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Something curious has happened recently: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2...013156380.html
By 2025, Kazakhstan will officially use the Latin script for the Kazakh language, over the presently-used Cyrillic.
We presently have 2536 Kazakh sentences, and most, if not all of them, appear to be in Cyrillic script.
How will this change in Kazakhstan affect Tatoeba?
I guess that when the change will be fully operated, several solutions exist.
Probably some guys will develop tools to go from one alphabet to the other, so a tool could be integrated, like the tool for the Japanese language, that displays furigana.
Another solution is to simply use a tag indicating that the sentence uses Cyrillic. This, or two separate flags, although it would depend on the official choice (is Cyrillic maintained for several years beside Latin, etc.)
At least ,we have time to think about the problem! ^^
In this kind of situation, I like to think that Tatoeba is kind of a keeper of the languages. Even if Cyrillic is replaced, a trace will remain here on Tatoeba.
Actually, we have similar situation with Serbian which uses both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets right now. Serbian Tatoeba corpus consists of both types. The conversion can be fully automatized only in the case "Cyrillic to Latin". Automatic "Latin to Cyrillic" conversion will give wrong results sometimes.
Unfortunately Serbian alphabet conversion tool is not implemented for a long time.
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1456
I agree with what you said on Github and I don't see a real nesessarity in "native speaker verification" before starting the work on the converter, cause those rules of transliterations are all in common textbooks and those exception roots can be easily found in vocabularies. It's a work which an intermediate level speaker can do. Of cause, any native or professional Serbian speaker is very welcome to check and complete the list, but it can be done in the process of work.
I also agree that Cyrillic script is preferable to use for Serbian contribution, but in fact many Serbian speakers prefer to use Latin in their everyday writing communications, so an obligation to only use Cyrillic might become a kind of burden for them.
The Kazakh language is recognized officially in Russia on regional level and there the alphabet will not be changed to Latin even if the reform in Kazakhstan will be successful. So the Cyrillic Kazakh will remain.
Eg. Azeri language in Azerbaijan changed to Latin but in Russia, Azeri language is official in Dagestan in its Cyrillic form. (But Cyrillic is not used on Tatoeba)
The Cyrillic Azeri newspaper "Derbent" October 2017
https://i.mycdn.me/image?id=861...9Jhh0rmoKbqRgk
In which regions of Russia the Kazakh language is reconized officially as a regional language?
Altai republic
http://zakon.scli.ru/ru/legal_t...7-3057d6dbed48
"Казахский язык используется в официальных сферах общения в местах компактного проживания его носителей."
Thanks.
If the conversion between Latin and Cyrillic can be automatized, we could use the same mechanism we have for Mandarin Chinese, where we allow users to enter sentences both in simplified and traditional.
There is big chance the alphabet reform will never be finished, at least in this variant. The Uzbek scenario is the most probable.