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I am surprised that the article fails to mention that the traditional Mongolian script is, in fact, a form of the modern Aramaic script (Syriac). (This fun fact makes the history of Mongolian writing system much more interesting.)
Fun fact: the earliest alphabets in India, Iran, Syria are all descendent from Aramaic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet

IIRC, proto-sinaitic gave birth to Phoenician and Arabic (with some lost alphabets like Moabite in there somewhere). Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet, and its two children are Aramaic and Greek, with alphabets in the "east" being likely descended from Aramaic (Brahmi script, proto-Farsi and Parthian, Syrian) and those in the "west" descendent from Greek (Latin, Armenian, Cyrillic, Coptic). Thus you would in fact expect Mongolian, being in the east, to be an offshoot of Aramaic if you knew it had an alphabet (it could be like Mandarin without an alphabet). That's the real question -- does it have an alphabet or not.

I only say this because a lot of people think that Aramaic script is some exotic thing, but it was the official language of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, which was quite large, stretching from India to North Africa, and Aramaic was a lingua franca of that era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire

also Aramaic was the main language of the Roman province of Judea some 2021 years ago.
I think it would be really interesting to learn more about the history of the region between ~Georgia and Mongolia before the USSR. It seems fantastic how the Turkic language group can be so geographically widespread as it is (there are languages belonging to it way up in Siberia), though TIL that Mongolian isn't Turkic.

And then the Mongols came from the other direction, unifying the area. What did that do culturally?

This is basically all I know about the area, but it seems extremely interesting.

One thing I've always been curious about with alphabet transitions like these is how people dealt with it. State newspapers might start printing in the new alphabet, but at what point did shop signs and handwritten correspondence switch over? Did everyone over schooling age stick with the old?
I lived through it in Moldova (see my other comment as well, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27081059). In 1989 that is literally what happened, the whole country went from Cyrillic script to Latin script.

I took slightly over year IIRC for basically everything written in Romanian to go from Cyrillic script to Latin script. And it was very, very hard on many people, especially middle age and older. As various government jobs switched to Latin script, quite a few people where let go because they couldn't adapt to the new system quickly enough.

I was in school at the time, and I remember that even for us it took some adjustment. I think it took me at least several months to fully switch (I'm not a native speaker, and we Romanian was a mandatory class from second grade up).

A friend of my mother's, a native Moldovan with roots back to time immemorial, still struggles with Latin script even though it's been 30 years since the change.

I think you’re grossly overestimating the level of literacy.
According to Wikipedia: "Mongolia has a high literacy rate, consistently rated around 98%" ([1]).

Which is not surprising given that Soviets always had put a special focus on strong educational system. They failed in many areas, but they did "liquidate illiteracy" everywhere they could ([2])

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Mongolia#:~:text=....

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez

You're grossly underestimating the level of education in Mongolia. Until the IMF-mandated austerity policies of the 90's, during which so many schools closed that many families couldn't even send their children to primary school anymore, and the remaining schools had to close in winter because they couldn't afford heating, Mongolia did not only have near-total literacy, but also one of the highest rates of tertiary education, that is, college education, in the world (not in the "third" world). Of course, since Mongolia has been blessed with the free market, living standards have been on a decline throughout the country, and nowadays, your offhand remark is more likely than not to have some substance. However, things have been improving again over the past decade or so.

The Western drive to assume that people in poorer countries are all uneducated seems to me to reflect something Hannah Arendt wrote about Soviet totalitarianism, namely that once Soviet propaganda had claimed that the Moscow metro is the only working metro in the world, there emerged a need to conquer the whole world, just so all other metros could be shut down to ensure the truth of the ideology.

I've heard that another effect of Sovietization in Mongolia was surnames.

Mongolians had surnames (strictly speaking, clan names) before the Soviet takeover. The Soviets abolished them, as part of an effort to get rid of the old aristocracy. Since then, Mongolians have been known officially either by a single personal name or by using their father's name in combination with their own.

