RARELY has the humble apostrophe caused such commotion. Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president, wants the punctuation symbol to play a much bigger part in public life. Ordinary Kazakhs are objecting. Some feel so strongly that they have launched an anti-apostrophe campaign on social media, adorning their Facebook pages with crossed-out apostrophes.
At issue is the apostrophe-peppered alphabet that the government wants to introduce over the next eight years, to replace the current rendering of the Kazakh language in Cyrillic—the alphabet used to write Russian, among other languages. The new script is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which is used to write not only English but many other languages, including Turkic ones related to Kazakh, such as Turkish.
Officially, the switch is about equipping Kazakhstan for the digital age. (The new script should be easier to type and to render online.) But the...Continue reading
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