Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Saturday, March 6, 2004, 0:36
From:    John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...>
> It's fascinating to see how illogical the Cyrillic situation is for the > Northeastern Caucasian languages. Abkhaz and Abaza are closely related > (some linguists consider them mere dialects of one language), so you'd > think the authorities who provided alphabets for them would use consistent > transcription systems, yet the two systems are miles apart, with Abkhaz > using 14 newly contrived letters ("neographs"?)not found in any other > Cyrillic-transcribed language, while all the other Caucasian languages get > by using standard Cyrillic plus the new letter I. Does anyone know the > history of how Abkhaz's writing system came to be so aberrant compared to > the other written Caucasian languages?
IIRC, Viadeslav Ardzinba, the current president of the de facto Abkhaz regime, was in a former life a philologist of some kind working in Moscow. But they've been proposing orthographic reforms, and instituting such reforms, ever since Stalin's death when they gave up Georgian script. I don't know of any articles about such reforms, but Viacheslav Chirikba's grammar of Abkhaz (the thin one from LINCOM Europa) has a few pages discussing the history of writing Abkhaz, so that's the first place I would look. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637