From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 19:26:25 EST
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
> On 03/01/2004 14:23, Peter Kirk wrote:
> > On 03/01/2004 13:37, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> >
> >> We can't say from the exhibited uppercase alphabet that this should be
a
> >> mirrored dotless j or a mirrored soft-dotted j if it is converted to
> >> lowercase. So Peter, where did you find this image of an alphabet?
> >
> > It's not a mirrored J, ...
>
> The best description I can find of this character's glyph is that it is
> an inverted (not rotated) U+0490/0491 (not to be confused with
U+0413/0433).
OK. But as your GIF image is taken from a satiric image published to promote
the adoption of _a_ Latin script for writing all Turkic languages like
Azeri, instead of Arabic, I think there was some debate at that time about
which character to use, and that were defined later around 1929, just a few
years after Turkey adopted the Latin script.
So there may exist a lot of variants for this character used to
transliterate Arabic letters, or Turkic sounds. Which one was effectively
used between 1930 and 1939 in printed books before Stalin imposed the
Cyrillic script after attempting to desunify the Latin alphabet proposed in
the Turkic southern republics of USSR?
Then as the Latin script was restored recently a few weeks after Azerbaikan
became independant, is the new Latin alphabet adopted by the Azeri law
exactly the same as the first Latin alphabet used within the 30's? Isn't
there now additional letters needed to transcript Cyrillic letters that have
been used for about 50 years in Azerbaijan?
Wasn't there a proposal to reunify this alphabet so that it would allow
exchanges with other Turkic languages that are used in now independant
countries which have also opted for the Latin alphabet?
Is the current Azeri Latin alphabet completely finalized? Aren't there some
pending characters to solve problematic orthographs that are still currently
written with inconsistent digraphs or diacritics, notably because of a more
complex history with mixed Turkic, Arabic and Cyrillic heritages?
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