Re: Terzemian on the web

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:


> The Cyrillic omega Ѡѡ for /Q/ å doesn't seem realistic to
> me. The Soviet orthographies for various languages avoided
> all archaic Cyrillic letters no longer used in Russian
> like the plague, no doubt because they had come to be
> associated with Church Slavic.
I don't know the reasons, but that's true - OCS letters aren't found in the
Soviet alphabets. OTOH, some people say that visually Ө and Ү are taken from
Ѳ and Ѵ (that is, fita and izhitsa).

> If they used shapes
> similar to such letters it was always with different
> values; witness the Cyrillic ö Ө, ө alongside that
> strange Ҫ used for Bashkir /T/,
Nothing strange. /T/ sounds quite similar to /s/ for a Russian ear: [sik
sins] for "thick things" is not unheard. Except in "three", where people
tend to say smth like [fr;i], because [sr;i] means imperative of /srat;/
(vulg. "to defecate").

> or the so-called semi-
> soft sign Ҍҍ from I don't know which language which to
> all the world looks like jat'!
Russian Saami. Never have seen that IRL.

> So what might a Soviet orthography use for /Q/? I'm not
> aware of any Soviet language which has a distinction between
> two o-type sounds. Since many Soviet orthographies used
> 'schwa' Әә for /&/ maybe you can use that for the front
> /a/ and a Аа for the back /Q/? In Abkhaz schwa represents
> labialization of the preceding consonant, so it may work for
> /Q/ too. N.B. that Turkic a is /A/, and moreover the letters
> а and о are closely related to Russian orthographic
> sensibilities. Another possibility is the hard sign Ъъ for
> å, since that letter was actually made useful in some
> Soviet orthographies. It is also used for the [@] allophone
> of /a/ in Cyrillo-phonetic notation of Russian. A third
> possibility would of course be the IPA [O] Ɔɔ, which has a
> capital version in Unicode \u0186. The Cyrillic (ab)uses of
> schwa (See WP <http://tinyurl.com/yqm5uk>) may cause one to
> doubt how plausible it is, but at least Soviet scholars knew
> IPA, and upside-down ess for a vowel is at least no stranger
> than upside-down cee.
>
> FWIW IPA [O] Ɔɔ seems more likely than å in New
> Turkic too.
Cyrillisation for Korean (ab)uses Ɔ.
OTOH, the only lang I know about, that distingishes /O/ and /o/ in Cyrillic
script, seems to be Standard Uzbek. Then, it uses О for /O/ (or /Q/?) and Ў
for /o/. Looks odd. In Tajik, we also find О on the places where Farsi has
Â, but it seems soemhow connected to the dialectal vowel mergers.

> BTW all Soviet Cyrillic alphabets always included the full
> Russian alphabet, even if some letters were not used in
> native words, and notably all the j+vowel letters were
> normally used like in Russian.
Exactly.

-- Yitzik