Re: OT: Parlez vous Kazakh?

Quoting Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>:

> Andreas Johansson cazdy:
>
> > 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".
>
> 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".
>
> The languages based on dialects that lost palatal harmony, seem to
> elaborate
> /k/~/q/ distinction into separate phonemes to keep more oppositions:
>
> Uzbek /qol/ "hand" ~ /kol/ "lake" (ö > o).
>
> Hope that helps,
Well, it feeds my craving for exotic curiosa, if nothing else ...
In other words: Thanks!

No-one answered whether Kazakh's natively written in Arabic script ...

                                           Andreas