Re: More orthographic miscellanea (was: Chinese Romanization)

Ray Brown scripsit:

> But the rounded front vowels were not denoted by o-umlaut &
> u-umlaut in Azeri and |?| (s with comma or cedilla) was not, according to
> my sources, introduced to Azeri until the 1933 reform which was _after_
> the adoption of the Roman alphabet by the Turks. The letter was already in
> use in Romanian and this must surely have been the source its adoption in
> Turkish.
If it were so, the Turks would surely have adopted it in the form
of s-comma-below rather than s-cedilla.  So while the Romanian usage
probably accounts for the pronunciation of Turkish s-cedilla, it seems
to me unlikely to be the immediate source of its form.

> But, of course, things changed under Stalin and all these new
> Romanizations were swept away in 1939-1940 and Cyrillic replaced all
> earlier alphabets with the exception of Gerorgian & Armenian.
Yiddish continued to be written in the Hebrew alphabet, although the
spelling of Hebrew borrowings was reformed to make them phonetic
rather than (as was done elsewhere) written as in Hebrew.

Korean also continued to be written in hangeul.  Dungan, however, though
it is part of the Mandarin dialect continuum, did get a Cyrillic orthography;
its three tones are not represented.

In addition, of course, Western European languages spoken by minorities
in the Soviet Union (German, Polish, Czech, etc.) continued to be written
in their Latin-alphabet forms.

> But I believe the pre-1939 Romanized alphabets have been re-established
> everywhere now.
Sometimes with changes, as in Turkmenistan.

--
We call nothing profound                        cowan@ccil.org
that is not wittily expressed.                  John Cowan
        --Northrop Frye (improved)              http://www.reutershealth.com

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