Thursday, October 27, 2005
Map of Turkic Alphabets
"Written Turkic," by Curzon, Coming Anarchy, 26 October 2005, http://www.cominganarchy.com/archives/2005/10/26/written-turkic/.
Curzon from ComingAnarchy presents a beautiful map on the three-way split in how Turkic languages are written
Latin in the West, Cyrillic in the Center, Arabic in the East
Local expert Nathan gives his own view
And not just Cyrillic, but very different Cyrillic alphabets. I can kind of get written Kyrgyz and Kazakh, but I’m not entirely sure what sounds the vowels make.
On the map, I’d at least put Uzbekistan as a mix of blue and green. Even when I was there, Latin signs were fairly common and like I said, some kids couldn’t read Cyrillic.
Dari’s written in Arabic script. Tajik, however, is written in Cyrillic (but I think they’re supposed to be switching to Latin).
Beautiful cartography. Check it out
10:40 Posted in Central Asia | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: alphabets, turkic, languages, cyrillic