Uyghur Latin transcription

This is an article I posted on Unilang a while ago:

'There have been too many attempts to transcribe Uyghur with Latin letters and the idiosyncratic versions only lead to confusion. The Chinese even went so far as to suggest ‘x’ for the ‘sh’ sound and ‘q’ for the ‘ch’ sound, as if it was Mandarin pinyin! Here on Unilang I propose a single, standard transcription for Uyghur as discussed below. Criticisms are always welcome.

First of all, I propose that the principles of Latinising Uyghur should be 1. the transcription should be simple and aesthetically pleasing; and we should avoid digraphs as much as possible; 2. it should show its Turkic characteristics. So we should look to other Turkic languages which have succeeded in Latinising their writing systems for examples.

I suggest that we transcribe ‘sh’ ش as ş and ‘ch’ چ as ç, following the examples of Turkish. Letter ‘c’ should take the same value as in Turkish – voiced alveolar affricate while letter ‘j’ takes the value of voiced alveolar fricative (as in French ‘bonjour’). 

As for the pair غ and خ (voiced and voiceless velar fricative), I suggest that we use the Turkish ğ and the Azeri x respectively. The Turkish ğ, although having no phonetic value in the modern language, is the remnant of an old sound that used to be found in the language and was lost in the history of language evolution. Since the sound is well alive in Modern Uyghur, ğ deserves to be reassigned its old value when it’s used in Uyghur. A good example is the word çağ (time) which exists in both Turkish and Uyghur; the ğ is silent in the former but clearly pronounced in the latter. Different from the Turkish ğ, the Uyghur ğ can start a word, as in ğam ‘sorrow’ (غام) (the Turkish cognate is ‘gam’). There’s nothing wrong with ‘kh’ representing the voiceless velar fricative, as many people do when transcribing Persian, but adopting the Azeri x follows the principle of avoiding digraphs. Moreover, letter ‘x’ is itself the traditional symbol for the voiceless velar fricative: it ‘cognate letters’ are used to represent this sound in Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Since Azeri, a Turkic language, also uses it, we should follow the example. 


I also suggest that we use the Azeri ‘upside down e’, ə, to represent the mid-open front vowel /æ/which occurs in both Azeri and Uyghur. Most transcription systems don’t distinguish between /æ/ and /e/ in Uyghur, which I find very misleading and irresponsible. They sound rather similar on their own but depending on the phonological context, one can sound more open and the other can sound more close. It is absolutely necessary to make a distinction in writing, as the Arabic system and the Cyrillic system both do. As I said, we look to Azeri because it is a Turkic language, and we need something simple and easy to write. If it was not for this reason, umlaut ä or æ would satisfy perfectly. Phoneticians would complain about the confusion with the IPA symbol for the schwa, but writing is different from IPA symbols that always have to stay in brackets. Since Azeri uses it for both its Latin and Cyrillic versions of writing, we can be confident about assigning this value to a letter that looks like an IPA symbol. 

There is only one potential digraph left, ‘ng’, which is commonly used in many languages to represent the velar nasal stop. Since it’s a convention to use it in languages based on the Latin-alphabet we could well adopt it in transcribing Uyghur. However, confusion arises when it becomes ambisyllabic. In Uyghur, the velar nasal stop remains intact when it is in the coda position of the previous syllable while occupying simultaneously the onset position of the following syllable. It does not break up to n-g as the orthography would visually suggest. For example, the word yengi ‘new’ (cf. Turkish ‘yeni’) is read as ‘ye-ngi’ (the same pronunciation can also be broken down into two syllables as ‘yeng-i’ since it’s ambisyllabic, but no gap is heard), never ‘yen-gi’. However, since visual perception affects oral execution, learners of Uyghur or children would be confused about the pronunciation. Writing it as yeng’i would be worse, since it’d suggest a glottal stop between yeng and i. The Arabic writing system deals with it well, using only one single letter ڭ for this phoneme, and so does the Cyrillic alphabet which Uyghur briefly employed (unfortunately my keyboard doesn’t have this letter, but you can refer to the lyrics posted by zhiguli, where the velar nasal sound is represented by the Russian ‘n’ with a hook). So we should basically use the Latin letter ‘n’ and add a diacritic to it. The Spanish ñ is used by a lot of Native American languages to represent this sound, which I would not suggest that we do, since the Spanish ñ is too well known for its original value – palatal nasal and even though its value is not fixed, the use of it would remind people of Native American languages, whereas here we are dealing with a Turkic language. Turkmen uses ň to represent its velar nasal and it is a possible solution for Uyghur. However, I personally would hesitate to use it because the hacek is characteristic of Slavic languages written in Latin letters. I found in Latvian the letter ņ (n cedilla) which I’d personally prefer to use, because it harmonises well with the other cedillas – ş and ç and is aesthetically pleasing. It is also easier to write, since we write from top to bottom and it is more natural to mark the bottom part rather than going back to the top to add things there. Although the Latvian ņ is really used to represent the palatal nasal of the language, its value is less known outside the language community and consequently it is easier to assign a new value to it when it’s used in another language.'