In the 90s, there was an attempt to bring back surnames. People were given a free choice of which surname to adopt. Some people either still knew the surname their family had had before the Soviet era (because it had been passed down in secret), or were able to find it in local records. But a lot of people chose a name that had no history in their family, either because they didn't know their old surname, it had an unflattering meaning (like "Thief" or "Seven Drunkards"), or they simply wanted a different one.

The attempt was unsuccessful, in part because huge numbers of people chose to adopt Borjigin (Genghis Khan's clan name) as their surname.

interesting that the Cyrillic Alphabeth has a lot of variations [1] for example it's not identical for Ukraine and Russia, the Mongolian Cyrillic Alphabeth also has its variations: they add Ө and a second Ү [2]. For the Latin Alphabeth there are also quite a lot of variations [3].

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_alphabets fascinating that Classical Latin didn't have the letter U, so they would have to write SPQR for all instances of IMPERIUM ROMANUM. But here it says they wrote V instead of U https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Roman-V-meant-to-mean-the-lette.... Nice rabbit hole...

Also the name Julius Ceasar would have to be spelled differently without the letter J in the Classical Latin script.

If anything Cyrillic differs between Ukraine and Russia, and Belarus has it’s own variation too. Also “forbidden nationalistic lettet ґ”
This is true of the latin alphabets as well
Mongolian script is unusual because of its orientation.

How do UIs handle the script? For example mobile chat applications.

Not that unusual. Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese are primarily written vertically, in columns right to left: https://i.imgur.com/Jai2Qcm.png The common exception is technical works, and translations, which from the early 20th century onward are often horizontal and left-to-right to allow using the Latin alphabet, math equations, etc.

Well, not quite. That was the situation until very recently. It's now mostly horizontal. Almost everything on a computer is horizontal. The first Korean newspaper to switch to horizontal text did so in 1988. It was universal by the mid-90s. Japanese is probably the most resistant and has its traditionalist holdouts in novels and some print newspapers. But horizontal text is ascendant there too.

While those languages are basically compatible with writing in any direction, this shift is mostly because software can't handle vertical text. It was terrible when computer typesetting first took off. Even today for publication quality, it probably requires specialized software. So the answer is that UI's don't handle it. It's almost always a disaster in software. The traditional writing system of several major world languages is simply not properly supported by most software, and much still fails completely.

An observation to close with: perhaps ironically, the Mongolian script is from the Syriac alphabet that went along the silk road route, and is distantly related to the Latin alphabet. It was rotated 90 degrees probably for no other reason than because it works well alongside vertical Chinese. It seems that rotating to get along is a recurring theme.

This is based off 30 minutes of naive research; if someone knows better, please correct me. (No better way to get information than to say something wrong on the Internet.)

Most of the time, major or more sophisticated apps will just use Cyrillic (in Mongolia) or be written in Mandarin (in Inner Mongolia, CN). There are, however, web pages in the traditional script, which you can look at to get a sense of how a UI layout for a vertical script might work [0][1][2]. I also found a website with a full list, with many broken links [3].

From an encoding perspective, Unicode historically hasn't meshed well with Mongolian script, because of a surfeit of homographs. From what I can gather, Menksoft supports the most widely used alternative encoding method, which isn't Unicode-compatible. This apparently makes searching and indexing traditional Mongolian pages hard.

[0] http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home

[1] http://mongol.people.com.cn/

[2] http://www.nmg.xinhuanet.com/mg/

[3] http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbi...

The short answer is that they don't. Android flat out doesn't support vertical scripts so there's a library that reimplements a lot of UI components. iOS basically doesn't, but it's somewhat easier to work around. Chrome and Firefox can render the characters with appropriate fonts, but that can be uncommon and applications using them screw up. Electron apps generally render vertical scripts LTR for example.
A similar change happened in Moldova (which first was Autonomous Moldovan Republic as a part of Ukraine and then Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic within USSR after WWII).

Moldovan was declared a language similar to, but different from Romanian, and was given a Cyrillic script [1]. Even though Moldovan is at most a dialect of Romanian.

