Everyone already knows latin alphabet. It doesn't make it any easier to learn language. Nor it would make it easier for foreigner to understand anything in latinized Kazakh language, this language is completely different from English. I guess, it has some common words with Turkey language, so may be for them it would be a tiny bit easier.

Honestly I'm seeing it as a pure political decision and huge waste of money, not something, that would have any real benefit. Making Russian and English as an additional official government languages — now that would be useful. Currently almost noone except highly educated people knows English and a lot of people don't know Russian or know it very poorly and it's sad. For Kazakhstan, Russia is a most important neighbor and it's very important to keep common cultural values.

It probably is 99% political, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a waste of money.

Cyrillic is/was a big part of Russia/USSR's identity from the west -- see things like "BORДT", faux Cyrillic [1], cheap exported Russian vodka, "СССР" on t-shirts, etc.

If Kazakhstan wants to appear less Russian, swapping the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin will be very effective.

(I know the Latin alphabet but only a few letters of the Cyrillic one. It's far easier for me to read signs in Viet Nam than it is in Russia, even though I can probably pronounce Russian much better than Vietnamese. When I don't understand a word written in Cyrillic, it takes me 20 times longer to type it into my phone's dictionary.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faux_Cyrillic

> Honestly I'm seeing it as a pure political decision and huge waste of money

Sounds like how the BJP is about to force all high school students in India to learn Sanskrit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/world/asia/india-sanskrit...

They are actually shifting back to (one of) the original alphabets.

> Nazarbayev described the use of the Cyrillic script as "political," noting that the Latin alphabet had previously been used from 1929 until 1940. Prior to 1929, the Arabic script had been used. "In 1940 … a law was adopted transferring the Kazakh language from the Latin alphabet to one based on Russian script,"

Also:

> The Kazakh language belongs to the family of Turkic languages, whereas Russian is a Slavic language. Other countries with Turkic languages, such as Turkey, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, currently use the Latin alphabet.

At the end of the day, this is not really about interoperating with the rest of the world. It's about pride and national identity.

The traditional alphabet in this case is Arabic. Latin was also pushed on them from the outside, and never broadly used prior to that, so it's also "globalizing" in that sense (remember how it was introduced in Turkey, and why?).

Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not. Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing, that is not the case with Turkish. Yes, you can write Turkish (more properly, Osmanli) using Arabic script. For that matter you can write Spanish using Arabic script and for many years many people did. But in both of these cases, you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it.

> Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing,

That's an orientalist claim. Vowels do exist in Arabic but some foreign learners of the language don't get the distinction between short and long vowels and how the letters "ا و ي" have dual role as consonants and vowels as well.

> you're shoehorning a language into a script that really isn't appropriate for it.

Here's a phonetic transliteration of your first sentence in Arabic

"Arabic is a Semitic language; Turkish and the other Turkic are not."

"أَرَبِك از أَ سِمِتِك لانجوِﭺ، تِركِش أَند أَذَر تِركِك أَر نَت"

By the way, this is the Egyptian convention since the "g" sound is missing in Modern Standard Arabic.

Great example! I had the misconception that Arabic had no vowels. I fed your Arabic transliteration into Google Translate[1], clicked on the "speak it" icon for the Arabic, and I could hear a comprehensible English sentence:

https://translate.google.com/m/translate?hl=en#ar/en/أَرَبِك...

If Arabic had no vowel sounds then this should have been impossible!

[1] Ignore the English translation which is meaningless and irrelevant. In this case I'm using Google Translate for speech synthesis, not for translation.

That vowels are an afterthought in Semitic scripts is not an “Orientalist claim” at all, it’s completely mainstream archaeology. The use of some consonant letters to denote long vowels (as so-called matres lectionis) was a development subsequent to the use of a purely consonantal writing system.

With regard to Turkic, one of the challenges with using the Arabic script is not just that Turkic has a larger vowel inventory than Arabic or Persian, but the frontness/backness of vowels plays a major part in the morphophonemics. The Orkhon script that was the first used for Turkic languages was designed to reflect this, but when the Arabic script was introduced in towards the Middle Turkic era new strategies had to be thought up to reflect frontness/backness, e.g. the use of Arabic emphatic stops versus non-emphatic ones. However, the solutions that were found left a lot of room for ambiguity. I often read Kazan Tatar documents in the old Arabic script, and I can understand how the plethora of rules and exceptions confused the masses prior to the introduction of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. (The Cyrillic script now in use is hardly better than the Arabic script, though)

This is how all alphabets came into being:

1- Egyptian hieroglyphs

2- Sinaic script

3- Phoenician script.

Then alphabets evolved from that like Latin and Greek with all the bells and whistles. Semitic scripts on the other hand remained true to its roots and didn't evolve to have dedicated vowels early on.

Arabic as a Semitic language descended from Syriac and Aramaic and thus lacked distinct vowels. Heck early Arabic script didn't make any effort to differentiate similar looking consonants as diacritic were totally missing. Case in point, Hejazi Script, one of the early Arabic scripts lacked vowels, vowel diacritics and consonant diacritics but only possessed the defining quality of cursive/adjoining writing.

However, for later versions of the Arabic script, things improved substantially esp. when it had the full support and backup of the then-young and burgeoning Islamic state, and thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets but retaining a few distinctive features like compactness.

So, yeah you can say that vowels were afterthought in early Arabic scripts but definitely not for the current system in use for centuries now and that's why I characterized his/her statement as an orientalist claim that's completely inaccurate and improper.

For Ottoman Turkish, I get the frustration that some Turkish speakers may have had with reading or writing in Arabic script. Original Arabic script is not supposed to be a drop-in replacement for any language. It needs first to be extended and re-purposed to meet the requirements of the target language and with languages like Turkish with a wider selection of vowels, it gets tricky to work around the limitations of the script like vowel diacritics.

