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Some great news from our Kazakh brothers. :cheers:

Kazakhstan sets timeline for switch from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet

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ASTANA, KAZAKHSTAN (AFP) - Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Wednesday (April 12) set out a timeline for the ex-Soviet country to switch from Cyrillic letters to the Latin alphabet as part of a modernisation drive.

The 76-year-old leader has long called for ditching the Cyrillic alphabet - which Kazakhstan shares with neighbour and ally Russia - in favour of the more widely used Latin one.

In an article published in the state-owned Egemen Kazakhstan newspaper Nazarbayev called for the government to begin "preparatory work" and "create a schedule" for the switch.

"By the end of 2017, after consultation with academics and representatives of the public, a single standard for the new Kazakh alphabet and script should be developed," Nazarbayev wrote.

"From 2018, (Kazakhstan) must train specialists to teach the new alphabet and produce textbooks for secondary schools," Nazarbayev added in the Kazakh-language paper.

Nazarbayev has said in the past that the country should switch to the Latin alphabet by 2025.

The Kazakh language is part of the Turkic family, like Turkish. It currently uses a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet with 42 letters.

Kazakhstan briefly used the Latin alphabet during the Soviet era before switching to Cyrillic letters in 1940.

Kazakhstan is a close ally of Russia and has the largest ethnic Russian population of the five Central Asian states that gained independence from Moscow in 1991.

Russian enjoys an official constitutional status and Nazarbayev uses it along with Kazakh in speeches.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin enraged Kazakh nationalists in 2014 by describing Kazakhstan as part of "the greater Russian world" and saying it never had statehood before 1991, in comments shortly after Moscow's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

Kazakhstan's education ministry has announced plans in recent years to increase teaching of English in schools but has faced opposition from defenders of the Kazakh language.
 
Orkhon is not popular in the world. Latin lets people connect to the world easily.
 
Yes, i would like to see Orkhon script as a lesson in schools, but not as an official alphabet of the state.
 
Latin alphabet is influenced by Etrüsk (Etruscan Civilization). And:

The Turkish historian named Kazım Mirşan explained that he deciphered the Cippus inscription, the most important monument of the Etruscans, and that this language is a Proto-Turkic dialect.

Which means it is something close to home. More then any other (kiril, arabic, etc.).
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrüskler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization

Runic is the main source, about which some Turks are ,with some findings as the man you mentined, trying to crack the arrogance of some Europeans due to their superior civilization stance over others.
 

Dünya'daki Türk toplumu ve Kazakeli'ndeki eski çağ Türkleri, ayrıca yapılacak çalışmalar hakkında ilginç bilgiler vermekte El Farabi Üni. Türkoloji Bşk. Yerden Kazhybek.

A tv program named The Turks in the world from TRT Avaz channel, in this episode El Farabi university and Turk roots in Kazakeli(Kazakhstan) are introduced.
 
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Kimlik ve İnanç üzerine Kırgızistan'ın Azatlık Radyosunda bir Tengrici Kırgız Türk'ü ile Müslüman Kırgız Türk'ü arasında geçen tartışma.

A debate between a Tengrist and Muslim Kırgız Turk in Kırgızeli(Kyrgyzstan).

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Prof Dr Ahmet Taşağıl: Kazak ve Kırgız Türkleri üzerine. A video about Kazak and Kırgız Turks.

