Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

Danny Wier wrote:

>An Adobe document on how the many consonants and few vowels of North
>Caucasian languages are represented in Cyrillic writing.
>http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/caucasus/kaukschr.pdf
>Comments? Any ideas that might relate to conlangs, especially those with
>large phonologies?
___________
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?

Also:  for those interested in the more-or-less accepted transcription
system used (by linguists only) for Ubykh, see the following link:
http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/ubykh.pdf

--John Quijada

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