[lg policy] THE WINDOWS 7 TATAR LANGUAGE INTERFACE PACK IS LIVE

[Harold Schiffman]

THE WINDOWS 7 TATAR LANGUAGE INTERFACE PACK IS LIVE!

Woo hoo! :-)

Click here to download the Tatar Windows 7 LIP via the Microsoft.com
Download Center.

Please note that the Tatar Windows 7 LIP can only be installed on a
system that runs a Russian client version of Windows 7.   It is
available for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems on the Download Center.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON TATAR:

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:

6-7 million speakers

NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:

татарча

The Tatar language is one of the two official languages of the
republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation (Russian being the
other). Tatar is spoken there by around 5.7 million speakers; smaller
communities of Tatar speakers can be found in neighboring regions like
Bashqortostan, in southwestern Siberia and in post-Soviet central Asia
and eastern Europe.

During the Soviet era, Tatar lost ground to Russian; it is estimated
that in the last 30 years of the Soviet Union more than 8 percent of
the population of Tatarstan switched from Tatar to Russian as their
preferred language. The language of high education as well as the mass
media is still predominantly Russian, and in urban areas more Russian
is heard. But the Tatar language is being promoted by an active
language policy in the republic, and since the end of the 20th century
there has been a renaissance of the language.

Tatar has a large number of dialects, which can be classified into
three major groups: Central, Western/Misharian and Eastern/Siberian.
Modern standard Tatar shows features mostly of both the Central
dialects (especially in lexicon and phonology) and the
Western/Misharian dialects (more in morphology).

FUN FACTS:

    *
      In Turkish, the Tatar language is called Turkish Tatar (Tatar
Türkçesi) to stress its membership in the Turkic language family.
    *
      Tatar literature flourished in the empire of the Golden Horde,
founded by Ghengis Khan’s grandson, Batu Khan. The empire existed from
the early 13th to middle 15th century.

Click here for more information about the Tatar language

CLASSIFICATION:

Tatar belongs to the Northern Kypchak branch of the Turkic languages,
which might belong to the (disputed) Altaic language family. The
classification of Tatar itself is not undisputed either (as for most
Turkic languages). The closest relative of Tatar is Bashkir, other
relatives include Crimean Tatar or Kazakh.

Click here for more information about Tatar classification

SCRIPT:

Until the late 1920s Tatar was written in a modified Arabic script
(which did not suit Tatar well and imposed very complex spelling
rules). The Latin alphabet introduced then, was replaced by a Cyrillic
one already in 1939. The second introduction of a Latin alphabet,
which was made official in September 2001, was reverted by the Russian
Supreme Court which argued that for maintaining unity in Russia a
unified script is necessary. Therefore Tatar is written in a Cyrillic
script with 6 special characters unknown in Russian.

Click here for more information about the Tatar script

http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2010/08/27/i-went-to-tatarstan-and-all-i-got-was-this-language-interface-pack/
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