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Re: OT: Parlez vous Kazakh?

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Friday, May 2, 2003, 23:22
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