Re: Finally, a script for Mun'gayöd

On Tue, 9 May 2000, Daniel A. Wier wrote:

> Vertical Arabic!  You know, since Uyghur (an East Turkic language
> closely related to Uzbek) uses both Mongolian and Arabic script
> (depending on religion; I think Xinjiang/Uyghurstan is mostly Muslim
> though), a vertical Arabic-like script could be a unifying concept.
Actually, these are quite separate things, both in time and language.  The
modern Uighur language is, as you say, closely related to Uzbek and used
an Arabic script (with a brief phase of Latinism).  However, the name
"Uighur" for this language/"nationality" is a 20th-century invention,
based on historical knowledge of the medieval Turkic Uighur state.  The
Uighur (in that sense) language actually belonged to a different branch
entirely of the Turkic languages, and was written with this
Sogdian-or-Syriac (not quite clear which) derived script.

> I really need to learn Mongolian, which incidentally is a vertical
> form of Syriac script in a way.
But definitely not mutually readable, though, as an Iranist classmate and
I discovered recently.

Kenji