Talk:Kazakh language

Kazak in Cyrillic

Kazak in cyrillic should be written with a back k Dawit

Qaydar and Jenga transcriptions

Is there anywhere I could find more information on these transcription systems, e.g., how they came about? I couldn't find anything relevant in Wikipedia articles, and Google searches led me back to Wikipedia. I can't seem to find any relevant information. Waynem 03:58, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

The Qaydar transcription was developed by a team of linguists under the leadership of Abdwali Qaydar (another spelling: Abduali Khaydar), to be consistent with the Latin alphabets of other Turkic languages. There is not much information about it in English.

I've never heard about the Janga transcription. "Janga" means "new" in Kazakh, and so probably it is not the name or last name of its creator (unlike Qaydar).

Conversions between Cyrillic and Qaydar's Latin alphabet can be made here: www.qaztranslit.com— Janibek and Kerey 19:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Personal pronouns

This table doesn't make sense. Either there is a grammatical sketch, or there isn't. And - without knowing Kazakh - I suspect that out of the eight pronouns given in the table, two are wrong (біэ and сіэдер). Where did Garzo get those from? —Babelfisch 01:37, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, I know some Kazakh and the table looks correct to me. What exactly doesn't make sense? I = men, We = biz, You (to one person, younger than you or your peer) = sen, You (to several people, younger than you or your peers) = sender, You (to one person, older than you or to be polite) = siz, You (to several people, older than you or to be polite) = sizder, He/She/It (there is no sex difference for pronouns in Kazakh) = ol, They = olar.

Phonology section

User:Firespeaker sent me a private email (I'm not checking WP much these days) asking for some comments/help with this article. Here I respond publically and ask for more assistance. Things which I feel need further elucidation:—

1. Who's Vajda? Let's at least cite the work!
2. Kyrgyz vowel harmony. The Kyrgyz language article in barely there, so that's not going to help much. Observe that the further away from the root vowel you get, the less rounded vowels tend to be, and that it's optional, and here, this is how it works with phonetic IPA transcriptions. (If I'm right about the rule/s.)
3. Vowel harmony really should go into the vowels section. Maybe vowels should be moved above the consonants, if it's that important. On second thoughts, Vowel Harmony really deserves a full section on its own---potentially before the consonants and vowels, because it affects both. i.e. in Kazakh, it seems to me that it's front-back harmony, not front-back vowel harmony.
4. When we say "post-alveolar", do we mean postalveolar/retroflex, or palato-alveolar?
5. If you (Firespeaker) have the data (I think you said you did?) maybe we can draw up a chart like at Image:Bulgarian vowel chart.png. Include the tense vowels (but noted distinctly) and keep the chart so it's still obvious what the patterns are.

I've drawn up a working draft at User:Cassowary/Kazakh language phonology section (draft) which I hope people can comment on, correct, and move over when it's happy.

(Regarding the draft chart on my page, maybe we should extent ɑ into the complex section so it's obvious what the alternation is post-stress (if that is indeed the alternation). I just think it's a bit scary as it stands. (But we should be careful, because the harmonically rounded form of ɑ is ɒ, not wʊ, which it looks like on the old chart.)

There's also the folk at Wikipedia:WikiProject Phonetics who we might alert of this.

Thanks!

—Felix the Cassowary 13:01, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree on all accounts, and you're correctly informed on all points, except that ɑ rounds to wʊ in Kazakh (were you talking purely phonetically, or Kazakh-specific?). Or, in theory—I'm unsure whether I've heard ɑ round in Kazakh, but it's correct for Kyrgyz at least, where wʊ is somewhat more like [oriɡinal?] ɔ. —Firespeaker 23:20, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I must've misunderstood you then/confused Kazakh with another language. I suppose it depends on whether it rounds in practice (anything verifiable there?), or else we just go for the originally slightly ambiguous layout. (Have you read the draft? There's a few places where I'm obviously correctly informed, but it's not obvious which is correct, e.g. "does/does not" :) —Felix the Cassowary 03:03, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

ɑ rounding to ɒ is Tatar, and more lexifiedly/historically, Uzbek. —Firespeaker 14:36, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I think, Vajda might refer to Edward Vajda, a linguist who currently works on the Ket language; he used to work in the same institute as I do. I could imagine he is meant. — N-true 19:23, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

@N-true and Firespeaker: That seems very likely:

“Kazakh Phonology.” Opuscula Altaica: Essays Presented in Honor of Henry Schwarz, pp. 603–650. Western Washington University, 1994.

