I've born in Uzbekistan. In 1990s Uzbekistan moved their entire language to Latin-based alphabet. Even I was small kid I knew it's just a stupid sign of nationalism.<p>Changing your official language to a new alphabet is pretty expensive thing (especially when your country's economy is collapsed and your country has extreme inflation). You have to change all official signs, texts and reteach whole population.<p>Another stupid thing Uzbekistan did is to publicly burn (literally) soviet school books while not having a good replacement. I remember looking at those burning soviet math books in my school's backyard.<p>And it's all done instead of what? Instead of:<p>1. Teach population of proper fluent English as a second/third language along with Russian;<p>2. Making competitive free-market economy without clan-type quasi-government monopolies which run by top government official's relatives;<p>3. Attracting and protecting western investors;
One of the things I like about the cyrillic alphabet is that it has symbols for diphtongs. Portuguese (my native toungue) fixes this with diacritics (melancia, and distância - the diacritic wouldn't be necessary if the 'ia' in distância used a symbol to indicate it is a diphtong). French mixes vowels up in lots of different ways and English spelling is a mess.<p>Had the latin alphabet symbols for diphtongs, things could be simpler. Mind you, I am not a linguist.
This is clever:<p>> The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks (glyphs added to a letter, or basic glyphs) as they suppose that because of rare use, the specific sounds of the Kazakh language can disappear.<p>I see nothing wrong in principle with diacritics (I use two languages that require them daily, in addition to English) but given the dire state of internationalization this makes it easier for foreign software to support Kazakh, and fits their entire language in the ASCII plane.