Arabic

Karakhanid language

Karakhanid written with Arabic Nastaliq in 1000 orthography

The writing system uses the Arabic script (Nastaliq variant) to record the Karakhanid language. It was a Turkic language developed in the 11th century during the Middle Turkic period under the Kara-Khanid Khanate, and has been described as the first literary Islamic Turkic language. After the introduction of Islam, the Old Uyghur script was gradually replaced by the Arabic script.

According to Dankoff & Kelly (1982) ¹, the alphabet is shown below:

Remark:

1. * means that there is no simple correspondence between writing units and phonology, or their functions are not intended to correspond to specific phonemes, and therefore their transliteration does not represent their phonemes either.
2. q, w and y are used to represent vowels by matres lectionis, i.e., q and q̄ are used to record /ɑ/ or /æ/, qy is used to record /i/ or /e/, and qw is used to record /o/, /u/, /ø/ or /y/, and q is omitted when inside a word. q in fact corresponds to glottal stop, and q̄ is used to indicate long vowels. There is a clear correspondence between the functions of vowel marks and those of matres lectionis.
3. The dual-joining h is used to represent /h/, while the right-joining e is used to represent /ɑ, æ/.
4. The digraph nk is used to represent /ŋ/. The digraph kq̇ is used represent a final /k/ or /q/.
5. The combining mark o means that the combined letter has no vowel. And the combining mark ḍ means repeating the combined letter.

Chagatai language

Chagatai written with Arabic Nastaliq in 1400 orthography

The writing system uses the Arabic script (Nastaliq variant) to record the Chagatai language. There are also said to be some documents written in Arabic script (Naskh variant), but they are said to be used only for titles of books or chapters, or not primarily. No relevant image material was found.

Narrowly, the development of Chagatai can be dated proper to the fifteenth century in the former realm of Chagatai Khan (r. 1226–1242) and his descendants. There such notables as the poet ʿAli Sher Navaʾi (1441–1501) elevated the speech of the Turkic peoples of the Timurid realm to the station of a common literary language alongside Persian. Around the same time, Ẓahir ud-Din Babur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal dynasty, wrote a mainly autobiographical work in Chagatai, the Baburnama, which remains a classic of Islamic and world literature. “Chagatai” in this sense points to a realm of literary production engaged with Turko-Persian high culture. Broadly, “Chagatai” encompasses writing in Arabo-Persian script along a continuum of Eastern Turkic varieties from the 1400s through the 1950s. In this sense, Chagatai can be regarded as a lingua franca for Central Asia that in most places functioned alongside Persian, and in some areas was much more prevalent.

The written language, like the spoken, varied significantly across the region, but it was mostly intelligible to different readers and listeners across time and space. That broad continuity is reflected in how people talked about the language: When people wrote and spoke, they referred to “Turki,” as opposed to “Farsi.” Turki as a spoken language interacted with the literary legacy of Navaʾi and the clerical legacy of Timurid scribes and so provided people with a common idiom for writing all sorts of texts for centuries. Thus not only of Chagatai poetry and prose but also of Chagatai documents of every genre can be discussed.

According to Schluessel (2018) ², the alphabet is shown below:

Remark:

1. The transliteration system is based on existing relevant studies, but trade-offs were made due to slight differences between the transliteration systems of different literatures and databases.
2. * means that there is no simple correspondence between writing units and phonology, or their functions are not intended to correspond to specific phonemes, and therefore their transliteration does not represent their phonemes either.
3. q, w and y are used to represent vowels by matres lectionis, i.e., q and q̄ are used to record /ɑ/ or /æ/, qy is used to record /i/ or /e/, and qw is used to record /o/, /u/, /ø/ or /y/, and q is omitted when inside a word. q in fact corresponds to glottal stop, and q̄ is used to indicate long vowels. There is a clear correspondence between the functions of vowel marks and those of matres lectionis.
4. b is used to represent /b/ as in bqr /bɑr/, and is also used to represent /p/ as in qwlwb /ølyp/. While p is fairly uncommon and most of these examples are from a very late 1950s manuscript.
5. j is used to represent /d͡ʒ/ as in jqnwr /d͡ʒɑːnwɑr/, and is also used to represent /t͡ʃ/ as in fqrje /pɑrt͡ʃæ/. While č is not very common.
6. k is used to represent /k/ as in kwkdwr /køkdur/, and is also used to represent /g/ as in kwšt /ɡøʃt/. While g is fairly rare in manuscripts until late. The digraph nk is used to represent /ŋ/.
7. The dual-joining h is used to represent /h/ as in pqdšqh /pɑːdiʃɑːh/, while the right-joining e is used to represent /ɑ, æ/ as in mywe /mewæ/. The right-joining ẖ is used to represent a final /t/.
8. The combining mark o means that the combined letter has no vowel. And the combining mark ḍ means repeating the combined letter.

Reference