Scripts, religion, and ideology

Abstract

Religion often determines the choice of alphabets. So do other ideological factors that have impact on religious ones—such as nationalism and Marxism. Opposition to the influence of religion led Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to switch the spelling of Turkish and Judeo-Spanish from Arabic and Hebrew letters to Latin characters. Nationalism led Romania to switch from the Cyrillic alphabet to Latin characters. Marxist regimes did not switch alphabets and writing systems but altered them. Thus, many Chinese characters were simplified by Chairman Mao. And in the Soviet Union, Yiddish words of Hebrew origin were spelled phonetically rather than traditionally, and final forms of letters were eliminated. In each of these and other cases discussed in this article, belief or identity was reflected in the writing systems of these various languages.

Keywords:

• religion
• nationalism
• political philosophy
• identification
• alphabets

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 When my daughter Miriam and I visited Inner Mongolia in 1989, we were delighted to see that every single sign in Chinese was accompanied by a translation into Mongolian written in the traditional alphabet.