Re: Orkhon alphabet

Gianni Vacca wrote:

>
> Hello
>
> Omniglot (http://www.omniglot.com/), which I found
> accurate until today, writes the following at the
> bottom of its Orkhon alphabet page
> (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/orkhon.htm):
>
> "Used to write Uyghur or Uighur, a Turkic language
> spoken in China, particularly in Xinjiang Uyghur
> Autonomous Region, by about 6,750,000 people"
>
> Now, as far as I know Uighur is written in a modified
> Arabic alphabet. Do some nationalist Uighurs still use
> Orkhon?

The Orkhon runes were quite thoroughly dead when they were discovered
(when?) and deciphered by Vilhelm Thomsen around the turn of the 20th
century.

Uyghur is most unusual in writing Arabic loanwords not according to
their Arabic orthography, but according to Uyghur phonetics. The Uyghur
alphabet doesn't include several Arabic letters as a result.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...