Wed, 22 Apr 2020
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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