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Comment by kmm | Hacker News Reader

25 can't be enough, Kazakh has 9 phonemic vowels. I presume the six Latin vowel signs will still get diacritics?

Looks like they're using digraphs instead:

    To ensure fullness of the Kazakh language sound system, the scientists included 8 digraphs,
    [...]
    The scientists rejected the idea of introducing diacritical marks

Am I crazy, or does the article only list 4 digraphs?

I don't see any vowel ones

Apart from the digraphs, both Һ and Х are mapped to H. That makes the Latin proposal not round-trip safe.

Didn't German deal with something similar with S and ß?

Maybe they did that because Һ and X are pronounced the same in Kazakh?

They aren't - the distinction is voiced/unvoiced.

The distinction is place of articulation - velar versus glottal - not voicing. And, according to Wikipedia, "The letter Һ is used only in Arabic-Persian borrowings and is often pronounced like an unvoiced Х".

I only see seven vowels in the graph.

I also only see four digraphs, for consonants only.

It looks like U is replacing У-with-a-line, and W (!) is replacing У

W for У is natural because that's how it works in Arabic.

But Kazakh is not in any way, shape or form related to Arabic. Nor is there widespread knowledge of how to write Arabic among the population.

No doubt, but the academics who designed this alphabet definitely can write Arabic, and the letter W was going spare anyway.

https://tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/kak-vyiglyadit-proekt-...

see chart with three rows for other vowel sounds

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