Q LEGALIZED IN TURKEY.

Mark Liberman at the Log reports on the legalization of the letters Q, W, and X as part of Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Democratization Package”:

The Turkish Alphabet Law of 11/1/1928 was aimed at shifting Turkish from Arabic-based to Latin-based orthography, and it was quite effective in suppressing the use of the Ottoman script. But it has also been used to suppress Kurdish, historically spoken by 10-25% of the country’s population.

But the post is especially worth reading for the passage from Gravity’s Rainbow Mark cites (“ƣ seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate…”); if you enjoy that as much as I do, you will want to read the much more extensive series of quotes from Pynchon’s masterpiece in this nine-year-old Log post (and a quote from a different section at this eight-year-old LH post)—and, hopefully, the book itself.

Comments

  1. I guess they were fed up with always losing at Scrabble.

  2. Great tales there, in Baku and in Seven Rivers too, wow. One of my relatives was a real-life Azerbaijani linguist posted to Kyrgyzstan (and newly married to my aunt, a native Francophone Jewish poet who learned to ride on horseback in those road-less highlands). But he spent most of his life rather unproductively, behind the barbed wire of various labor camps and concentration camps…

  3. ƣ seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive.

    That of course is what it isn’t; it represented a velar or uvular sound depending on the language being written, but was in either case a fricative.

    The distinction between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate.

    I don’t know where Tchicherine comes from, but I wonder if Southern Russian /g/ is still typically a voiced velar fricative in his time. I once read a late-19C pedagogical grammar of German (in English) which explains that g is a voiced fricative in German.

  4. David Marjanović says

    velar or uvular sound depending on the language being written

    I think it was only used for Turkic languages, so uvular in all of them, right? Is Azerbaijani an exception?

    I wonder if Southern Russian /g/ is still typically a voiced velar fricative in his time.

    Good point. I’ve heard Russian-speaking Ukrainians use [ɣ] on YouTube.

  5. I think it was only used for Turkic languages

    No, it was used in many Caucasian languages of five (out of seven) families as well.

    so uvular in all of them, right? Is Azerbaijani an exception?

    Here’s the best breakdown I can get:

    /ʁ/: Abaza (NWC), Abkhaz (NWC), Avar (NEC), Bashkir (Turkic), Kabardian (NWC), Karaim (Turkic), Kazakh (Turkic), Kumyk (Turkic), Kyrgyz (Turkic), Lezgian (NEC), Yakut (Turkic), Tajik (IE), Tatar (Turkic), Uzbek (Turkic)

    /ɣ/: Azerbaijani (Turkic), Crimean Tatar (Turkic), Karakalpak (Turkic), Khakas (Turkic), Kurdish (IE), Laz (Kartvelian), Nogai (Turkic), Talysh (IE), Tat (IE)

    Both: Turkmen (Turkic) [phonemic distinction but not made in writing]. Udi (NEC) [no phonemic distinction]

    I don’t know: literary Dargin (NEC), Karachay-Balkar (Turkic), Lak (NEC), Tsakhur (NEC), Tuvan [Turkic]

    Urgh, that was brutal; I had to look at a lot of Wikipedia pages and in some cases the answer was not evident and had to be inferred.

  6. David Marjanović says

    Wow, thanks!

    I still think some of the velar ones will turn out to be uvular because that distinction hasn’t often been made by inexpert phoneticians, but for now I’ll just shut up 🙂

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