If he doesn’t want to alienate Russia, then sticking with Cyrillic sounds like the sensible option here. Inventing your own weird apostrophe-script alienates everybody.
The article takes for granted that the linguist has the right of this argument, and I’m not qualified to say otherwise, but he does seem to be dismissing the difficulties in changing everyone’s keyboard. Even if they standardised on Turkish keyboards (not a bad choice in itself), it’d take a long time, and many people would likely always have English keyboards because there are just a lot more routes to getting a cheap QWERTY laptop than one made for the Kazakh market. The article implies that may already the norm, even though their current orthography is Cyrillic.
I’m also curious to know why they wouldn’t go back to using Arabic script, unless it’s just because they think the US would reflexively bomb them
Arabic script is most suitable for the Arabic language, since it reflects the structure of Arabic words - typically constructed of a 3-consonant “root” arranged with varying combinations of vowels and affixes (i.e. in various “forms”) to achieve meanings related to the root meaning. I’m less well informed on Turkic languages, except to say that their words aren’t constructed this way. This is one of the reasons why Ataturk had Turkey change from Arabic to Latin-based script in the 1920s.
Of course in the West, they’ll ignore the apostrophes just as they ignored them in the Wade-Giles Romanization scheme for Chinese.
Honestly I never saw that one till now, I only found it because I figured I can’t be the only one who thinks about Iran to that tune…
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Reminds me a lot of Trff Bmzklfrpz from the Doonesbury comic strip.
Former President-for-Life of the fictional Republic of Berzerkistan. Ex-President Bmzklfrpz was a typical dictator, and, according to an interview with Mark Slackmeyer, engaged in genocide and is anti-Semitic. In a parody of former Turkmenistan president Saparmurat Niyazov, he renamed the month of April (as well as a species of plant and a type of bird) “Trff”, after himself.
Life imitating art satirizing life? Pump up thevolumemeta.
Cool. That’s exactly who I had in mind. Who knows, maybe he’s a philosopher king.
W’h’a’t a’ s’h’i’t’h’o’l’e’ l’ang’u’a’ge
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