Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes The Kazakh language is currently written using a modified version of Cyrillic, a legacy of Soviet rule, but Mr. Nazarbayev announced in May that the Russian alphabet would be dumped in favor of a new script based on the Latin alphabet. Because Kazakh features many sounds that are not easily rendered into either the Cyrillic or Latin alphabets without additional markers, a decision needed to be made whether to follow Turkish, which uses the Latin script but includes cedillas, tildes, breves, dots and other markers to clarify pronunciation, or invent alternative phonetic pointers. Uzbekistan, which dropped Cyrillic in favor of the Latin script to write its own Turkic language in the 1990s, has an alphabet that sometimes requires apostrophes but not nearly as many as those mandated by Mr. Nazarbayev. Far less popular, however, has been a decision by the president in October to ignore the advice of specialists and announce a system that uses apostrophes to designate Kazakh sounds that don’t exist in other languages written in the standard Latin script. Mr. Satpayev said that The president is thinking about his legacy and wants to go down in history as the man who created a new alphabet, 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.
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