From: ajk@garnet.berkeley.edu (Adam Jacobs)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.tuva,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Uighur & other scripts.
Date: 8 Nov 1992 17:56:20 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu
Summary: Modern Uighur

In article <1992Nov8.143205.22191@prime.mdata.fi> karttu@mits.mdata.fi
(Antti Karttunen) writes:

>...
>Well, now I found it, my photocopies of "Writing Systems of the World",
>by Akira Nakanishi (Published by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.
>ISBN 0-8048 1293-4)
>...
>page 84:
>
>    Sinkiang [shinjang; shinchiang]
>    In the Sinkiang Uighur autonomous region, Uighur (Turkish/Altaic)
>    and Kazakh (Turkish/Altaic) are spoken; both are written in
>    Arabic script. The arabic alphabet for Uighur consists of thirty
>    letters, adding <sorry, can't reproduce with ascii ;-> and
>    excluding <ditto>. This arabic writing system expresses vowels
>    completely. Recently, Latin script has also been used for Uighur
>    and Kazakh.

    These data, while essentially correct, may be somewhat out of date.

    Here at the UCB linguistics department we are actively working on
modern Uighur in a field-methods seminar.  Our native informant (from
Urumqi) explains that the "official" script is Latin-based; in fact,
modelled after a standard Chinese romanization.  It is not perfectly
suited for Uighur, as it fails to show some important phonemic
distinctions (e.g. that between velar [k] and postvelar [q]), although
it almost certainly is more appropriate than Arabic script.
Apparently recent attempts to revive the use of the Arabic script have
led to the peculiar (though no longer rare) situation of young
children and grandparents sharing a skill that is not possessed by the
average Uighur of the parent generation.

    Incidentally modern Uighur is very close to the other
(non-Chuvash) Turkic languages, including Ottoman Turkish.  The chief
differences I've noticed THUS FAR (as a student of Turkish) can be put
into the following categories:

	- systematic phonological correspondences, e.g. Uighur initial
	  voiceless stop often corresponds to Turkish initial voiced stop
	- vocalic harmony is not so far-ranging in Uighur as in Turkish
	  (T. /atlar/ vs. U. /atler/)
	- some differences in verbal and nominal inflectional morphology:
	  - personal inflection of verbs is sometimes more transparently
	    related to the pronominal system in Uighur than in Turkish
	    (T. /ben bil-me-m/ "I don't know" vs. U. /men byl-me-y-men/)
	  - some tense/aspect marking, and notably the present progressive
	    form, differs between the two languages (T. /-Iyor/ vs.
	    U. /vat/)
	  - Uighur preserves a less phonologically degraded form of
	    most of the nominal suffixes (T /-A/ vs U /-GA/ allative)
	  We haven't studied the rich derivational verb morphology deeply
	  enough yet to make any real judgments here, but what we've seen
	  so far suggests that the same level of similarity is maintained;
	- some minor syntactic differences (e.g. normal attrib adj position)
	- various semantic splits (U /qol/ "hand" vs T /kol/ "arm")
	- a surprisingly small proportion of morphs elicited thus far
	  have no cognate in T (as judged by our native Turkish speaker).

Our informant says he had little trouble communicating in Turkey after
he had realized that "they say [gel] ("come") when I say [k^el]" and
so on.

Adam Jacobs Kuznetsov ajk@garnet.berkeley.edu
Dept. of Linguistics - Dept. of MCB/Neurobiology
U.C. Berkeley