Yaghnobi Orthography March 17, 2007
Posted by Bahrom in Linguistics, Orthography, Phonology, Yaghnobi.7 comments
Yaghnobi is mainly a spoken language with very little modern written literature. I say very little modern written literature since the Yaghnobi language is a descendant of one of the dialects of Sogdian and there was a rich body of written literature in Sogdian. This ancient Sogdian literature is the literarary heritage of the Yaghnobi people.
The two systems that have been used for transcribing Yaghnobi are a Latin phonetic system which was commonly employed by Russian linguists during the Soviet period, and the modified Cyrillic alphabet which is also used for the Tajik language. A comparison of the two systems is shown in this Acrobat (.pdf) file: Cyrillic-IPA-Latin transcription chart. The Tajik Cyrillic alphabet has been used in the Yaghnobi textbooks printed for use in grades 1 - 4 in public schools in Yaghnobi speaking areas of Tajikistan. (more…)
