Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

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.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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Chicago, IL 60637