Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 26 – The Turkic-language
countries which emerged on the demise of the Soviet Union have discovered that alphabets
based on Latin script can be as divisive as those based on Cyrillic. As a
result, their shift from the Soviet-imposed Cyrillic scripts to Latin-based
scripts they have chosen for themselves has been difficult.
Turkey wanted the newly independent Turkic
countries to adopt its Latin-script alphabet, hoping thereby to unite them.
Many initially moved in that direction, but then for various reasons, including
phonetic differences among them, they backed off. Now, Uzbekistan, announcing what
it calls the last alphabet reform, has moved back to one like in Turkey.
This week, Uzbek linguists at Tashkent
State University published the final version of a renewed Uzbek alphabet, one
that in most respects returns to the 1993 version that was closed to the Turkish,
thus doing away with the reforms that were introduced in 1995 (currenttime.tv/a/uzbekistan-alvafit-aphabet-letters-linguistics/29955997.html).
If this new version is introduced,
it will bring the way in which Uzbek is written close not only to Turkish but
also to Karakalpak, Kazakh and Azerbaijani, thus making it easier for speakers
of one of these languages to interact with speakers of others and make use of
publications from them and encouraging them to think of themselves as a community.
At the same time, yet another
alphabet change in Uzbekistan will complicate things for people there. Often
when there is an alphabet reform, those used to the old alphabet will stop
reading publications in the new, something that affects not only the news media
but society more generally.
Indeed, such changes can cut one
generation off from another, with members of each having their preferred alphabet.
Presumably in this case, the changes are not so large than this will be a
problem; but that there are again changes at all underscores how difficult making
any reform really is.
No comments:
Post a Comment