The usage of Z WITH STROKE

Frédéric Grosshans frederic.grosshans at gmail.com
Fri Nov 25 10:18:37 CST 2016


Le 25/11/2016 à 15:38, Janusz S. Bień a écrit :
> Hi!
>
> There are two comments to the character(s) in the U0180 chart:
>
> 1. Pan-Turkic Latin orthography
> 2. handwritten variant of Latin “z”
>
> Ad 1.
>
> Do I understand correctly that the Pan-Turkic Latin ortography
> refers to the initiative described in the post to the Linguist list:
>
> https://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-187.html
>
> If so, where to find more information about it? I found already another
> post to the Linguist list
>
> https://linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-739.html
>
> but it contains only very general information.
The use of Latin (vs Arabic or Cyrillic)  alphabets in Turkic languages 
has been a heavily political subject for the whole 20th century. You can 
find a lots of information of the pre-1991 situation in Mark Dickens’ 
article “Soviet Language Policy  in Central Asia” 
http://www.oxuscom.com/lang-policy.htm#alphabet . The end of USSR in 
1991 was the occasion of new reform, but some were cancelled, like for 
Tatar, since the only official alphabet allowed in Russia is Cyrillic 
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatar_alphabet).

However, the modern (1990’s) turkic alphabets do not contain ƶ 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_Alphabet . It was used for 
waht is know written with j in the 1930’s USSR’s uniform Turkic alphabet 
aka Jaꞑalif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C3%B1alif.
The Wikipedia pages of Azerbaijani, Turkman, Crieman Tatar anad Usbek 
alphabets mention this historical use 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_alphabet , 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkmen_alphabet , 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatar_alphabet , 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbek_alphabet .

This letter was also used for other orthographies : The 1931–41 Latin 
Mongolian orthography 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Latin_alphabet), and a 1992 
Latin orthography used by secessionist Chechens
>
> Ad 2.
>
> I'm curious how widespread, in time and space, is/was this
> convention. Can you suggest to me where to search for this information?
I was told in elementary (French) school too write Z this way. I guess 
you should look at elementary schoolbooks for various languages, or 
since it’s a handwritten convention, on references about calligraphy 
and/or paleography.



More information about the Unicode mailing list