Product Code Database
Uyghur language is a Turkic languages with a long literary tradition spoken in Xinjiang, China by the Uyghurs. Today, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet is the official writing system used for Uyghur in Xinjiang, whereas other alphabets like the Uyghur Cyrillic alphabets are still in use outside China, especially in Central Asia, and Uyghur Latin is used in western countries.
The Old Uyghur language evolved into the modern Western Yugur, and remained in use until the 18th century among the Yugur.
The Arabic-derived alphabet taken into use first came to be the so-called Chagatai script, which was used for writing the Chagatai language and the Turki (modern Uyghur) language, but fell out of use in the early 1920s, when the Uyghur-speaking areas variously became a part of, or under the influence of, the Soviet Union.
The Chagatai alphabet is known as Kona Yëziq ().
The Syriac alphabet has also been used for writing Old Uyghur at some time between the 5th century and 19th century.
With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the promotion of a Cyrillic script began, but when the tensions between the Soviet Union and China grew during the late 1950s, the Chinese devised a new alphabet based upon Pinyin and Cyrillic (with some letters borrowed from the Soviet's Uniform Turkic Alphabet – a Cyrillic-influenced Latin alphabet, with Latin letters like Ə, Gha, Ⱨ, Ɵ, etc.), which is known as the Uyghur New Script and promoted this instead, and which soon became the official alphabet of usage for almost 10 years.
In 1982 Uyghur new script was abolished, the Arabic alphabet was reinstated in a modified form as the Uyghur Arabic alphabet.XUAR Government Document No. XH-1982-283 However, due to the increasing importance of information technology, there have been requests for a Latin alphabet, for easier use on . This resulted in five conferences between 2000 and 2001, where a Latin-derived auxiliary alphabet was devised known as the Uyghur Latin alphabet.
In the table below, the alphabets are shown side-by-side for comparison, together with phonetic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is only grouped by phonemic proximity; each alphabet has its own sorting order. Some letter forms that are used for words borrowed from other languages (notably proper names), or kept occasionally from older orthographic conventions, are shown in parentheses.
| {class="wikitable" style="font-size:125%;line-height:1.6;text-align:center" | + Consonants | |
| M m | ||
| N n | ||
| D d | ||
| T t | ||
| B b | ||
| P p | ||
| F f | ||
| Q q | ||
| K k | ||
| Ng ng | ||
| G g | ||
| Gh gh | ||
| H h | ||
| X x | ||
| Ch ch | ||
| Ch ch | ||
| J j | ||
| Zh zh | ||
| Zh zh | ||
| Z z | ||
| S s | ||
| Sh sh | ||
| Sh sh | ||
| R r | ||
| L l | ||
| + Vowels | ||
| A a | ||
| E e | ||
| Ë ë | ||
| I i | ||
| Ö ö | ||
| O o | ||
| U u | ||
| Ü ü | ||
| + Semivowels | ||
| Y y | ||
| W w | ||
| + Compounds from Cyrillic | ||
| Yu yu | ||
| Ya ya | ||
As can be seen, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet, Uyghur New Script, ALA-LC Uighur Romanization, and Uyghur Latin alphabet each has a total of 32 letters (if one included their digraphs, which are: in all three Latin-based alphabets; also , , , & in ULY and ALA-CL, and in this last further , as well as their vowels bearing diacritics). Differences may still exist in texts using ULY (the most recently devised of the Latin orthographies) in that its standard is sometimes written by instead , that is to say, with the acute accent in place of the diaeresis, without this variation denoting any difference in Uyghur pronunciation.
The Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet has three additional letters, the Cyrillic soft letters/ligatures , , and , representing , , and , respectively, which are written with an independent consonant and vowel in the other alphabets. Some words may still use the Cyrillic soft sign. Also, of Russian language origin are often spelled as they are in Russian, and thus not adapted to Uyghur orthography.
Another notable feature of the Uyghur New Script is the use of the letter to represent (sometimes incorrectly rendered as ). This letter has erroneously been named LATIN LETTER OI in Unicode, although it is correctly referred to as gha and replaced by the digraph in the newer Uyghur Latin alphabet.
In the ALA-LC Uighur Romanization and the Uyghur Latin alphabet, only the ISO basic Latin alphabet is needed plus in the way of diacritic marks that occur above vowels (which are supported by many fonts and encoding standards) only: in both spellings diaeresis (umlaut) and in the ALA-LC breve as well. The letter is only used in the digraph, and the letter is normally not used in the Uyghur Latin except in loanwords, where a difference exists between foreign and native . Another detail of the Uyghur Latin is that may be interchangeably represented by either of two letter: either using or as — although the latter is also used for (and, when the thus becomes ambiguous by serving also in place of the , speakers can still resolve the ambiguity from facts such as that the tends to occur in words from Russian vs. the in ones from Perso-Tajik, Arabic, and Mandarin). One might view this in the Arabic-script and Cyrillic orthographies as merely as a graphic variant of the , effectively reducing the number of letters in these two alphabets from 32 to 31. Users have found this variation in spelling acceptable as long as it does not obscure any semantic distinction.
One of the major differences among the four alphabets is the rules of when the glottal stop is written.
In Uyghur Arabic alphabet, it is consistently written, using the hamza on a tooth , including at the beginning of words. However, in that position, the glottal stop is not considered by Uyghurs a separate letter, but rather to be just a support for the vowel that follow.
In the Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet and Uyghur New Script, the glottal stop was only written word-medially, using an apostrophe (), but it is not required and thus not very consistent.
And finally, in the ALA-LC Uighur Romanization and the Uyghur Latin alphabet, the glottal stop is written between and (likewise using an apostrophe, but consistently), and also to separate , , , , and when these represent two rather than being digraphs for a single consonant (for example the word bashlan’ghuch, pronounced and meaning beginning, which could have been without the apostrophe).
The text is taken from the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
on line since 2015.
|
|
