Қазақстан/Kazakhstan/Qazaqstan

October 31, 2017 5:02 PM

On October 26, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree that Kazakhstan would transition from the Cyrillic script to Latin by 2025

DW:

Officials said the switch is part of a modernization drive and an attempt to make use of technology easier. The Kazakh Cyrillic keyboard, for example, uses all number and punctuation keys in order to cover the 42 letters of Cyrillic alphabet.

[...]

The switch is also seen as an attempt by Kazakhstan to distance itself from Russian influence and promote nationalism.

According to the 2009 census, only 62 percent of the population is fluent in written and spoken Kazakh. Some 85 percent of the population is fluent in Russian.

BBC:

If even the name of the country would change from Kazakhstan to Qazaqstan, just imagine the potential for confusion in people's daily lives?

Let's look at the innocent carrot for an example: The Kazakh word for carrot is "сәбіз" and would traditionally be spelled "sabeez" in Latin. In new Latin alphabet though, it will end up as "sa'biz".

This, again, is awfully close to the Latin spelling of an extremely rude Russian swear word.

Not all the mix-ups are as delicate as this one: But there's ample discussion online of people confused and amused by how they now should write their own names and whether the change will work out well nor not.

Note: The BBC article says the transition will be difficult as the Latin script has only 26 letters. The new Kazakh script will omit C, W, and X and have 9 additional characters with apostrophes, making the total 32.

Kazakh speakers in China, Iran, and Afghanistan still use the Arabic script.

Fellow Turkic nations Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and, Turkmenistan transitioned to the Latin alphabet after 1991. Kyrgyzstan still uses Cyrillic, as does the Persian speaking Tajikistan (although there's debate on whether to switch to Perso-Arabic).

Further discussion earlier this month at Languagehat's Blog.

posted by Freelance Demiurge (21 comments total)

(makes a mental note to be careful what he says about a Kazakh's carrot..)
posted by Nerd of the North at 5:13 PM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]

The BBC article says the transition will be difficult as the Latin script has only 26 letters. The new Kazakh script will omit C, W, and X and have 9 additional characters with apostrophes, making the total 32.

So they're not even employing unique characters or characters with diacritics, the way that Turkish does? I'll point out that Turkish transitioned from Arabic script to a Latinesque alphabet, which literally involved flipping the entire direction of the text. I'll grant that there were unusual historical circumstances in Turkey's case, but I don't see how "the Latin script has only 26 letters" is, in itself, the primary reason for difficulties in transition.
posted by inconstant at 6:06 PM on October 31, 2017

I wrote that line because I felt that the BBC article gave the impression that the new alphabet would only have 26 letters. Apologies, it seems I was unclear myself.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 6:33 PM on October 31, 2017

No, no, I'm expressing incredulity at the BBC article, which seems to be under the impression that all this is some kind of wildly unprecedented sociolinguistic anomaly. (It isn't.)
posted by inconstant at 7:19 PM on October 31, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was temporarily amazed when I found that stateside Persians/Iranians routinely text in Roman characters that sound Farsi.
posted by Brian B. at 7:40 PM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

Egyptian Arabic speakers do the same thing, with numbers to represent letters that don’t exist in the Roman alphabet (selected because they look like the Arabic letters in question).

(Non-Egyptian Arabic speakers may do the same thing but my experience is only with Egyptians)
posted by Itaxpica at 8:00 PM on October 31, 2017

I was told by an Armenian, that language has 17 vowels. Then he pronounced Urartu and it sounded like Woorahrtu, with the emphasis on the Woo, and I realized why the lazy English just gave up and called the place Ur.
posted by Oyéah at 8:59 PM on October 31, 2017 [2 favorites]

(makes a mental note to be careful what he says about a Kazakh's carrot..)

Carrot in Welsh is moron.
posted by conic at 9:30 PM on October 31, 2017 [4 favorites]

(makes a mental note to be careful what he says about a Kazakh's carrot..)


I was happily imagining a forlorn and unimaginative tourist at a swingers' party sitting alone on a couch clutching a bowl of carrots - reality is again a disappointment.

Digging through
http://www.youswear.com/swear-by-letter.asp?language=Russian&letter=S
reveals
S'ebis' - Get the fuck out
as the likely candidate.


Buzzfeed's 17 Russian Swear Words We Definitely Need In English is more rewarding and possibly useful.
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:07 PM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]

Neither the BBC nor the DW article indicates what everyday citizens think about all this. Will this screw over or disenfranchise a chunk of people slower to adapt to the changes in what they read and write?
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:10 PM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was told by an Armenian, that language has 17 vowels. Then he pronounced Urartu and it sounded like Woorahrtu, with the emphasis on the Woo, and I realized why the lazy English just gave up and called the place Ur.

