> >Not a good idea: the Nogai and Khakass languages appear to have used both > >gha/oi and "i with lower right hook" according to > >http://www.writingsystems.net/languages/nogai/nogailatin.htm and > >http://www.writingsystems.net/languages/khakass/khakasslatin.htm . > > > >Charles Cox > > > > > > > Thank you, Charles. I note also that both Nogai and Khakass used the > dotless i with lower right as well as the small b or soft sign as > distinct characters, which implies that these two cannot be considered > as glyph variants as they might be for Azerbaijani. > > From the same site, > http://www.writingsystems.net/languages/azeri/azerilatin1.htm shows an > odd Azeri Latin alphabet for 1922-1928 which seems to have an L with a > hook, but this is probably an error for the dotless i with hook which is > missing.
Somebody probably needs to go to Baku to dig out actual printed materials from the 20's and 30's to make an assessment of actual usage. There are a lot of Cyrillic "characters" and Cyrilatinic "characters" from this period which are proposed based on single attestations in charts like this, without sufficient analysis of the actual typographic practice (including people substituting pieces of type for new characters not in their font cases) and acceptable ranges of variation at the time. My own interpretation of the likely identity of this is as an I-with-Cyrillicdescender, to represent the Turkic high back unrounded vowel (modern Turkish U+0049/U+0131). This would follow the Ukrainian precedent of using an I/i-shaped character (instead of the Cyrillic U+0418), and follow the Cyrillic practice of appending descenders (or hooks, often in free variation in actual practice in typography) to the letters as diacritics. The cited forms that look more like L/l with descenders could, in fact, just be pieces of type turned upside down (the U+0490 GHE WITH UPTURN that Peter noted), or could be people's misinterpretations of how the diacritic was being represented. During this period, the Latin orthographies for these Turkic languages were clearly not fully standardized in usage, and there presumably was contention between alternative conventions, including the use of capital/small soft sign for this sound. The ALA-LC gives yet more possibilities for Khakass during this period, including o-diaeresis and y-diaeresis for the back unrounded vowels (Khakass 1924-1927), and use of dotted-I/i for the unrounded front vowel (i.e. the modern Turkish convention) (Khakass 1939). --Ken
