The Autocrat and the Apostrophe
January 16, 2018 12:28 PM Subscribe
Nursultan Nazarbayev, authoritarian leader of Kazakhstan, has been broadly popular in his rule. Until he decided to start sticking apostrophes all over the place.
Fascinating. Thanks. I should probably throw some apostrophes in here somewhere but the misuse of them in English is already bad, so I won't.
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:44 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:44 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
linguists proposed using an alphabet that largely followed the Turkish model. The president’s office, however, declared this a nonstarter because Turkish-style markers do not feature on a standard keyboard. ... The only reason publicly cited by Mr. Nazarbayev to explain why he did not want Turkish-style phonetic markers is that “there should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer,”Augh! This is ASCII thinking. (Or possibly KOI8 thinking.) I hope someone spends an hour with him and a modern Unicode-capable computer. Maybe one with a Turkish keyboard.
posted by Nelson at 12:50 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
As the season's change, so do we.
posted by little onion at 12:51 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by little onion at 12:51 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
I hope someone spends and hour with him and a modern Unicode-capable computer. Maybe one with a Turkish keyboard.Maybe Nazarbayev can have a similar enlightenment if he spends time with a Turkish typewriter.
posted by stannate at 12:53 PM on January 16, 2018 [4 favorites]
But language, Mr. Sarym noted, “is a very delicate sphere that cannot be dictated by officials.”
Has Mr. Sarym heard of Hangul? Because that's exactly how the Korean alphabet came to be: the guy in charge decided there should be an alphabet, and it should look like this, and declared that everyone would be using it from now on.
Of course, he didn't have a populace that was arguing about how to tweet in said alphabet, which does rather change the conversation.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:00 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
Has Mr. Sarym heard of Hangul? Because that's exactly how the Korean alphabet came to be: the guy in charge decided there should be an alphabet, and it should look like this, and declared that everyone would be using it from now on.
Of course, he didn't have a populace that was arguing about how to tweet in said alphabet, which does rather change the conversation.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:00 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
Moscow between 1938 and 1940 ordered that Kazakh and other Turkic languages be written in modified Cyrillic as part of a push to promote Russian culture. To try to ensure that different Turkic peoples could not read one another’s writings and develop a shared non-Soviet sense of common identity, it introduced nearly 20 versions of Cyrillic
Russia has, historically, a thing for deliberately introduced incompatibilities. The Russian railways run on a unique broad gauge, ordered by the Czar to ensure that invading armies could not use them. (Some would also say that the Warsaw Pact's adoption of the SECAM analogue television standard was to prevent their people near borders from easily viewing Western broadcasts, though SECAM and PAL are similar enough that it'd just look uglier.)
posted by acb at 1:01 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
Russia has, historically, a thing for deliberately introduced incompatibilities. The Russian railways run on a unique broad gauge, ordered by the Czar to ensure that invading armies could not use them. (Some would also say that the Warsaw Pact's adoption of the SECAM analogue television standard was to prevent their people near borders from easily viewing Western broadcasts, though SECAM and PAL are similar enough that it'd just look uglier.)
posted by acb at 1:01 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
“The president is thinking about his legacy and wants to go down in history as the man who created a new alphabet,” said Mr. Satpayev, who supports the switch to Latin script but not the president’s version. “The problem is that our president is not a philologist.”
And then the king stumbled at the podium and said “shit”, and the 200,000 assembled subjects squatted and strained, for the king's word was the law.
posted by acb at 1:05 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
And then the king stumbled at the podium and said “shit”, and the 200,000 assembled subjects squatted and strained, for the king's word was the law.
posted by acb at 1:05 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
I see no problem with wanting to align Kazakh orthography more closely to the standard method for transliterating Klingon.
It will make pursuing an official policy of bilingualism that much easier.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:31 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
It will make pursuing an official policy of bilingualism that much easier.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:31 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
So, basically, these aren’t apostrophes at all. They’re just offset diacritics, which aren’t at all unusual. In French, for example, it’s just as legitimate to write, say, fiance’ as it is to write fiancé. I concur that it seems like he just doesn’t realize that computers are capable of more than typewriters.
And, well, that’s just it: He’s old. Give it a decade or two for that problem to solve itself, and they’ll either shift the marks onto the letters or do away with them altogether.