Absent these additions and workarounds, it becomes more advisable to make the switch to more accommodative script like Latin and forgo the succinctness and terseness gains of the Arabic script and that's why I view Kurdish written in Arabic script as a big mess as the developers opted to full hard code of the vowels in the script while dropping vowel diacritics altogether.

> thus it underwent a complete overhaul where it got all the bells and whistles of other alphabets

It didn’t get all the bells and whistles of other alphabets in actual practice. Yes, in theory short vowels could be denoted with diacritics, but this was rarely done in Arabic, let alone Turkic.

> not for the current system in use for centuries now

Again, the “current system” in use for centuries in Middle Turkic and early modern Kazan Tatar and other Kipchak languages did not mark most vowels with the use of diacritics in spite of their theoretic availability.

> It didn’t get all the bells and whistles of other alphabets in actual practice.

Like what exactly? What's missing of value?

> but this was rarely done in Arabic

Because it's redundant. I know it's frustrating for beginners to guess the diacritics on the words but once you get to intermediate/advanced proficiency level of the language, you'll start to appreciate this design aspect of the language.

> Again, the “current system” in use for centuries in Middle Turkic and early modern Kazan Tatar and other Kipchak languages did not mark most vowels with the use of diacritics in spite of their theoretic availability.

How's this Arabic's fault?

To be honest with you, I am not really familiar with Ottoman Turkish let alone other Turkic languages and their evolution journey but if they didn't make any use of extended vowel diacritics or worse the baseline package of Arabic, I don't know exactly how they managed to communicate using that system.

> Because it's redundant.

While short vowel markings are left out, as long as different words can have wildly different voicings, it is hard to claim they are redundant. Rather, the reader is simply pressed to tell the vowel pointing from context, a skill that does not come without considerably more literacy education than for alphabet writing systems. The claim that diacritics are redundant would be more easily defended for languages like Romanian where the sounds distinguished by diacritics still usually stand in an allophonic relationship dependent on the word’s morphophonemics, but that is certainly not the case in Semitic languages today.

> How's this Arabic's fault?

The Turkic script wasn’t introduced to the Turks in a vacuum. It was brought in as part of a larger influence of Islamic culture, and because among Arabic and Persian speakers the script was almost always used without short vowel diacritics, the Turks inherited the same “right way” of doing things, disastrous as it was for literacy in their languages until the early 20th century.

>this is how alphabets came along... 3.Phoenician script.

No, not even close. Another myth like that of the "indoeuropeans" which has zero archeological support.

The parent post has a "چ" or "cheem" character, which is neither Arabic nor required in this case. That character is used in Persian, Urdu, Pashto, etc., but not in Arabic.

A more phonetic transliteration of "Arabic is a Semitic language, Turkish and the other Turkic languages are not" is:

أَرَبِكْ ازْ أَ سِمِتِكْ لانجوِج، تِركِشْ أَندْ اُذَرّ تُركِكْ لانجوِجزّ أَرْ نَتْ

which you can listen to a robot speak by visiting

https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/أَرَبِكْ%20ازْ%20أَ%20سِ...

I don't really know enough about Turkic languages to say whether Latin is a better fit for them than Arabic, or not. I would expect modern Turkish alphabet to be better at it, if only because it was specifically designed for that purpose, and not just organically adopted the way Arabic was.

But my point wasn't about which one is a better fit, but rather which one was historically used for that particular language first, and for the longest period of time, and used to produce the most past cultural artifacts. And in this case, it would be Arabic.

But the Arabic alphabet is already being succesfully used in Iran and Pakistan, to give a couple of examples, for languages that are very different from Arabic.

> Vowels are an afterthought to Arabic writing.

Are you an Arabic speaker? This claim is a bit stretched.

Yes, short vowels are written as diacritic symbols on consonants, which are often dropped from mass publications.

However, long vowels are an essential part of the language and they are indeed present as their own letters in Arabic.

But Arabic is, obviously, also not a native script.

What is a native script, though? If you mean the one that is completely original, then very few languages could claim such a thing - most cultures borrowed their writing systems from someone else, and then adapted them to their needs. Most people would say that Cyrillic, for example, is a "native script" for East Slavic languages, but it's clearly derived from Greek (and its historical version more so than the modern one).

For Kazakh and their predecessors, the script in use before Arabic was Orkhon. But it was also derived from other scripts.

I agree, like many things, it's a continuum rather than a binary, but if we are going to draw a line somewhere, my heuristic would be when the script is named after a foreign language, it isn't native. So, for example, the "Arabic," "Chinese" and "Latin" scripts are native, respectively, to Arabic, Chinese dialects and Romance languages, while in Farsi, Japanese and English they are in customary use, but are not of native origin.

> Language change that shifts populations away from their historical niche and towards global systems conflicts me.

It happened before. For example it happened to my language, Romanian, which used to be written in Cyrillic script until the 1860s or so. AFAIK it was the only Romance language which used Cyrillic, which I find kind of interesting. You're right, most of the Romanian literature/newspapers written before the switch are now illegible for 99% of today's population, but it also matters that not that many books had been printed in Romanian until the switch was made, our culture was mostly an oral one.

I don't think the point does still stand with just a script change. Learning a new alphabet is orders of magnitude easier than learning a new language.

Touch typing with an alphabet that's not printed on your physical keyboard can challenging though (I still struggle a bit with that).

As stated in the article, the script they currently use was forced on them by the Soviets. Before then, they used Latin characters, and before that, Arabic.

> Before then, they used Latin characters

...which was also forced on them by the Soviets.