As well, the Latin letter "c/C" is not used, just for the digraph "ch/Ch".
But two distinct Cyrillic letters are mapped to Latin "h/H", when one could be mapped to Latin "x/X" with almost the same letter form to preserve the orthography. The three versions of the Cyrilic letter i is mapped to 1.5 (distinguished only on lowercase with the Turkic lowercase dotless i, but not distinguished on uppercase where there's no dot at all...). It should have used two distinct letters at least (I with or without acute). Yes it was possible to have a one-to-one mapping, and to allow full compatibiility with existing Kazakh Cyrillic keyboards maps (but not necessarily the additional US QWERTY layout in its existing Latin extension only made for typing English, and which could be dumped and replaced by the Kazakh Cyrillic-to-Latin one-to-one transliteration). No additional keystrokes was then necessary, no new hardware keyboards needed for using the orthography, if they just look at existing Cyrillic keycaps. New hardwares could have LAtin keycaps in the same positions (and the position of Cyrillic letters infered also by one-to-one transliteration). And then all documents in Kazakh could be extremely simply transliterated without loss. And new documents would also be readable instantly by the one-to-one transliterators for those that will be trained to only the Latin alphabet and will want to be able to read historic documents. But I fear that Kazakh governemnt does not care much of keeping things from the past and history is not their problem (they'll realize that this is not so simple because there are tons of historic documents that are still in the Cyrillic orthography and that must be legally kept unchanged (including international treaties, long term contracts, Kazakh justice decisions, legal personal records...): using a non one-to-one transliteration will cause legal problems even in the country itself, and various administrative problems with their citizens, or they'll need to duplicate the official databases to maintain the two orthographies and this will cause them computing costs, and storage costs, and problems in applications that will search one form and won't find the other, unless these applciatiosn are corrected (additional costs there too!). 2018-02-20 22:04 GMT+01:00 Michael Everson via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> : > Not using Turkic letters is daft, particularly as there was a widely-used > transliteration in Kazakhstan anyway. And even if not Ç Ş, they could have > used Ć and Ś. > > There’s no value in using diagraphs in Kazakh particularly when there > could be a one-to-one relation with the Cyrillic orthography, and I bet you > anything there will be ambiguity where some morpheme ends in -s and the > next begins with h- where you have [sx] and not [ʃ]. > > Groan. > > > On 20 Feb 2018, at 20:40, Christoph Päper <christoph.pae...@crissov.de> > wrote: > > > > Michael Everson: > >> Why on earth would they use Ch and Sh when 1) C isn’t used by itself > and 2) if you’re using Ǵǵ you may as well use Çç Şş. > > > > I would have argued in favor of digraphs for G' and N' as well if there > already was a decision for Ch and Sh. > > > > Many European orthographies use the digraph Qu although the letter Q > does not occur otherwise. > > >