Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes - The New York Times

Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes - The New York Times

Another example of totalitarian manipulation of language for control, from a story about a new writing system for the Kazakh language.

'Later, growing fearful of pan-Turkic sentiment among Kazakhs, Uzbeks and other Turkic peoples in the Soviet Union, Moscow between 1938 and 1940 ordered that Kazakh and other Turkic languages be written in modified Cyrillic as part of a push to promote Russian culture. To try to ensure that different Turkic peoples could not read one another's writings and develop a shared non-Soviet sense of common identity, it introduced nearly 20 versions of Cyrillic, Mr. Kocaoglu said....

'The modified Latin alphabet put forward by Mr. Nazarbayev uses apostrophes to elongate or modify the sounds of certain letters.

'For example, the letter "I" with an apostrophe designates roughly the same sound as the "I" in Fiji, while "I" on its own sounds like the vowel in fig. The letter "S" with an apostrophe indicates "sh" and C' is pronounced "ch." Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s'i'i'e, and pronounced she-ee-ye....

'The only reason publicly cited by Mr. Nazarbayev to explain why he did not want Turkish-style phonetic markers is that "there should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer," he said in September. He also complained that using digraphs to transcribe special Kazakh sounds would cause confusion when people try to read English, when the same combination of letters designates entirely different sounds....

'"The president is thinking about his legacy and wants to go down in history as the man who created a new alphabet," said Mr. Satpayev, who supports the switch to Latin script but not the president's version. "The problem is that our president is not a philologist."'