficient communication is probably the most important factor in peace.

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

If you're not familiar with Mongolian (and I dare say most people aren't), give this a listen:

https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U

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.

Koshkin9• 6 years ago

Sounds like a dialect of Portuguese to me...

tanilama2• 6 years ago

I am curious how would IDE's adopt this vertical writing style.

This feels pretty unintuitive

BossingAround• 6 years ago

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.

ComputerGuru• 6 years ago

It’s a very interesting script! It’s like a top-down (columnar) Arabic without any of the later additions of diacritics and distinguishing dots.

dimitrov• 6 years ago

Probably because both the Arabic and Mongolian scripts descend from the Aramaic script

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

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.

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

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?

https://web.archive.org/web/20111101013639/http://ubpost.mon...

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script

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...

blululu• 6 years ago

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.

pattisapu• 6 years ago

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.

aasasd• 6 years ago

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.

anovikov• 6 years ago

One weird way of fighting the Communism! They may also start looking suspicious to Chinese, since vertical script is also used in Taiwan.

j2i2t2u22• 6 years ago

I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea!

j2i2t2u22• 6 years ago

I am from Ulaanbaatar, this is not a good idea! Do not support this move!

chrismorgan7• 6 years ago

I’m curious: why not?

noirchen• 6 years ago

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...

garfieldnate• 6 years ago

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!

Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

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