Re: OT: Parlez vous Kazakh?

At 16:25 2.5.2003 +0300, Isaac Penzev wrote:

>Generally speaking, in many Turkic languages there is no phone*m*ic opposition
>/k/~/q/ (I assume, the same picture was in Proto-Turkic). One phoneme /k/ was
>realized as [q] in words with back vowels and as [k] (or even [k_j]) in the
>words with front vowels:
>
>Balkar /kol/ [qol] "hand" ~ /köl/ [k_j2l_j] "lake".
Also this was exploited when writing Turkic languages with Arabic script:
_qaaf_, _ghayn_ and the "emphatic" dental letters were used in back-vowel words
while _kaaf_, _gaaf_ and the plain dentals were used in front-vowel words.
Apparently this goes way back to how Uighur was written in Aramaic/Sogdian 
script.

/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)
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