Yañalif

The earliest written text in a Kipchak language, specifically the Cuman language, an ancestor of the modern Tatar language and written with Latin characters, is the Codex Cumanicus, dated 1303. Such texts were used by Catholic missionaries to the Golden Horde. Their Latin script ceased to be used after Gazaria was taken over by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. For centuries some Tatar languages as well as some other Turkic languages used a modified Arabic alphabet, İske imlâ. The deficiencies of this alphabet were both technical (abundance of positional letterforms complicated adoption of modern technology such as typewriters and teleprinters) and linguistic (Arabic language has only three vowel qualities, but Tatar has nine, which had to be mapped onto combinations and variations of the three existing vowel letters). Because of this some Turkic intelligentsia tended to use the Latin or Cyrillic script. The first attempts appeared in the mid-19th century among Azerbaijanis. At the same period the Russian missionary Nikolay Ilminsky, along with followers, invented a modified Russian alphabet for the Turkic peoples of Idel-Ural, for the purpose of Christianization; Muslim Tatars did not use his alphabet. In 1908–1909 the Tatar poet started to use the Latin script in his works. He used several digraphs: ea for [æ], eu for [y], eo for [ɵ] and ei for [ɯ]. Arabists turned down his project, preferring to reform İske imlâ. The simplified Arabic script, known as Yaña imlâ, was used in 1920–1927. Sounds specific to the Bashkir language were written with digraphs. On July 3, 1927, Tatarstan officials declared Yañalif the official script of the Tatar language, replacing the Yaña imlâ script. The first variant of Yañalif did not have separate letters for K and Q (realized as K) and for G and Ğ (realized as G), V and W (realized as W). Ş (sh) looked like the Cyrillic letter Ш (she). C and Ç were realized as in Turkish and the modern Tatar Latin alphabet and later were transposed in the final version of Yañalif. : A B C Ç D Dh E F G Ĝ H I J K L M N Ꞑ O Ö P Q R S T Th U Ü W V X Y Z Ƶ Ə Э Latin dustь (1924) alphabetical order: : A B Ĝ Ç D E Ä Y F Gh G H I J Q K L M N Ng Ö O P R S T U Ü W X Z Ƶ Ş Original Yañalif (1927) alphabetical order: : A B C Ç D E É Э F G H I J K L M N Ꞑ O Ó P R S T U V X Y Z Ƶ Ш W ==Decline==

Using two different alphabets for Russian and Turkic languages was problematic: people had to learn two different alphabets, confusing letters of one alphabet for letters from another, and Turkic languages had to use specific typewriters instead of sharing typewriters with Russian. In order to overcome these issues, a decision was made to convert Turkic languages to Cyrillic. In 1939 the Soviet government prohibited Yañalif although it remained in use until January 1940. Yañalif was also used in Nazi gazettes for prisoners of war and propaganda during World War II. The alphabet served until the 1950s, because most of the schoolbooks were printed before World War II. Some Tatar diasporas also used Yañalif outside of the Soviet Union, for example the Tatar bureau of Radio Free Europe. For 12 years of usage the Latin script, Arabic script (and not only Yaña imlâ, but İske imlâ too) also were used. One of the Musa Cälil's Moabit Notebooks was written in Yañalif, and another was written in Arabic letters. Both notebooks were written in German prison, after 1939, the year when the Cyrillic script was established. ==Restoring Yañalif ==

does not have separate encoding in Unicode. Cyrillic Ь is used. Only some Tatar fonts use this glyph., a variant of Ŋ, that was used in Yañalif and is represented in Unicode since 6.0. Only some Tatar fonts use this glyph at the position of Ñ. In the 1990s some wanted to restore Yañalif, or Yañalif +W, as being appropriate for the modern Tatar phonetics. But technical problems, such as font problems and the disuse of Uniform Turkic alphabet among other peoples, forced the use of a "Turkish-based alphabet". In 2000 such an alphabet was adopted by the Tatarstan government, but in 2002 it was abolished by the Russian Federation. Inalif The "Internet-style" alphabet named Inalif after Internet and älifba was convented in 2003 and partly it was inspired by Yañalif. The main purpose of this alphabet was standardization of texts, which are typed on a standard English keyboard, without any diacritical marks. But this is not a simple transliteration of non-English symbols of Yañalif or modern alphabet. Sounds absent from English are represented with digraphs; soft vowels are represented as a combination of the pairmate and apostrophe, apart from , corresponding to ⟨ь⟩ in Yañalif, which is represented as ⟨y⟩, probably under influence of transliteration of Russian. Like in Yañalif, ⟨j⟩ represent , and ⟨zh⟩ is used for , corresponding to ⟨ƶ⟩ in Yañalif. ⟨x⟩ isn't used in Inalif, and ⟨kh⟩ is used instead. Other changes include: ⟨ä⟩ → ⟨a'⟩; ⟨ö⟩ → ⟨o'⟩; ⟨ü⟩ → ⟨u'⟩; ⟨ç⟩ → ⟨ch⟩; ⟨ğ⟩ → ⟨gh⟩; ⟨ñ⟩ → ⟨ng⟩; ⟨ş⟩ → ⟨sh⟩. The sorting order of Inalif isn't specified, but in practice, the English sorting order is used. Inalif is used only on the Internet. == Criticism ==

Tatar literary scholar Hatip Minnegulov: "The replacement of the Arabic script, used by our people for more than a thousand years, with the Latin and soon the Cyrillic alphabet was a terrible blow to the continuity of the people's memory, which can be considered as burning the bridges between the past and the present". Jussi Ahtinen-Karsikko wrote in Finland in 1934: "The change made in the footsteps of the religious indifference formed under the influence of Kemal Pasha's French spirit" felt as if "a thousand-year-old precious tradition had been frivolously sacrificed in favor of a suspicious Western progressiveness". The Head of the Middle East and Central Asia Section at the British Library, Michael Erdman, feels that the Turkic usage of Arabic script, which dates back to the 10th century when Islam was adopted by Turkic communities, is not as unsuitable as critics claim. Erdman thinks that it is entirely possible to use the script while taking into account the unique vocal features of each languages, which a vast amount of reform efforts in the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union show. He also takes aim at the claim that Arabic script is solely connected to religion and thus backwardness by showcasing modern scientific works created in this writing. Erdman reminds that millions of Turkic people, such as the Uyghurs of China and Azeris of Iran, still use the Arabic script. It has been argued also, that the Arabic script was more unifying for Turkic peoples; "The very limitations of the Arabic script might be considered as its strength. In essence, while the Arabic script was able to add letters to represent vowels, the obscuring of the same vowels allowed for easier comprehension between speakers with different pronunciations". ==Sources==