LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: USSR Latin (ussrlatn)

["Reshat Sabiq (Reşat)"]

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LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM
   1. Name of requester:		Reshat Sabiq
   2. E-mail address of requester:	tatar.iqtelif.i18n at gmail.com
   3. Record Requested:

      Type:		variant
      Subtag:		ussrlatn
      Description:	USSR Latin alphabet, as a reference to Historical
Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet used in the Soviet Union (1930s)
      Prefixes:		az, ba, crh, kk, krc, ky, sah, tk, tt, uz
      Preferred-Value:
      Deprecated:
      Suppress-Script:
      Comments:		Popularized and widely used in the Soviet Union in the
1930s among Turkic languages as part of USSR-wide policy of introducing
Latin-based alphabets in Turkic regions, on the basis of representing
equivalent phonemes in a unified fashion. Other names:
a. New (as of 1930s) Turkic Alphabet
b. Birlәşdirilmiş Jeni (1930larda) Türk Әlifbasь (Unified New (as of
1930s) Turk(ic) Alphabet)
c. Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet
d. Jaŋalif (in Qazan Tatar: abbreviation of "New Alphabet").

Mainly meant to be used in historical, and academic discourse, and
possibly graphics-based republications of 1930s publications.

   4. Intended meaning of the subtag:	The tag stands for: USSR Latn,
with reference to Historical Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet. It is
unlikely to be used frequently, and is essentially ruled out as an
option for adoption by sovereign Turkic states, as the Latin alphabets
of 1930s are widely acknowledged as outdated, non-conventional, and
inadequate, but could be useful in academic discourse, and historical
sources, as well as possibly photo republication of 1930s publications, etc.
   5. Reference to published description
      of the language (book or article):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Turkic_alphabet
The reference in this article is informative, however the word Uniform
used in this article is an inaccurate translation. Other sources do not
use Uniform. Unified is used in several sources in various languages.
   6. Any other relevant information:	As one article from 1936 puts it,
Soviet alphabet unification did not aim at having a single alphabet for
all Turkic regions, but rather a unified core, with additions of letters
when needed. In reality, some unifiable letters were denoted differently
in some languages, and some unified letters in some alphabets were not
in the spirit of unification. On a side note, orthography based on this
alphabet was actually less unified than Arabic orthography (especially
standard one used for centuries before early 1920s). Latinization policy
in late 1920s, and 1930s was also applied to non-Turkic languages, but
they weren't characterized by the same unified core alphabet as Turkic
languages were. For instance, letter c was used to denote English ch in
the Latin-based Turkic alphabets of 1930s, but it was used for ts, wıth
ç used for ch, in some non-Turkic alphabets.
I'd like the brain power of this list to think about a good variant
name. I started thinking with Janalif for Tatar, but that was too narrow
of a scope, so I continued with huturlal as variant name for Turkic
languages at first. I had thought about some other choices, but frankly
it's hard to say which one would make more sense. While writing this up,
at this exact point i finally came up with ussrlatn, below, and it hit
me that if someone saw ussrlatn, they'd understand it much easier than
huturlal, or any other variant name in the list below. If an average
user aware of the 1930s alphabet and language engineering, excuse me,
reform, saw tt-ussrlatn, or az-ussrlatn, they'd know what it refers to,
even without having to look up the long form. So here's the train of
thought i went thru:
janalif		(Tatar: Janalif)
huturlal	(Historical Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet)
hutalatn	(Historical Unified Turkic Alphabet, Latin)
hntalatn	(Historical New Turkic Alphabet, Latin)
hnutalat	(Historical New Unified Turkic Alphabet, Latin)
huntural	(Historical Unified Turkic Alphabet)
turkichl	(Turkic Historical Latin)
turkhula	(Turkic Historical Unified Latin Alphabet)
sutalatn	(Soviet Unified Turkic Alphabet (or Soviet Union Turkic
Alphabet), Latin)
ussrlatn	(USSR Latin)
I feel that Historical or Soviet, or USSR should be a part of the
variant name, because that would clearly identify that this alphabet
refers to the past practice. But thoughts on this would be welcome.
Note also, if the variant name or description doesn't mention Turkic
specifically, then that could be interpreted in the future as an open
door to add non-Turkic languages to the prefixes list. Now as mentioned
above, non-Turkic languages denoted some phonemes present in core
Historical Unified Turkic Alphabet with different letters, so it would
leave a small question about desirability of mingling non-Turkic
languages with Turkic ones in the same variant. On the other hand,
ussrlatn is really descriptive, and if dedicated to Turkic languages,
then it would a little bit of a question what non-Turkic languages, like
Tajik, or Chechen, could use as a variant for the same 1930s period. I
guess one could make up something like sulatn, and use tg-sulatn, or
sovtlatn, with description of Soviet Union Latin. Nobody will probably
care, but if someone did they could argue why did Turkic languages get a
self-descriptive variant name, and we have to use a less descriptive
one? Of course, one could then say, the Turkological Congress of 1926
started the process, and Turkic languages led the way, and there's 10
languages in that list, so they deserve special treatment. There is of
course also a question of major Turkic languages transitioning to
contemporary Latin alphabets, so tk-Latn, for instance, can't possibly
be interpreted the same as tk-ussrlatn, which one could argue not to be
the case for Tajik language, tg, for instance.
If ussrlatn is used with the current prefixes list, one option would be
to leave the references to Turkic in Description and Comments, and then
remove them when a non-Turkic language is suggested to be added to the
prefixes list.
Well, my brain is overheated, so i'm just gonna outsource the rest of
the thinking to the more powerful ones present on this list. ;)

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