Reshat Sabiq's requests for two Tatar orthographic variants

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
Thu Jan 4 18:06:21 CET 2007


Hi, all, Happy New Year (it's an important Holiday for me because it means a 
new start and I associate it with the Chinese New Year which emphasizes 
organizing one's house/putting things in order, and prosperity for all; also 
Kalenda Maya is a big holiday and has personal significance--it was Kalenda 
Maya in Japan when I was born though I was born somewhere on the other side 
of that date line)  Back to Reshat Sabiq's request:

>Addison Phillips yazmış:
> >> What about ussr1928 or ussr1938? Is it the case that (some of) these
> >> orthographies were introduces concurrently?
> >
> > Why the 'ussr' at all? There is precedent for using years on their own
> > for this purpose (see: -1901, -1996).
> >

I agree, I do not want to use the term ussr though it does have some 
historical significance and I can see why you are choosing it; but if the 
alphabet is in use today while the entity ussr is now sort of defunct and 
replaced  by the Russian Federation I do not think ussr is the right name.  
If the alphabet is in use today, you need a term that is meaningful today.

>The way are see it, the main choices can be categorized as follows:
>1) separate tag for each language (note that there's no unicode
>character for one letter in the original made up alphabets, but Å‹ is the
>closest apporximation available):
>1.1) janalif (Jaŋalif, Qazan Tatar)
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janalif
>1.2) canalip (Çaŋalip, Qazaq)
>http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%85%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%84%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%82
>Note, that Qazaq also has another variant: pinyin.

So how many variants do you want, 2 or 3?   Why that number, are these 
variants significantly different?  If so explain how they differ and why it 
makes sense to tag the alphabets/language variants differently?  Are these 
different languages you are talking about now or just different ways of 
writing the one language?  (I note in the one article I got to look at that 
you said that differences that did not exist or were minimal in the original 
languages really werecreated/augmented with the introduction of different 
ways of representing the vowels; so is that what these variants represent?)

1.3) Some of these, do not appear to have a cute abbreviation like the
>above, so a year or a combination of a year w/ something would probably
>be needed, possibly merging 1.3 with 3 below. 1927 as the date of the
>conference would be a starting point for most Turkic languages.


How many of 'these' are there?

I can see why you chose latn because these are in a latn and not Arabic or 
Cyrillic alphabet/script (or  are these in a Cyrillic script?)

Choose the one that is most meaningful.

Do let me know the number of total variants; you know I am not an expert on 
the Turkic or Tatar languages and on when the variation between two forms is 
significant enough to warrant a unique tag; you are going to have  to tell 
me what cases the variation is significant for and what tag you want!!!

Specify whether these are variants in the script or in the language too; and 
to what degree the script is the one script for that language variant or not 
when it is a language variant!!!

Also I would use dates only when they were relevant and easily available.

Like if it's the date of a well-known dictionary or event, maybe.  Otherwise 
no.

>2) A common abbreviation for Turkic languages, as used in many sources,
>such as NTA (New Turkic Alphabet), NA (New Alphabet), UTLA (Unified New
>Turkic Alphabet), etc. I guess most folks didn't like my abbreviations
>from the original request, and i can see the point of desirability of
>avoiding latn as part of such a variant.

I don't know which one; as I said I had less problems with latin than some; 
choose the best name for the alphabet(s) and let us know how many variants 
there are.

Best wishes, hope you get these through!


--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com

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