 
The Turks of China

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1. The mausoleum of Mahmud Kashgari in the village of Opal, southwest of Kashgar, within sight of the beautiful Pamir Mountains. The 11th-century poet, regarded as the father of Uighur literature, also compiled the first Turkic dictionary'

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2. Desert dust: A girl sprinkles water outside her home in Kashgar. Because of its altitude, the city does not become unbearably hot in summer – unlike Turfan in the east, where inhabitants once used to take refuge below ground. Below left: Tursungül, aged 22, in the kitchen of her family's house in the south of Xingjiang. Below right: A young Uighur shows the aquiline profile characteristic of many of the inhabitants of the south and west of of Xingjiang. The term Uighur is no longer an ethnic one: it is applied to all oasis-dwellers to distinguish them from the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, who belong to the steppe and mountain areas
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THE TURKS OF CHINA

Xinjiang, formerly known as Chinese Turkestan, is home to some ten million people of Turkic descent. Their culture, language and religious beliefs still owe more to central Asia and the northern steppes than they do to China itself. As distant from the China Sea as it is from the Mediterranean, Xinjiang is a place of wild terrain and extreme climate, surrounded by high mountain ranges. By Christian Tyler, author of Wild West China: The Taming of Xingjiang


In the centre of the Asian landmass, enclosed by towering mountain ranges and scoured by desert winds, lies a strange, wild place called Xinjiang. Until a few years ago, it was forgotten by the world.

The native inhabitants of this wilderness are citizens of the People’s Republic of China. But they are not Chinese. You can see it in their faces. You can see it also in the names of their landmarks: a mountain is tagh, water is su, lake is kul. Their language is Turkic, their script Arabic, their architecture Persian and their religion is Islam.

To the puzzled visitor, it seems as if, during the great westward steppe migrations of 1,500 hundred years ago, these proto-Turks turned south too soon and ended up on the wrong side of the mountains. The land they chose seems to us fierce and barren, but there are fertile oases beneath the mountains and round the desert shore. For centuries these Turks were left alone to enjoy their new life as farmers. But as empires expanded and national boundaries became fixed, the outside world pressed in. Today, while their cousins on the western side of the Pamirs have escaped from their Soviet masters, they find themselves chafing under the iron hand of Beijing.

Rediscovered by European adventurers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Xinjiang was closed again from the 1930s until the late 1980s. Nobody was there to report on the plight of China’s Turks as they were hammered into a Chinese mould along with Mongolians and Tibetans on either side of them.

So remote is this province of China that its ancient Turkic capital, Kashgar, is as far from Beijing as it is from Ankara. Yet the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (to give it its official name), formerly Chinese Turkestan, comprises a sixth of China’s territory, while containing a mere sixtieth of its population.

Of its twenty million people, about ten million are Turkic, mainly oasis-dwelling Uighurs, with smaller numbers of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. There are another million or more Mongols, Hui (Chinese Muslims), Tajiks and others. Officially, the Han Chinese population is 7.5 million. In reality, it is probably nearer twelve million.

Not only remote, Xinjiang is also a country of extremes. Its mountains are among the highest in the world, soaring to 25,000 feet (7,600 metres), while the Turfan Depression is below sea level, one of the deepest pockets on earth. The Taklamakan Desert, which fills the Tarim basin, is the second largest sand desert on the globe. So dry is the region that only one of its rivers, the Irtysh in the far north, ever finds its way to the sea. The rest are swallowed by the desert sands. Temperatures in the Taklamakan swing from minus 50 to plus 50 degrees centigrade. Howling sandstorms batter the traveller along the desert margins, and the oasis towns around its shores are muffled in a pall of dust for days on end. Dwellers on the less-populated southern side of the desert fight a constant battle against the inexorable advance of the great dunes.

For centuries the chief influences – peoples, cultures, religions – came not from China but from the far side of the mountains. Xinjiang’s history defied its geography. The Chinese began their incursions during the Han dynasty (206bc–220ad), mainly to get the horses they needed to keep on terms with their steppe enemies. It took many false starts and reverses before the Chinese succeeded in mastering the people they regarded as the ‘barbarians’ of the far west. Not until the mid eighteenth century did they manage a credible military conquest. It took another 200 years, and the Communist revolution of 1949, to achieve complete administrative control. Even today, Xinjiang is not entirely subdued.

http://www.cornucopia.net/magazine/articles/the-turks-of-china/
 
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