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A suggestion for romanizing the Abkhaz alphabet (based on Monika Höhlig's Adiĝe Alfabet)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

B. G. Hewitt
B. G. Hewitt
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

In 1983 Monika Höhlig published a pamphlet (reprinted in 1990) setting out her ideas for producing a romanized script for (North-West Caucasian) Circassian. Since the bulk of the Circassian community lives not in the Caucasus but in Turkey (or elsewhere in the Near East), her basic tenet was that, where necessary, the roman characters should have the same values that obtain for the purpose of representing Turkish—so that, for example, the letter c would represent the voiced palato-alveolar affricate []. Two further principles which guided the creation of this script were: (a) that any attempt to provide one totally independent character for each phoneme of the language would lead to an unwieldy number of new letter-shapes, and (b) that no diacritic should be employed that is not available on a Turkish typewriter.

Type
Notes and Communications
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 334 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1995

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References

Hewitt, B. G. 1989. ‘Aspects of language planning in Georgia (Georgian and Abkhaz)’, in Kirkwood, M. (ed.), Language planning in the Soviet Union. London: Macmillan: 123–44.Google Scholar
Hewitt, B. G. 1994. ‘Peoples of the Caucasus’, in Fernández-Armesto, F. (ed.), Guide to the peoples of Europe. London: Times Books: 366–84.Google Scholar
Höhlig, M. 1983 (2nd ed. 1990). Draft of an orthography for Adyghe, Abdzakh dialect, on the basis of the Turkish alphabet (with Turkish and English gloss (2nd edition only)).Google Scholar