Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by heliodor on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @07:32PM (#16927420)

Well, the measuring stick is not English.

Is it Latin? Which version? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet

Or is it all modern non-Cyrillic letters used in Europe that don't have diacritics?

In any case, diacritics are a positive. They're used to make a language as phonetic as possible, which is a net positive. As anyone can attest, learning to pronounce English words (or French, for that matter) is a lot of people wasting a lot of effort, which would be better spent elsewhere!

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by eCa on Thursday April 26, 2018 @12:56AM (#16928904)

We are in complete agreement, sorry for making my argument a bit on the terse side.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by ahakki on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @08:16PM (#16927695)

Learing to pronounce French words is rather easy. English is a huge mess.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by heliodor on Friday April 27, 2018 @09:26AM (#16940598)

Easy? Fine. But it's still a huge waste of time on a global scale compared to phonetic languages, when you consider how many people have to learn French, English, etc.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by evincarofautumn on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @09:15PM (#16928021)

It’s relatively easy for an English speaker to learn because we have a lot of French vocabulary, but the correspondence between pronunciation and spelling isn’t simple[1]—although granted it is somewhat simpler than English[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Sound_to_sp...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Spelling_p...

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by saryant on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @11:52PM (#16928660)

I don't think it's obvious that 3 of 7 letters in "mangent" are silent (as in "ils mangent").

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by umanwizard on Thursday April 26, 2018 @03:08AM (#16929493)

Yes it is obvious once you learn French.

It’s usually (not always) clear how a word is pronounced in French if you know its spelling.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by snovv_crash on Thursday April 26, 2018 @09:20AM (#16931577)

What isn't clear is how you spell the word after hearing it.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by gerdesj on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @08:50PM (#16927904)

Really?

French (there are quite a few of them - think CA for example) has just as many idiosyncrasies as English when you really get in to it.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by umanwizard on Thursday April 26, 2018 @03:09AM (#16929507)

This is categorically wrong. French spelling has absolutely nowhere near as many idiosyncrasies as English spelling.

It is totally impossible to predict how an unfamiliar written word is pronounced in English, but quite easy in French (barring some ambiguous situations like if a noun ends in “s”.)

By the way, I don’t know what CA means. If you’re referring to the French word “ça”, its pronunciation is completely regular and predictable given the spelling.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by y_molodtsov on Thursday April 26, 2018 @03:26AM (#16929616)

Well, it's possible, but only if you know where did the word come from.

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