In some Central Asian countries, there is a push to switch from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet to a Western Roman alphabet. They hope that this will facilitate trade and language learning between their region and the West.
The A smiliar precident is Turkey, which adopted a Roman alphabet in the 1920's (and did away with their Arabic script). Today, Turkey has excellent relations with the West, which can at least partially be attributed to langauge (alphabet) similarity.
The resistance comes mostly from nationalists, who insist that adopting a new alphabet will cause their cultural heritage to be lost (the same argument was made in Turkey in the 1920's).
What do you think? Should the world adopt a Universal Alphabet (I don't mean the IPA). Why or why not? Which alphabet should be chosen? Why?
2006-08-05
05:26:36
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5 answers
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asked by
cognitively_dislocated
5