Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
> Thus the Uighur script is the direct ancestor of the Mongolian
> script, and is also a term used for the modern Mongolian script
> itself, to distinguish it from Mongolian written in one of the other
> scripts (including Latin and Tibetan).
And the Uighur script has itself apparently also been adapted to other
languages. It was employed also by Anatolian Turks, according to
Kornfilt (Comrie, p. 621):
"From the very beginning of its Anatolian period, Turkish was written in
the Arabic script, until the Latin script was adopted in the course of
the so-called 'writing reform' of 1928 (put into force in 1929), one of
the various reforms introduced after the founding of the Turkish
Republic with the aim of westernizing the country. However, the Uighur
script was also employed by the Anatolian Turks up to the 15th century,
which might explain some of the features of the Arabic script as used by
the Turks of that period and which differ from standard Arabic usage,
e.g. vowels are written out in Turkish words. This point, incidentally,
has often been brought up to motivate the so-called writing reform,
arguing that the multiple ambiguities that arise in Turkish within a
non-vocalized orthography made the Arabic system highly inadequate for Turkish."
-Richard
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