Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Simple Arabic Alphabet of Uyghur

Uyghur (Уйғур/ئۇيغۇر)

Uyghur is a Turkic language with about 10 million speakers mainly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, and also in Afghanistan, Australia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Turkey, the USA and Uzbekistan.

Uyghur was originally written with the Orkhon alphabet, a runiform script derived from or inspired by the Sogdian script, which was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script.
Between the 8th and the 16th century, Uyghur was written with an alphabet derived from Sogdian known as Old Uyghur. Unlike Sogdian, which was written from right to left in horizontal lines, the Old Uyghur alphabet was written from left to right in vertical columns,or in other words, it was a version of Sogdian rotated 90° to the left.
From the the 16th century until the early 20th century, Uyghur was written with a version of the Arabic alphabet known as 'Chagatai'.During the 20th century a number of versions of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were adopted to write Uyghur in different Uyghur-speaking regions. However the Latin alphabet was unpopular and in 1987 the Arabic script was reinstated as the official script for Uyghur in China.
The name of this language is variously spelt Uigur, Uiguir, Uighuir, Uygur,Uighur, Uygur, Uyghur or in Chinese, 维吾尔语(Wéiwú'ěryǔ). Uyghur is the preferred spelling in the Latin alphabet: this was confirmed at a conference of the Ethnic Languages and Script Committe of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region held in October 2006. For details (in Uyghur), see:
http://www.xjyw.gov.cn/han/YWGZDT/wwesiyingwenzhuanxie.htm