The Universe of Discourse


Wed, 22 Apr 2020

Mystery spam language

This morning I got spam with this subject:

Subject: yaxşı xəbər

Now what language is that? The ‘şı’ looks Turkish, but I don't think Turkish has a letter ‘ə’. It took me a little while to find out the answer.

It's Azerbaijani. Azerbaijani has an Arabic script and a Latin script; this is the Latin script. Azerbaijani is very similar to Turkish and I suppose they use the ‘ş’ and ‘ı’ for the same things. I speculated that the ‘x’ was analogous to Turkish ‘ğ’, but it appears not; Azerbaijani also has ‘ğ’ and in former times they used ‘ƣ’ for this.

Bonus trivia: The official Unicode name of ‘ƣ’ is LATIN SMALL LETTER OI. Unicode Technical Note #27 says:

These should have been called letter GHA. They are neither pronounced 'oi' nor based on the letters 'o' and 'i'.

[ Addendum 20210215: I was pleased to discover today that I have not yet forgotten what Azeri looks like. ]

[ Addendum 20230731: Another mystery language sample. ]


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