Quoting Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>:
> Andreas Johansson zhazdy:
>
>
> > > Russian word is |kazak| [kV"zak].
> >
> > Which still sound alot like _qazaq_ if you can't tell [q] and [k]
> apart ...
>
> Yes. Russian |kazak| is a loan word with the same meaning: freeman.
Hm. The last time I asked on this list if the words "Cossack" and "Kazakh" had
a common origin, the answer I got was "probably not" ... I can't remember who
said that.
> > Were there any |aq qyrGyz|?
>
> I don't know. The present day Qazaqs also called themselves |qyrGyz
> qaìsaq| or
> |qaìsaq qyrGyz|. Another Qypchaq group that migrated to N.Caucasus -
> Nogays -
> still has three different clans: aq noGaì, qara noGaì and just noGaì.
> And a
> different Qypchaq tribe living in Uzbekistan, calls themselves |qara
> qalpaq|
> "black hat"...
"Karakalpakstan" has long been one of my favourite toponyms.
> > No-one answered whether Kazakh's natively written in Arabic script
> ...
>
> It depends on how you define "natively". For quite a long time Qazaq was
> an oral
> language. For writing documents most of Turkic tribes used a Turkic
> lingua
> franca called "Türki" written in Arabic script. That was in 17th - 19th
> cc. The
> same script was used for the first pieces of literature in Qazaq written
> in late
> 19th c. In 1930 "Yanalif" (New Interturkic Latinized alphabet) was
> introduced.
> In 1940 it was substituted by present Cyrillic alphabet. Not intention
> to switch
> back to Latin script is observed.
No intention to switch back to Arabic either?
Was this Yanalif connected to Turkish's Latin orthography?
Andreas