<aside> <img src="/icons/language_green.svg" alt="/icons/language_green.svg" width="40px" /> Bu məqələneñ Tatarçası

Эта статья на русском языке

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• Table of contents:

Alphabet

Rules

• There are no diphthongs as a phonetic feature in Tatar language, therefore a vowel can not be followed by another vowel, except in newest borrowings with original spelling. Definition of diphthong: a sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable

• At beginning or end of a base word, a double consonant can not occur:

  • “металл” → “metal”, not “metall”
  • “сценарий” → “senəri”, not “ssenari”

• The letters “Í” and “İ” ‘unwrap’ as “ıy” and “iy” when followed by a vowel:

  • “җый” → “cí”, “җыю” → “cıyu”
  • “тый” → “tí”, “тыю” → “tıyu”
  • “би” → “bi”, “бию” → “biyü”
  • “ти” → “ti”, “тию” → “tiyü”

  EXCEPTION: imperative form of the verb “ию” (to incline) and vocative “и” are written as “iy”, not “i”

  Outside this rule and the exception, letter “Y” never comes after letters “I” and “İ”. Therefore, the only possible combinations are ıyV and iyV, where “V” is any vowel.

• When the letter “U” or “Ü” is followed by a vowel, letter “W” is put between the vowels:

  • “алуы” → “aluwı”
  • “ууы” → “uwuwı”
  • “китүе” → “kitüwe”
  • “көлүе” → “kölüwe”

  EXCEPTION: imperative form of the verb “уу” (to scrub) is written as “uw”, not “u”

  Outside this rule and the exception, letter “W” never comes after letters “U” and “Ü”. Therefore, the only possible combinations are üwV and uwV, where “V” is any vowel.

• The apostrophe ( ' ) is used for two purposes:

  • Separates proper nouns from suffixes:

    • “New York**’**ta” - “in New York”
    • “Qazan**’**nan” - “from Kazan”

    Numbers are likewise considered proper nouns:

    • “1552**’**də” - “in 1552”

  • Indicates the glottal stop [ʔ] in certain words, such as “Qör**’ən”, “tə’sir”, “ma’**may”

• Proper nouns (toponyms, human names, ethnonyms, month names and etc.) are always written capitalised, and they preserve their common romanisation:

  • “Пекиндә” → “Beijing’tə”
  • “Пхеньяндә” → “Pyongyang’ta”

  However, old borrowings remain the same, without adopting a common romanisation:

  • “Məskəw’də” - “in Moscow”
  • “Qıtay’da” - “in China”

• Dot “ . ” is used after numbers to indicate ordinal numbers:

  • “20. bittə” - “at the twentieth page”
  • “8. bülektə” - “at the eighth section”

• If no available fonts support the letter “Əə”, it can be replaced by “Ää”

These are only the basic rules. More extensive rules, such as language-specific loanword importing rules, will be available soon, in sha’Allah.

Example texts:

Fatixa (Açuçı) sürəse

Ğabdulla Tuqay - İy tuğan tel

Ramazan Baytimer - Tatarstan dəwlət gimnı

Commentary

This Latin alphabet, named Neo-alif (thanks to “QQ” team for name idea) is my personal fix to the currently existing standart of Zamanalif. I am not the author of the entire system, I only adjusted it based off of Zamanalif after using it for a while, then doing some research and experimentation. I felt the need of creating a strict standart of Zamanalif, because most personalisations of others either don’t follow basic phonetic principles of a script, include too many interchangeable letters that would clutter the keyboards, or include obscure blocks of Unicode (below Latin Extended-A) that most fonts don’t support, resulting in relatively often tofus and inconsistent fonts within a single word, not solving the problems of the currently used Cyrillic alphabet. This alphabet, however, is objectively better in this regard:

• It almost entirely consists of Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement characters - only 10 (Əə, Çç, Şş, Ğğ, İ, ı) out of 71 total glyphs are from other blocks;
  • The letter “Əə” is used instead of more widely supported “Ää” due to huge abundance of the letter in Tatar language and the inconvenience caused by the huge amount of umlauts otherwise, and due to it already being used by Azeri language, potentially increasing support of the glyph in the future;
• It has exactly 5 pairs of correspondent vowel letters — a-ə, ı-e, o-ö, u-ü and í-i, which at least partially fixes the issue of vowel harmony getting exponentially more and more mutilated due to inconsistent Cyrillic rules;
  • This also helps to fully follow the one letter - one phoneme rule;
• The written language in this alphabet is somewhat intelligible with Turkish and most other Turkic languages with a Latin alphabet that mostly fits the aforementioned criteria (such as Qazaqgrammar’s older rendition of Kazakh Latin alphabet), even despite the sound shifts;
• Lastly, it is significantly more aesthetic than majority of the other variants (and thanks to the lack of obscure blocks of Unicode, it supports more fonts, including the more aesthetic ones), but this is just a personal opinion.

Update 09.10.2023: a lot of people are argumenting against the letter Íí, so I felt the need of explaining my strong adherence to its usage.

• Firstly, the letter complements the 10-vowel system of Tatar language. Even though İi is an underlying -iy in most syllables, it’s much more reasonable to add the letter Íí to the alphabet, than write -y after every -i in such positions.
• Secondly, this letter’s usage is logically consistent, even though its original usage in Zamanalif-1 was somewhat different.
• Thirdly, unlike the common misconception, this letter is hard to confuse with İi — the only instances where changing one letter to the other changes the meaning are the unconjugated monosyllabic imperative verbs tí - ti and sí - si; but even these verbs are easy to differentiate when conjugated: tıyılğan - tiyelgən, sídırdı - siderde
• And lastly, it has a very high font support, even much higher than some other letters of the alphabet.

— @bababashqort