At 12:19 PM 1/2/2004, D. Starner wrote:
Can I assume that both the Pan-Turkic Latin orthography and the Pan-Nigerian alphabet postdate that?
The Pan-Turkic Latin orthography developed out of the modern Turkish orthography and Latin alphabets in use in the Soviet Turkic republics in the 1920s. ...
Vice versa for Turkish, surely? Turkey didn't adopt the Latin alphabet, at least formally, until 1928.
... Most of the latter alphabets were formalised after 1923, but some languages were already using Latin alongside Arabic earlier than that. For example, the Azeri communist newspaper _Yeni Yol_ used Latin exclusively from 1920.OK. They weren't pan-Turkic until later, though. And I wasn't aware of Latin script publications as early as 1920, although a Latin, or mixed Latin-Cyrillic, alphabet was proposed in Azerbaijan as early as 1878. Latin was a second official script in Azerbaijan from 20th October 1923, and this early script seems to have included the following non-Latin-1 characters (plus capital equivalents):
U+0259 É
U+01A3 Æ
?? dotless i with a hook to the right (possibly U+0269 É, but it actually looks more like a small caps L with a descender at the right hand end)
A glyph variant of U+014B Å
U+0275 É
U+0292 Ê
U+01B6 Æ
A more useful reference than the one I gave before is http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81_anar.html. See also http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81_akhundov.html; the headings of the first table have examples of the odd i with a hook, but sadly illegible (I can see them in the printed version of this magazine which I have), but there is one shown in the pictured alphabet scroll in http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81_mollanasraddin.html.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
