Comment by pseingatl

Turkey did so in its change from an ancient empire to a modern republic. Strange though, that it is taking the Kazakhs so long to make the change. Ataturk made the change in one year; the Kazakhs are taking nearly a decade, during which time the change can be rolled back or abandoned. Mao wanted to go to Pinyin to increase literacy in China; he stopped with simplified characters. Japanese can be written perfectly well with romaji, but it will never supplant that country's writing system. My guess is that Kazakh teenagers are already writing their language using roman characters in order to text and sms each other, just like the Arab teenagers who created Arabizi (Roman alphabet plus 3, 5 7 and 9) on their own in order to use phones that did not yet support R2L script. While modern phones do so, the new writing system still persists and is perfectly serviceable. Also, why do people insist on saying the Roman alphabet has 26 characters? B looks nothing like b. R looks nothing like r. For someone completely unfamiliar with the alphabet, there are more than 26 letter forms or glyphs to learn.