Apparently there’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about what to do with written M*ngolian language. A form of cyrillic was adopted (read: imposed) in 1941 by the Russians in place of the traditional script (see pic). This has worked for a while, but M*ngolian wasn’t ever a great fit for cyrillic, they had to invent a few new letters to cover some of the characters in the traditional script. So a discussion with major scholars was held and they were asked if M*ngolia should get rid of cyrillic which, according to our teacher, was unanimously voted for. The second question was what should they replace cyrillic with. This divided the scholars into two camps, one who believe that Latin letters would be a good modern replacement for cyrillic and the other who believe M*ngolia should go back to its traditional script like China and Korea have stuck to and then whatever secondary alphabet which needs to be used is irrelevant (eg. latin letters for cell phone messages, internet, etc… which is already happening). Their main arguement is that if the government decides to go solely on latin letters that the traditional script will be lost forever, which is probably true, it’s even now only taught in schools as a sort of secondary, cultural writing system.
Our teacher votes strongly for throwing out cyrillic for traditional script as do many of the older generation. If traditional script can take the primary role for writing then he said it doesn’t matter if cyrillic or latin letters are adopted for secondary writing.
Cyrillic isn’t horribly difficult to learn, but I agree that it’s doesn’t really fit M*ngolia. The latin alphabet would make M*ngolian much easier for foreigners to learn the sounds and pronunciation of M*ngolian but I don’t think a complete switch to the latin alphabet would be very effective or good for the country.
I don’t know how far into this process the government is, our teacher thinks that within 3-4 years the cyrillic or latin alphabet will have worked its way into society enough to be accepted as the main foreign alphabet but whether they go back to traditional script is anyone’s guess at this point. I think it would be nice and it would give some identity back to the M*ngolian people who feel like their country has been tossed back and forth between China, Russia and nearly Japan since its vast empire collapsed.
All this debate is to try to calm the confusion of the modern M*ngolian language which consists of, incredibly, four different versions: 1) traditional script, 2) cyrillic script, 3) cyrillic cursive, 4) latin alphabet (for the internet or text messages), it’s quite a mess, at least from an outsiders viewpoint.
Plus our teacher isn’t a huge fan of cyrillic (he’s one of two people who hold a doctorate in traditional script in the whole country) and so today he was really voicing his desire for the traditional script to come back, and then he said, in English, that cyrillic could “say goodnight.” =)
