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Comment by gostsamo | Hacker News Reader

This is part of the national identity. No chance in hell.

I remember back around 20 years ago someone on this radio station https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%BE... was expressing support of the idea of switching to the Latin alphabet as a natural step in the integration of the country in Europe/ new digital age/ or something along those lines. His conclusion seemed to be that "society wasn't mature enough".

Bulgaria’s population is set to halve by 2100, so again, considering the importance of Latin-based languages globally, integration into the EU, etc. I don’t think it’s that inconceivable. Maybe just not likely soon because of the historical connection to Cyrillic.

Again, I didn’t say it will happen, just that it seems conceivable to me.

Maybe reflect on what made you think that a nation would just scratch more than a thousand years of culture so that it is easier for facebook engineers to encode their web page. Have no other comment, really.

There are plenty of other examples of countries switching to a new alphabet, even when it would cut people off from their history. Turkish being a prime example. It has nothing to do with making life easier for Facebook engineers and I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. It has everything to do with what real people do in their daily lives, and what government institutions mandate.

These sarcastic replies are so tiresome and intellectually uncurious.

Ok, and just because a few countries did it, in what way implies that Bulgaria will? Your arguments have no basis other than "Country A did it, so Bulgaria is also more likely to do it".

I said it was plausible.

Try reading the comment again.

It is only plausible based on your own subjective views and cultural projection. As of now, it has no basis on any fact.

Ok. Well I’ve written a few long comments on why I think it is plausible, but you and the other commenter don’t seem to have actual responses, just insults. Hence this conversation is a waste of time.

When met with extreme obliviousness, sarcasm is the only escape of the mind.

Turkey switched lots of things as a deliberate act of cutting off with its past, including form of government, constitution, and legitimacy model, and after losing wars and territories for centuries. The fact that you disregard the context to arrive at the desired conclusion might have something to do with the intellectual difficulties you find yourself in.

You can’t seem to leave any comment without adding some sort of sarcastic rude put down, which really isn’t in the nature of this site, nor is it conducive for having an interesting discussion about the future of language. Learn some manners and try again, this time with actual arguments.

Your example using Turkish isn't that good. Turkic languages like Turkish or Kazakh switched to a latin alphabet because the arabic or cyrillic writing systems didn't suit them. The cyrillic script was explicitly created for slavic languages, so there's no need for slavic languages to switch to a latin based alphabet.

Turkish switched to the Latin alphabet and thereby cut itself off from over a thousand years of history and interaction with the Islamic world via Persian and Arabic. This decision was made more for political reasons, as Ätaturk wanted to Westernize the country, than for strictly linguistic ones.

Atatürk also commented on one occasion that the symbolic meaning of the reform was for the Turkish nation to "show with its script and mentality that it is on the side of world civilisation".[26] The second president of Turkey, İsmet İnönü further elaborated the reason behind adopting a Latin alphabet: "The alphabet reform cannot be attributed to ease of reading and writing. That was the motive of Enver Pasha. For us, the big impact and the benefit of an alphabet reform was that it eased the way to cultural reform. We inevitably lost our connection with Arabic culture."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet#History

For a while in the early 2000s to late 2000s there was a very widespread usage of 4 and 6 replacing the ch and sh sounds. In hindsight, this was more likely to replace the letters 'ч' and 'ш' than Latin letters.

However it died out.

It’s hard to see how switching alphabet would help euro integration. Looking at other countries - economical and political reforms required for EU membership is the real barrier, not the alphabet. And switching alphabet would have a huge cost not helping the economy.

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