Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kgeist 754 days ago
Not quite - several Slavic languages have so called contrastive palatalization, i.e. almost all consonants come in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs, and they're hard to express using unmodified Latin alphabet. Some Slavic languages lost most of the contrastive palatalization (say, Serbian), and Turkic languages never had it to begin with, so they're easier to switch.

In Europe, Polish and Irish are two examples of a language with extensive contrastive palatalization which uses the Latin alphabet, and they're probably among the least readable/elegant writing systems in Europe.
1 comments
culebron21 754 days ago
Turkic languages do have constrastive palatalization system, going together with "soft" & "hard" vowels. (Example from German: a, e, o, u would be "hard", ä, ö and ü would be "soft" vowels for Kazakh speaker) In Kazakh, kerek (need) is palatized completely, while in kara (black) consonants are not. In "shanyrak" (yurt roof top window) consonants aren't palatized and "k" is fricative, in shelek (bucket) "k" is palatized and non-fricative. Since palatized consonants go together with "soft" vowels, one may omit this distinction in writing. But the difference is still there. N.B. Some Turkic languages have lost this feature.
link
kgeist 754 days ago
>Since palatized consonants go together with "soft" vowels, one may omit this distinction in writing. But the difference is still there.

Sure, many languages have palatalized consonants, influenced by surrounding phonetic context (such as, vowel harmony in Turkic makes surrounding consonants "softer" too).

The true "contrastive palatalization" I was referring to is about having minimal pairs where words have totally different meanings based on whether the consonants are palatalized or not.

For example, in Russian (where I specify the palatalization of a preceding consonant with ʲ):

  mer "a mayor"
  mʲer "of measures"
  mʲerʲ "measure!" (imperative)
Latin alphabet has no means to express it naturally, while in Cyrillic there're already all the required letters for it. Just omitting it in writing will introduce confusion.
link