Interesting that Nazarbayev’s alphabet seems to resemble other post-Cyrillic systems with the c’ (č) stuff, but I suppose if you’re proposing to transliterate a bunch of щ’s, shch is kind of a hard sell, even without the stink of The West on it. It’s no wonder Russian nationalists would be miffed; a lot of those eastern bloc Slavic languages went Latin explicitly for “fuck you and the alphabet you rode in on” reasons, and for the home of the Russian space program to go that way too has got to be a bit of a slap in the face.
Has Mr. Sarym heard of Hangul? Because that's exactly how the Korean alphabet came to be: the guy in charge decided there should be an alphabet, and it should look like this, and declared that everyone would be using it from now on.
Ditto Atatürk’s Turkish. I suppose it’s that it’s so tied to that guy and that country that Nazarbayev isn’t just jumping straight into that. (Also, it’s kind of bananas.)
posted by Sys Rq at 1:33 PM on January 16, 2018 [4 favorites]
And, well, that’s just it: He’s old. Give it a decade or two for that problem to solve itself, and they’ll either shift the marks onto the letters or do away with them altogether.
Interesting that Nazarbayev’s alphabet seems to resemble other post-Cyrillic systems with the c’ (č) stuff, but I suppose if you’re proposing to transliterate a bunch of щ’s, shch is kind of a hard sell, even without the stink of The West on it. It’s no wonder Russian nationalists would be miffed; a lot of those eastern bloc Slavic languages went Latin explicitly for “fuck you and the alphabet you rode in on” reasons, and for the home of the Russian space program to go that way too has got to be a bit of a slap in the face.
Has Mr. Sarym heard of Hangul? Because that's exactly how the Korean alphabet came to be: the guy in charge decided there should be an alphabet, and it should look like this, and declared that everyone would be using it from now on.
Ditto Atatürk’s Turkish. I suppose it’s that it’s so tied to that guy and that country that Nazarbayev isn’t just jumping straight into that. (Also, it’s kind of bananas.)
posted by Sys Rq at 1:33 PM on January 16, 2018 [4 favorites]
I see no problem with wanting to align Kazakh orthography more closely to the standard method for transliterating Klingon.
Superficially, yes. But those aren’t apostrophes in Klingon either, nor are they diacritics. They’re letters — ‘okina, like in Hawai‘ian. Glottal stops.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:38 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
Superficially, yes. But those aren’t apostrophes in Klingon either, nor are they diacritics. They’re letters — ‘okina, like in Hawai‘ian. Glottal stops.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:38 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
I work in a related language that transitioned from Cyrillic to Latin in the 1990s. I think that their transition was way smoother because it was pre-technology. Yet lots of older people still write in Cyrillic.
There are also a handful of letters that only exist in that alphabet and it SUCKS for graphic design. There are only 10 or so fonts that work with this alphabet.
So I sort of support the apostrophes. At least one can still use decent fonts.
posted by k8t at 4:17 PM on January 16, 2018
There are also a handful of letters that only exist in that alphabet and it SUCKS for graphic design. There are only 10 or so fonts that work with this alphabet.
So I sort of support the apostrophes. At least one can still use decent fonts.
posted by k8t at 4:17 PM on January 16, 2018
It's not impossible for computers to see the two letters “S'” and replace them with Ś
posted by scruss at 7:06 PM on January 16, 2018
posted by scruss at 7:06 PM on January 16, 2018
The complaint about not being able to google words with apostrophes in them is off-base; Google is smart enough to handle apostrophes. Twitter hashtags might be more of an issue, though of course people could just leave out the apostrophes in hashtags the same way they leave out spaces and capital letters.
OTOH, it's super ugly, and not consistent with how apostrophes are generally used, and typing letters with diacritics is really not a big deal. You can even do it with a US English keyboard using dead keys.
posted by shponglespore at 7:09 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
OTOH, it's super ugly, and not consistent with how apostrophes are generally used, and typing letters with diacritics is really not a big deal. You can even do it with a US English keyboard using dead keys.
posted by shponglespore at 7:09 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]
Augh! This is ASCII thinking.
Indeed, it is a principal tenet of Orthodox ASCII Church doctrine. Who knew that they could count the president of Kazakhstan among their adherents.
Indeed, it is a principal tenet of Orthodox ASCII Church doctrine. Who knew that they could count the president of Kazakhstan among their adherents.
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