RE: sort of OT: politics and scripts

From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-unicode@algonet.se)
Date: Wed Nov 22 2000 - 04:17:08 EST


Cathy Wissink <cwissink@microsoft.com> writes:
> The Soviet language policies under both Lenin and Stalin were amazing in
> what they managed to change in a very short time, especially considering the
> scripts first shifted from Arabic to Latin, then just a decade or so later
> to Cyrillic. I too have been wondering when there would be a movement in
> the post-Soviet, Central Asian countries away from Cyrillic; my assumption
> has always been that they would want to return to Arabic (or for others,
> back to their indigenous scripts).
>
> Surprisingly, however, in our NLS implementation, the movement is away from
> Cyrillic, as you noted, but towards Latin rather than Arabic.

The answer does of course lies in the reform imposed by Mustafa Kemal
in Turkey. Turkey is naturally the leading state in Turkic world, so
it's natural to turn to Turkey to get an alphabet.

>We've seen this in Azeri and Uzbek,

The most recent to announces a change was Tatarstan.

--
Yours sincerely,
Erland Sommarskog
sommar@algonet.se



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:15 EDT