Re: OT: Parlez vous Kazakh?

Quoting Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>  --- Joe Fatula skrzypszy:
>
> > I've seen the same sort of thing as well.  Lake Balkhash is always
> spelled
> > with a KH in English (for those who spell it at all), and Kazakh is
> > variously spelled with a K or a KH.  And yes, it's "qazaq" in Kazakh.
> So
> > no, I don't know what's going on.
>
> Simple: before 1991 it was common practice to follow the Russian version
> of a
> place name rather than the local version, even when the former was
> nothing but
> a Cyrillic transliteration. Republican languages (let alone the
> smaller
> languages) were hardly known among people other than specialists.
> For the same reason, the West-Ukrainian city of L'viv is almost always
> called
> "L'vov" in older atlases.
In my older atlases, it's called "Lemberg" ...

Still, this doesn't explain why the Russians transliterate one of the the q's in
"qazaq" as K and the other as X.

BTW, I assume Kazakh is natively written in Arabic script? There seems to be an
awful lot of Q's in the Central Asian Turkic languages, with the odd K thrown in
for confusion (in _köl_ for instance). Are these different phonemes or just
erratic spelling? Turkish don't appear to have a k~q distinction, and I assume
Turkish _kul_ "slave" to be the same as Uzbek _qul_ "slave".

                                                            Andreas

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