The Soviet Union was very direct but also very effective in changing entire cultural substrates of millions of people over a very short period of time. Giving languages under its influence Cyrillic scripts was a part of that.

Note: it's not all bleak and bad, as many indigenous people got their alphabets for the first time in history.

[1] Wikipedia has a very detailed page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1

The Soviets also imposed (badly needed) reforms on the alphabet and spelling of Russian itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography...), getting rid of two pairs and one trio of phonetically redundant letters and the totally unnecessary appending of hard signs to the end of many but not all words that had previously been required.
But see (if only as a “fun fact”), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Cyrillic_alphabet
One of the interesting parts of the OP is that they say Soviets moved to Latinise the scripts of all people as a move to unify Communist groups (second para under "Linguistic Revolution"). Then they simply say "Cyrillic became the preferred, unifying writing system" without explanation.
To me, all that reversal attempts are deemed to fail. Last time I tried the traditional script, I was not even sure that I can write down my own name properly. It's got some twisted logic that whatever written in it does not always pronounce and/or mean similar to the one in its Cyrillic counterpart.
I was born in USSR and Mongolians were our Asian brothers, together with Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tadjiks and all the other tribes in the 'stans. I remember perusing Uzbekistan main daily in Tashkent as a young child, seeing gobbledygook in Cyrillic and thinking that it was really funny. My mother was had some really wealthy Mongolian clients who were parking money in USA real estate post 2009 meltdown and for a while they were visiting a lot. We had them over at my place and their Russian was remarkable. Basically everyone in the ruling classes was educated in USSR and spoke perfect Russian not only conversationally, but down to the cursing and jokes. My uncle went out with these guys to fish for flounder in Puget Sound and confirms pretty good command of those last two. They brought me a bottle of Chengiz Khan vodka with Cyrillic label and poitless flakes of gold in it that just sat there for a few years until I re-gifted it. Fun times. Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education, without barriers to entry that we have here in USA. Ken Alibek (https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological...) was one of the examples of going from village to bacteriological weapon design and on the strength of being smart.
One of my good friends growing up was Kazakh(which is quite rare here in the US) and I met her mother who spoke fondly of the USSR; she spoke fondly of Russians(the people) but not of the government. Meeting them taught me a lot about the difference between people and their government.
"was one of the examples of going from village to bacteriological weapon design "

And this is a good thing?

The USSR was vast, which part of it were you born and raised in?
> Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life

MMhh OK, lets not ignore the fordable settlement that literally wiped out the majority of the wealth of the steppe and and killed or starved to death up to 50% of people while inducing severe starvation and malnutrition on the rest of them.

It basically was basically genocide that attempted to destroy a whole culture.

And then forced to do basically forced labor on state farms for the next couple of decades on low efficiency state farms.

The elites of those groups were moved to the gulags in large numbers as well.

I understand that your experience are from a decades after that and a lot had changed.

But while the mass death of Ukrainians is in the news often because of Crimea, the much higher % of death Kazakhs is basically ignored.

Not sure which barriers to entry you're thinking of, but Asian Americans, as a whole, are wealthier than White Americans, better educated, stay married more, commit much less crime, and live longer.

Your comment would have been much better without the unnecessary dig, which was also wrong.

Speaking to Mongolian clients who likely belonged to the oligarchy before and after the fall of the USSR does not provide an accurate picture of the situation at large.
My favorite part of Mongolian history is when their head refused to mass kill monks... I mean fight with the enemies of the people, so he was invited to Yalta (or some other resort?) and killed. And a new head was appointed instead.

Say what you want, there are countries that achieved way more than USSR, not to mention Mongolia, without mass killings, man made famines, slavery camps, serfs (1960s was the year when Soviet "collective farmers" were salaried for the first time and got a right to get a passport and leave their "farms").

> Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education

The USSR also took a lot of educated modern lifestyle people and sent them to Siberian forced labor camps. The whole thing was very much a calculated plan to replace the educated upper and middle class with new people that would be more loyal to Stalin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_settlements_in_the_Sovi...

