From: Alexander Savenkov (savenkov@xmlhack.ru)
Date: Tue Jul 27 2004 - 09:21:12 CDT
I didn't expect this pointless discussion to get that far. Hopefully,
this will be the end of it.
2004-07-19T02:39:47+03:00 Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org> wrote:
> Conclusion:
> 1) The Republic of Tatarstan passed a law in 1999 and coming into
> force in 2001 establishing a Tatar Latin alphabet.
True.
> 2) A Russian federal law (a monstrous piece of linguistic
> imperialism)
Peter, your estimates of Russian federal law are inadequate and go
beyond the scope of this list.
> overrode this in 2002, so after the Tatarstan law had come into
> force. Therefore this Latin alphabet was in some sense officially in
> force for a period. And it is still considered to be officially in
> force by many in Tatarstan including top government officials.
I can't guess what is considered by "many in Tatarstan". And I think
you shouldn't be guessing too as it makes no difference in our case.
If someone, in spite of the law, consider killing people to be ok,
it's a matter of court.
> 3) As the people of Tatarstan are independent-minded
Wow, where did you get this epithet? I agree with that, especially given
that 43 percent of Tatarstan's population are Russians. Just a quick
question, how is this sentence related to the discussion described in
the header?
> and more likely to follow their local leaders than the linguistic
> imperialists in Moscow, it is highly likely that at least some of
> them use the published Latin script even if it is not permitted to
> have official status.
True again. No one is banning you from using, e.g., pig Latin, online
or offline.
> 4) Not all speakers of the Tatar language live in the Russian
> Federation, and some live in countries like Azerbaijan where the
> official alphabets use Latin script. In such areas they are clearly
> likely to use the Latin script.
That seems to be the only relevant point of your letter, Peter.
Russian Kurds use Cyrillic script, others use Latin or Arabic... Same
for the Gipsies, same for Tatars. For this reason (and also for
historical reason) Latin alphabet for Tatar language exists.
Btw, I remember reading you visited Azerbaijan, so you know
the situation there better. I.e., you should know that many Azerbaijan
officials write their public speeches in Cyrillic script, so
the secretararies need to transliterate them into Latin before
publishing.
> 5) This is an alphabet which has been used, even in official
> websites, and very likely continues to be used by some. Decisions
> made in Moscow do not change this, especially because they are in
> practice widely ignored in Tatarstan
Once again, Peter, you're going off the topic. You're invited to prove
your assumptions with facts or withdraw them. I personally consider
statements of this kind as veiled attacks to Russia's statehood.
Please, stop that.
> and have no force in some other places where Tatars live. This
> alphabet therefore needs to be supported by Unicode. But fortunately
> this is not a problem as all the characters are already defined.
True, the alphabet is already supported. I've no idea about the point
of your latest letter.
Alexander
-- Alexander Savenkov http://www.xmlhack.ru/ savenkov@xmlhack.ru http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
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