Re: More orthographic miscellanea (was: Chinese Romanization)

John Cowan wrote:


> Isaac A. Penzev scripsit:
>
> > As for RF, the situation is different. It is ***forbidden by the federal
> > law*** to use any other alphabet than based on Cyrillics, for the
> > languages that have any official status in Russian Federation. Kazan
> > Tatars want to change to Turkish-based Latinics, but Moscow does not
> > permit to do it officially. The same is with Karelan - being written
> > in Latinics, it demands official status (for now they use Finnish and
> > Russian as official langauges of Republic of Karelia), bu it cannot
> > be given until they change to Cyrillics.
>
> I don't understand this.  If only Cyrillic-script languages can be
> official, how can Finnish be official?  Is it simply because it has
> official status in Finland and is written in Latin script there?
I may be misinformed about that issue. I have a bad habit to store in my
mind tons of information without remembering the original sources. As for
the issue about Karelian language status, I read it somewhere on the Web
some time ago, and I think it was a kind of Karelian nationalist site, so I
would give little credit to it...

...I did some googling (in Russian) and came to conclusion that Finnish has
no official status in Republic of Karelia.

> But Tatar has official status in China and is written in Latin
> script there, so it seems that the law is being inconsistently
> applied.
Well, that's Russia - why are you looking for consistency or logic?...

> > They all seem nice and convenient (even a bit strange but etymologicly
safe
> > Azeri), tho often totally incompatible with each other. I think it was
done
> > for hardening mutual understanding between Turkic ethnoi.
>
> Actually, I suspect that it was just a product of committees working
> independently and without coordination.
You may be right, but one can never exclude evil will while talking about
Bolsheviks :))

> (Note:  "harden" in English is
> not a general causative, but applies only to the literal sense of "hard" =
> "firm"; it cannot be applied in the sense "make [something] difficult".)
Note taken into consideration. Hope may be forgiven as written at 11:28pm ;)

Best wishes,
-- Yitzik