As you can see this layout has several extra letters. Most notably the letter Ņ. It will function as the Ң did in the Cyrillic alphabet and Ń in the Latin alphabet. There are major advantages of Qazaq OK! First, it eliminates the use of apostrophes like N’. Second, it will fit in the system that avoids digraphs like NG, SH, CH, etc so every sound is represented by one character this will boost typing speeds remarkably. Lastly, it fits perfectly visually with Ş and Ç. The letter Ç is used infrequently in Kazakh, but it is still accessible with ALT+C. 

In the current alphabet of 2018 Cyrillic І (і) and Й are merged to I which is illogical since Й is a consonant (voiced palatal approximant). There is the rare phenomenon of having  И and І (і) next to each other which will result in İİ. In which case it is obvious that it will be pronounced differently because İİ will never derive from anything else then И and І (і) in native Kazakh words. Much more important is the fact that И appears almost exclusively in Russian loanwords and in Arab/Persian suffixes -i. So there is no need to separate those sounds by letters because they almost never happen to appear in the same word-formation. Also in the current alphabet, И is represented by I (ı) which does have a dot. This confuses since the old alphabet marks palatal vowels are with an acute accent like Á, Ú, Ó. So representing И by an İ (like Ä, Ü, Ö) will solve this problem.

In contrast to W (Cyrillic У, old Alphabet Ý) forms a special sound to Kazakh. It must be preserved because it is representing 3 phonemes /w/, /ʊw/ and /ʉw/ which are vowels and consonants at the same time. W is the perfect match: no need for a diacritic, already on the international keyboard available and optical aligned to both U and V. Using widespread characters (Ä, Ü, Ş) will ensure the digital compatibility. Ergo diacritics are used consistently and we saved even 2 extra letters!

Click here for detailed information about the advantages of ROK.

Нажмите здесь для получения подробной информации о преимуществах ROK (на странице 10).

International English

International English