Kazakhstan approves new Latin alphabet

PanARMENIAN.Net - Kazakhstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev approved a decree on a new alphabet on Tuesday, February 20.

The new-look alphabet also has 32 letters, but there are some key differences. Most glaring is the abandonment of the requirement to add apostrophes to denote certain distinct sounds, Eurasianet.org says.

So the letters a’, g’, n’, o’, u’, y’, which denote Kazakh-specific phonemes, will now be rendered with just an accent above them instead. Then there is the letter i with and without a dot — the latter being analogous to a character in the Turkish alphabet.

The immediate obvious appeal of these modifications will be that writing these phonemes on a computer will require a single keystroke instead of two.

In a concession to an earlier proposed draft of the alphabet, other sounds specific to Kazakh will be rendered as sh and ch, instead of s’ and c’ as required under the previous incarnation.