Speaking solely from the perspective of someone who has read a bunch of Wikipedia articles, I think there are a multiplicity of places referred to as "Ur"—the originally-Sumerian Mesopotamian city of Ur founded in the third millenium BCE which had the patron god Nanna/Sin and appears in the Sumerian Kings List as 𒋀𒀕𒆠 or 𒋀𒀊𒆠 transliterated as "Urim", but also for example the city which the Biblical Abraham was identified as coming from called Ur of the Chaldees / Ur Kaśdim "אוּר כַּשְׂדִּים‎" in the Tanakh which may have been the aforementioned city because it was ruled by the Chaldeans at one point (that's the current majority opinion, I think?) but has also been associated with the different Mesopotamian archaeological site in the latter article above which was founded during the second millenium BCE; or, there are several other candidates for the Abraham Ur including Urartu as you mention, an ancient kingdom and region approximately between Mesopotamia and the Caucuses where languages from the Hurro-Urartian language family were spoken and which was recorded in the second and first millenia BCE.

Another place identified as the "Ur Kaśdim", by Jewish and Muslim medieval scholars, is the city which appears in the Sumerian Kings List as 𒌷𒀕 or 𒌷𒀔, "Unug" in Sumerian and "Uruk" in Akkadian, which lists Bilgamesh/Gilgamesh as one of the kings of its first dynasty, who also appears in the eponymous Epic of Gilgamesh.

On the topic of the OP, I'm annoyingly unable to find it at the moment but there was an FPP some time in the past few years about a woman who was doing very substantial journalism-in-exile about Uzbekistan from her home base in a Western country, but despite the web sites she was publishing on not being blocked by the government it appeared that very few Uzbeks were aware of the stories she was uncovering, things which would be major scandals in a liberal democracy. One of the linked articles explained that in addition to the usual repressions of an authoritarian society, another impairment to communicating and organizing among the people is that the oldest people are only literate in Uzbek written in Arabic script, the couple of generations which followed them can only read and write in Cyrillic, and now the youngest people read and write in Latin script, creating a sort of Balkanization of written culture.
posted by XMLicious at 11:17 PM on October 31, 2017 [4 favorites]

...aaaand speaking of cross-writing-script problems, כַּשְׂדִּים אוּר in my comment above seems to have gotten reversed and I missed the edit window to fix it.
posted by XMLicious at 11:34 PM on October 31, 2017

OK, question for all Kazakh speakers:

Presently there are two different "K" sounds in "Kazakhstan", represented by "k" and "kh".
If the word becomes "Qazaqstan", doesn't this mean that the two different sounds are represented by the same letter "q" in the future? Which looks to me like something (information contained in the written representation) will be lost. What gives?
posted by sour cream at 2:12 AM on November 1, 2017

Nine characters with apostrophes will be incorporated to signify hissing syllables as well as distinct Kazakh vowels.

Huge mistake, diacritics are the standard way to go here. Don't drag punctuation marks in to to the job of base letters.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:54 AM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

If the word becomes "Qazaqstan", doesn't this mean that the two different sounds are represented by the same letter "q" in the future?

I don't know any Kazakh (Qazaq?) but if you look at the Cyrillic spelling in the title of the OP, "Қазақстан", it's the same character 'Қ'. But per Wikipedia the way it's written in Cyrillic in Russian is Казахстан—using two different characters 'К' and 'Х', 'Х' being what's normally transliterated from Russian as "kh" in Latin characters. So, the difference would appear to be an artifact of Kazakh→Russian→Latin script?
posted by XMLicious at 3:06 AM on November 1, 2017

doesn't this mean that the two different sounds are represented by the same letter

Yes, it'll all be for nought if it hasn't been thought through enough.
posted by quinndexter at 4:34 AM on November 1, 2017 [7 favorites]

It's so naughty of them to introduce such a knotty problem which will take some linguistic karate to fix. Something something hottie eating gelati.
posted by XMLicious at 5:00 AM on November 1, 2017

doesn't this mean that the two different sounds are represented by the same letter

tip
chip
trip
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:35 AM on November 1, 2017

I'm not sure that "but English spelling is even more nonsensical" is a good argument.
posted by clawsoon at 4:56 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

It was very interesting to see dynamic between different generations of people in Uzbekistan when I was there about 8 years ago. The translation to Latin has made an entire generation effectively illiterate in their native language, with younger people illiterate in their parent's language. Will be interesting to see how this plays out in Kazakhstan, with only half the population but spread over a much greater area.

Edit: or what XMLicious said
posted by cholly at 5:27 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

An interesting point cholly! If you wanted to dump all the Soviet era stuff down the memory hole and build new people who only know the glorious president and devotion to him, this is one good way to get that happening.
posted by Meatbomb at 9:30 PM on November 1, 2017