Re: OT: Parlez vous Kazakh?

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,
~~~~~~Yitzik~~~~~~

Replies