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A comment on Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based. Parent comment

Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by M_Bakhtiari on Thursday April 26, 2018 @11:00AM (#16932466)
You don't always have the luxury of knowing the language of the text you're processing. You may well encounter both English and Turkish words in the same text stream, and you don't always have the means to distinguish between them.

It's the same problem with Han unification. It's fine if you have 100% Japanese, Chinese or Korean and set your font accordingly. But it all breaks down when you try to mix two or more languages in the same stream, unless you have some external means of distinguishing between them.

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Re:Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Lati... by gnulinux on Thursday April 26, 2018 @08:11PM (#16937283)
This might be true but Turkish alphabet was designed in late 1920s when computers barely existed. Maybe they could update it now? I find it hard to believe they would do it though.

EDIT: I guess you could make a case about Kazakh alphabet not inheriting this feature. But having written systems for both Turkish and English I don't find this a huge deal. I guess this alphabet reform has mostly nationalistic motivation and Kazakhs might have wanted to fit their alphabet to similar languages like Turkish or Azeri for which the alphabet is tested and we know it works.

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