Notes on Abkhaz

Bibliography

• K.V. Lomtatidze, Grammatika abkhazskogo *i*azyka. Fonetika i morfologi*i*a, Sukhumi, "Alashara," 1968.

  Available at Stanford Green Library, PK9201.A31 G7.

  cover, page 7, page 8, page 9.

• Chirikba, V. A. (V*i*acheslav Andreevich), Abkhaz, Munich, LINCOM, 2003. Volume 119 of Languages of the world/Materials. ISBN 3895861367.

  Available at Stanford Green Library, P1.A1 L3642 V.119.

  page 14, page 15, page 16, page 88, page 89, page 90.

• Bgazhba, Kh., Iz istorii pis'mennosti v Abkhazii [On the history of Writing in Abkhazia], Tbilisi Metsnieveba, 1967.

• Linguarium, Abkhaz phonology & script and Abkhaz scripts in pictures.

[Chirikba] discusses the various orthographies which have been used for Abkhaz. [Bgazhba] has a table of some of them.

Hooks and descenders

[Lomtatidze] and [Chirikba] give the same inventory of letters if one considers that the addition of a middle hook vs. the addition of a descender to a base letter is a glyph variation. The set of such modified letters is г ghe, к ka, п pe, т te, х ha and ч che. [Chirikba] consistently uses the forms with descender, while [Lomtatidze] uses the form with hook for г ghe and п pe and the form with descenders for the others. As of this writing, the forms with descenders are preferred.

In the Unicode standard, the forms with middle hook and the forms with descenders are considered separate abstract characters, and are therefore encoded separately. However, version 5.1 does not yet include a PE WITH DESCENDER; this character pair has been approved for encoding in a future version of Unicode at UTC meeting 115.

This translation follows the [Lomtatidze] tradition:

г ghe	U+0495 ҕ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GHE WITH MIDDLE HOOK
к ka	U+049B қ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER KA WITH DESCENDER
п pe	U+04A7 ҧ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER PE WITH MIDDLE HOOK
т te	U+04AD ҭ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER TE WITH DESCENDER
х ha	U+04B3 ҳ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER HA WITH DESCENDER
ч che	U+04B7 ҷ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER CHE WITH DESCENDER

This choice is the same as that used on the [Linguarium] page.