Mongolia to restore Bichig

[masako]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mong ... -rsvcgqmxd

While I am excited and encouraged by this, I do think it will present certain technical difficulties and bring about a period of lower literacy rates among the older generations.

[Moose-tache]

I do a lot of switching back and forth between LtR and RtL writing, and what I've learned is that expecting website design to function properly with RtL writing is like asking your white grandpa to pronounce your Indian friend's last name: there's a lot of earnest trying, but everything just ends up wrong. I can't begin to imagine what will happen when you click "switch to Mongolian script" on Amazon or Facebook.

[Kuchigakatai]

I do a lot of switching back and forth between LtR and RtL writing, and what I've learned is that expecting website design to function properly with RtL writing is like asking your white grandpa to pronounce your Indian friend's last name: there's a lot of earnest trying, but everything just ends up wrong. I can't begin to imagine what will happen when you click "switch to Mongolian script" on Amazon or Facebook.

I believe Mongolians are going to get used to reading their script sideways left-to-right whether they want to or not.

I'm really surprised by the news. Is Mongolia that dissociated from Russia nowadays? Is its relationship with China that much stronger now, that they feel it'd be worth it to get rid of Cyrillic?

[Pabappa]

i dunno. wikipedia says that they did this in 1994 and it didnt work out so well. add to that the fact that half of Mongolia probably speaks English now and very few did back then. i t hink this is a bad idea. the vertical script is a nice cultural artifact but a tiny country trying to be the only place in the world thatuses a vertical script is going to be a high hurdle to jump. if they were the size of china they would probably win, but i just dont see this happening.

[Raphael]

I don't know much about Mongolia, but I strongly doubt that many people there use English as their main everyday language. Just because a lot of people in a place are capable of speaking English, it doesn't mean that they'll actually do so when talking to other people from that place, if the main traditional language of the place is something else.

[Richard W]

While I am excited and encouraged by this, I do think it will present certain technical difficulties and bring about a period of lower literacy rates among the older generations.

It may not be too bad for fluent speakers of Middle Mongolian. Often, one can type a word just by typing the Middle Mongolian sounds. In Unicode, it encodes sounds, not characters as known in other scripts. There's been a lot of effort to redefine the overrides (variation selectors) so there can be an acceptable encoding of words that matches both the phonetic and visual requirements. The Unicode Consortium (and ISO) sinned by promulgating an incomplete encoding. They awaited a formal definition. When it appeared, it provided two contradictory encodings - one for for the presentation of individual letters, and another for writing words. That standard looks more like the specification of two different (and incompatible) fonts!

[Kuchigakatai]

Someone in another language forum says that he read in Montsame's website (a news agency from Mongolia) that, apparently, the plan is that both scripts will remain in use until 2025, when the idea is that Cyrillic will be abandoned as an official alternative script.

However, I think there are so many adults that know nothing of the Mongolian script at the moment, that it's going to have to stay for much longer. Also, I imagine that legal texts will remain in Cyrillic for quite a long while after that year...

It may not be too bad for fluent speakers of Middle Mongolian. Often, one can type a word just by typing the Middle Mongolian sounds. In Unicode, it encodes sounds, not characters as known in other scripts. There's been a lot of effort to redefine the overrides (variation selectors) so there can be an acceptable encoding of words that matches both the phonetic and visual requirements. The Unicode Consortium (and ISO) sinned by promulgating an incomplete encoding. They awaited a formal definition. When it appeared, it provided two contradictory encodings - one for for the presentation of individual letters, and another for writing words. That standard looks more like the specification of two different (and incompatible) fonts!

Oh god, that sounds horrible.

I have so many questions, if you happen to know the answers...

Was the original intention to be able to write Mongolian by typing Middle Mongolian sounds?
When did the later formal definition appear?
Is one of the two new contradictory encodings basically input, while the other one is output?
Why does the formal definition include two encodings? Is it because one of the two (presumably the output one?) is based on the older incomplete, unusable(?) definition?
Is the behaviour of variation selectors still undefined in the standard? I hope we're over that problem at least...

[Richard W]

Oh god, that sounds horrible.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#Unicode for a statement of distress.

Was the original intention to be able to write Mongolian by typing Middle Mongolian sounds?

The spelling is very conservative - literacy was low. A lot of vowels have been lost over time.

The writing system is learnt as a semisyllabary, rather like cuneiform. One can see the list of combinations at http://www.studymongolian.net/lessons/basics/writing/. Presumbably they intuit how to stick CV and VC together to make CVC. (One complication is that VC actually has what can recognise as an aleph at the start.)

The vowel pairs traditionally transliterated as <o> and <u> (/ɔ/ and /ʊ/) and <ö> and <ü> (/o/ and /u/) are not distinɡuished in native words. As a consequence, the word 'Mongol' is in practice typed in Unicode with all four combinations of /o/ and /u/. In many words, rounding harmony will resolve which sound occurs, but not in this word.

The two pairs are in general not distinguished in writing once the ATR vowel harmony has been established. If the harmony has not been established by the time the vowel comes to be established, then <ö> and <ü> are distinguished by sticking a yod in them.

ATR vowel harmony is important for rendering. The shape of the final consonant of 'bicig' depends on the fact that there are no [-ATR] vowels in the word.

When did the later formal definition appear?

I think 'the book' appeared within a year. I'll have to have another look at its extracts (and GB/T 26226-2010) for details of the problems. I'm handicapped by not being able to read Chinese and being too mean to pay for a translation.

Is the behaviour of variation selectors still undefined in the standard? I hope we're over that problem at least...

The definition has been created and expanded, but not contradicted. The contextual rules now have some definition - possibly now sufficient.