Talk:Azerbaijani alphabet

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This page was created as an orphan and needs synch up with the alphabets section of Azerbaijani language. The latter article refers to several alphabets - this article shows only two. I do not speak Azerbaijani so I can't work out how the two articles can be reconciled. --Cje 08:53, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Needs a little more

I cleaned up the alphabets and the table and removed the redundancy. I think it needs to be explained why the switch to the Latin alphabet was made.--Tim 07:32, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Because Cyrillic was associated with the Soviet Union, and because Turkey uses Latin. The latter had done much to associate itself with the Cyrillic alphabet by introducing it for almost all languages spoken in it.

While I am at it, though, I slapped the "dubious" tag on the idea that the Stalinist invention ə was reintroduced "chiefly due to national pride". As the second of the external links says:

Actually, I wasn't aware that any problem existed with the Azeri alphabet until I walked into one of Baku's highest educational institutions this past June. One of the top administrators confided, "We really have a problem with our new alphabet - it's that upside-down 'e' (the schwa). Do us a favor: in your next issue of Azerbaijan International, replace it with a combination "ae" or some such letter, and put a footnote at the bottom of the page explaining what you've done. The Latin alphabet is capable of handling every sound in our language. We shouldn't have created a letter that was outside the standard Latin alphabet."

I listened. This wasn't just some academic who happened to be disgruntled about a pedantic, esoteric matter. A respected linguist, he had been a member of the government's advisory board that had helped make the decision to adopt the new Latin alphabet when Azerbaijan gained its independence in 1991 and to rid themselves of Cyrillic which had been imposed on them by Stalin's regime.

"We were mostly linguists on that committee who made the decision to adopt the new Latin alphabet," he said. "We knew all about language, but we didn't have the technological computer expertise to anticipate all the complications we were getting into when we created a few letters of our own."

That troublesome upside-down "e" represents the /æ/ sound in the Azeri language. (In English, it's like the vowel sound in the words "fat cat.") The difficulty is that Azeri is the only language in the world that uses this letter. Curiously enough, this symbol was not included in the original alphabet that was adopted on December 25, 1991. At that time, the schwa sound was represented by an "a" with two dots (umlaut-ä). But since this sound is the most frequent in the entire language, the dotted "a" became very cumbersome. Not only was it awkward to write all those dots; it was slow and tedious and didn't appeal aesthetically, no matter whether the letter was written by hand or typed.

"We were mostly linguists on that committee who made the decision to adopt the new Latin alphabet," he said. "We knew all about language, but we didn't have the technological computer expertise to anticipate all the complications we were getting into when we created a few letters of our own."

That troublesome upside-down "e" represents the /æ/ sound in the Azeri language. (In English, it's like the vowel sound in the words "fat cat.") The difficulty is that Azeri is the only language in the world that uses this letter. Curiously enough, this symbol was not included in the original alphabet that was adopted on December 25, 1991. At that time, the schwa sound was represented by an "a" with two dots (umlaut-ä). But since this sound is the most frequent in the entire language, the dotted "a" became very cumbersome. Not only was it awkward to write all those dots; it was slow and tedious and didn't appeal aesthetically, no matter whether the letter was written by hand or typed.

[...] "And," I continued, "if the 'e' weren't such a big problem, how is it possible that you can walk into any bookstore in Baku and count on one hand (no exaggeration) the books that have been published in the new Latin alphabet? Nearly two years have passed since the alphabet was officially adopted, and Azerbaijanis are a highly literate society. But where are the books in the new Latin alphabet? There's a real problem here.

"If you take a very close look at the Ministry of Education's first primer (K[ə]rimov, 1992), it seems they had to customize every single upside-down 'e' by first printing an 'o,' then drawing a line through the center and cutting out a little wedge-an incredibly painstaking process."

There we have it: slapping on average 6 dots on every word was deemed too troublesome in handwriting and too ugly in print. I can't see any national pride here. David Marjanović 19:15, 17 June 2007 (UTC)