Russia: no choosing alphabets - correction

Nicholas Ostler nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk
Wed Nov 17 16:25:27 UTC 2004


Harold F. Schiffman wrote:

>>>From the NYTimes, Nov. 17, 2004:
>
>RUSSIA: NO CHOOSING ALPHABETS The Constitutional Court ruled against the
>semiautonomous republic of Tatarstan, which had been seeking to legitimize
>the use of the Latin alphabet to convey the sounds of Tatar, a Turkic
>language. Ethnic Russians are outnumbered by Tatars in the Volga River
>republic, which switched from the Latin alphabet to Arabic script in 1927
>before being forced to adopt Cyrillic letters in 1939 as part of Stalin's
>Russification campaign. Tatarstan passed a law in 2000 readopting the
>Latin alphabet, but a 2002 federal law called for the nationwide use of
>Cyrillic.
>
>Sophia Kishkovsky (NYT)
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/17briefs.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all
>
>
>
Evidently, the NYT article should have read:

the Volga River
republic, which switched to the Latin alphabet from Arabic script in 1927



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