[ryancw]

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?

[dmitriid]

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.

[koolba]

I think you’re grossly overestimating the level of literacy.

[krasin]

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

[indigo945]

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.

[nzmsv]

He meant literacy before the Soviets. That went "whoosh".