> from village to bacteriological weapon design

Right, more bacteriological weapons is what the world needs.

I'm really disappointed in the images in that piece, so low-res you can't read the text. For the BL that's pretty awful.

I noticed that the top line of the compared newspaper parts also appears to change, but it's so badly rendered and so small as to be almost unreadable.

Why would they do that?

Aside, whilst it says "Copyright British Library Board" the content is/should be free-gratis and free-libre reproducible under the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. Really it should have a better imprint, something like "free distribution and reuse allowed under this policy" with a link. Even better would be if they'd adopted a more widely recognised license.

Changing the language or at least alphabet used to write the books the state can control what literature the next generation will be able to read.
>Sovietization

Cyrillic was created 1100 years ago in Bulgaria for Christian lithurgy among Slavs, it's unfair and sad that it's now mainly associated with communism and USSR in Westerm countries.

It also is associated with hundreds of years of the Russian Empire. So it’s also associated with that (largely negative) history in large parts of Europe.
It doesn't matter when it was created in this case. In Mongolia it was literally connected to Sovietization of Mongolia.
India has been independent of colonial rule for over 5-7 decades depending on the area and influence of English and even Portuguese (in Goa) still persist.
I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only untenable but actually destructive. The history of every language and culture is one of brutality and conquest as well as mutual exchange. That doesn't mean that we should be trying to revert to some imagined "pure" time before the traumatic event.

I'm a product of brutal attempts at nation building by the American war machine. I wouldn't be speaking English otherwise. But that doesn't mean that this language isn't mine. If I were forced to speak and write differently because of some political initiative, it wouldn't be a return to authenticity. It would be forcing me to reject a part of me that's already been irreversibly changed.

For what it's worth, the use of Portuguese in Goa is hardly because the language has any real relevance still. It's like with Pondicherry. The official publication of the Union Territory's government is "La Gazette de L'État de Poudouchéry" and the rest of the title page is also in French. (But the actual publications are all in Tamil or English.)

The retained use of French there is symbolic and historical. And the locals have chosen to keep up the tradition. I'm not Indian so it's not my place to say whether such legacies of a colonial history should be discarded. But it strikes me as more quaint than anything else. Such sentimental historical quirks are surely different from when a policy of forced linguistic change is actively in place, as happened under empire (either in India or in Mongolia).

As for English, well, colonization certainly moved things along there, to put it mildly. I certainly understand why some Indians are upset at its heavy use in government and business. Business conducted in a global market set up in large part by the same former colonial power. Learn their tongue if you want any chance of getting ahead. Not a wonderful feeling.

Still, I suspect that even if Britain had never colonized India, assuming they still became a major power and the USA later rose to prominence, it'd probably still be the most widely studied foreign language in India, with encroaching use even in government and business, as it is nearly everywhere.

I've been measuring the extent of romanization of local languages in india and in the web age it is only accelerating. The vast majority of Hindi, Telugu, Tamil content is written in the English alphabet online - https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.wnut-1.24.pdf

Romanized Hindi / En / tamil are likely the dominant form of expression online - only going to keep growing at this point.

There have been attempts to phase out English and promote Hindi, but this has been met with opposition from non-Hindi southern states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil...

I don't even know where to start. I'd believe you ten years ago. Now I've seen same rethoric from Russian Federation against my country. No more Ukrainian schools in occupied territories. RF population largely supports war to "save Russians". War that killed thousands Russian speaking Ukrainians. And yet they call themselfs "brothers"... just as you said. No need for enemies with such "brothers".

I've been to Eastern Europe, a lot of people speak English there. Occupation is not required to a share culture.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar hell. The parent was nostalgically reminiscing. That's totally different.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27082892.

> RF population largely supports war to "save Russians".

Only those susceptible to propaganda. But such people are everywhere, who easily believe what they are told to believe.

I think the person you're responding to is talking about USSR circa 1920-1980, and you're talking about RF 2010-2020. Of course you can say that it's all the same, but then why would you be agreeing with them 10 years ago?