Re: CHAT: EU allumettes (was: Re: THEORY/CHAT: Talmy, Jackendoff and Matchboxes

From: "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>

> Danny Wier said:
>
> > Incidentally, Ahmed Tea of London marks its boxes in thirteen languages:
> > English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Portuguese, Polish,
> > Russian, Ukrainian, Qazaq*,
> > [snip]
> >
> > *I might be wrong on this one; it's definitely a Cyrillic-alphabet
Turkic
> > language, and it's not Uzbek. Could be Tatar, Kyrgyz or Turkmen.
>
> Post a sample. Might be Azeri if it reminds you of Turkish and is not
Uzbek.

It's not Azeri, because what I have has Cyrillic K with descender /q/ and G
with horizontal stroke /R/. Azeri has K, G and Ch with a small interior
vertical stroke, exclusive among Cyrillic-script languages. The text in
question is in three places (Latinized) given with the original English:

On the ingredients side: Qaraqat kosylghan shaj 'tea, blackcurrant
flavouring'
On the opposite side: TAZA SALMAGHY 'NET WEIGHT'
On the bottom: Saktanalatyn uaqyty: Kyryna caracyz 'For best before: See
side panel.'

It's not Kyrgyz either, I don't think, since the altered K and G characters
aren't used (uvularization is implied by the back vowel). That narrows it
down to Kazakh and Tatar, both very similar West Turkic languages, unless
there's more it could be. (Nowadays Azeri and Turkmen are more often written
in Latin characters.)

I could've given the Cyrillic text, but it would be a Unicode issue there,
and not everybody has a font with Central Asian characters.

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