—Edward_Vajda#References

--Thnidu (talk) 07:02, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

@N-true and Thnidu: Yep, that's the source. —Firespeaker (talk) 22:26, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

phonemes

The chart of consonant phonemes seems to be missing /q/. I don't know anything about the language myself, but it's listed as the pronunciation of <Қ> at Kazakh alphabet (and contrastive with /k/), given as an example at Voiceless uvular plosive, and shown in [qɑzɑq] at the top of the article. Are there other errors? Needs to be checked by someone knowledgeable. — Alan^✉ 22:37, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Kazakh Scouting

Can someone render Dayyin Bol (Be Prepared), the Scout Motto, into Kazakh Cyrillic? Thanks! Chris 15:21, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I know it's been over a year, but if you need it, it is Дайын бол. Uvula! (talk) 00:30, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Kazakh language is within the scope of WikiProject Afghanistan???

WHY? 24.63.243.104 03:17, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Seems WikiProject Afghanistan uses a bot sometimes to tag articles. I removed it from this one. Otebig 05:03, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

There is a significant number of Kazakh speakers in Afghanistan, but it looks like no one from WikiProject Afghanistan noticed the removal or cares, so maybe it's for the best. —Firespeaker (talk) 04:30, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Tilashar language learning site

Hi, I noticed an IP added a link to this KZ language school site without any description. I've put one in, but my Russian is very basic so could someone else check this site is worth linking to? It doesn't have an English version. http://www.tilashar.kz/
— FIRE!^{in a crowded theatre...} 18:19, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Phonology

There's an error in the phonology section. I'm a Qazaq, and I know that ғ is pronounced ɣ (voiced velar fricative), not G (voiced uvular plosive). Our Language has only one uvular plosive, it is voiceless. Sorry for my bad English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.46.75.43 (talk) 10:38, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I've studied the basics of Kazakh with native speakers and as a linguist, I feel that there is some variation in the sound. First, it sounds to me that ғ is a uvular fricative rather than a velar one. Which is also more logical, considering that қ (uvular) is the form of к that you see before back vowels. Therefore the back-vowel form of г should also be uvular. Also, there are instances where the letter sounds more like a plosive than a fricative, particularly after ң, like in the word ыңғайлы. Wow, this website is the bee's knees! (talk) 20:52, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

This is correct. ‹ғ› is pronounced as a uvular fricative normally, and is a uvular stop after other stops, including nasals. —Firespeaker (talk) 04:28, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Use of Kazakh vs. Russian in Kazakhstan

It would be interesting to see a section of the article comparing the use and demographics of Kazakh speakers vs. Russian speakers living in Kazakhstan. Uvula! (talk) 00:31, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Description of Kazakh vowels

Could Kwamikagami give a thorough explanation why the section about vowels couldn't be simplified so that the unnecessary distinction of RTR would be left out? What would be most simple and straightforwardly descriptive would be a table of the following kind, based on the pronunciations given in IPA (which should also be probably checked):

Kazakh vowel phonemes

	Front		Back
Diphthongised	/i̯ə/, ‹е›	/y̯ʉ/, ‹ө›		/u̯ʊ/, ‹о›
Close	/ɘ/, ‹i›	/ʉ/, ‹ү›	/ə/, ‹ы›	/ʊ/, ‹ұ›
Open	/æ/, ‹ә›		/ɑ/, ‹а›

Frontness/backness, as has been noted during the last few decades, is not an articulatory feature, but based on auditory factors. Close vowels are not close because some part of the tongue were at a given height, but because their F1 is at the same level. However, this doesn't mean that the position of the tongue wouldn't correlate with it. It is the position of the back of the tongue that creates the F1 and F2 formants.

ATR and RTR, on the other hand, are used to distinguish certain vowels in some African languages, mostly, where the vowels are pronounced in other respects the same, but only differ as regards to ATR or RTR. So, there might be two /i/'s, with the other having +RTR and the other -RTR. However, if we see that a language has vowels of which some are auditorily front and some auditorily back, we use the features of frontness and backness to describe this difference, not ±RTR, even if we could detect that there's a difference in the position of the root of the tongue (we might indicate this in a narrow transcription and note that this is an accompanying secondary feature).

This issue may also be confused by the presence of vowel harmony. However, the phoneme inventory should be given in terms of phonetic features of the phonemes, and the rules of vowel harmony should be given separately. Vowel harmony is not necessarily bound to phonetics, and usually this isn't so if there have been sound changes in the vowels involved.

Please comment, and at least provide a reference for this Vajda, so that we can assess it. Same applies for the mention of Vajda in the consonants section, though that seems quite uncontroversial in other respects. -Kompar (talk) 08:43, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

First of all, I don't know Kazakh.

The Vajda ref came up in discussion with s.o. who does. Sorry, I can't provide the ref.

My objection was in "simplifying" the vowel system. I don't see a reason to. ±ATR is also an auditory feature, or it wouldn't be distinctive. (You can sometimes see a person's tongue tense up through their jaw, but that can hardly be the primary cue.) It very often sounds like a difference in height or backness. So the two /i/s in your example may be [i] and [e] in formant space. If the distinctive feature is ±ATR, however, then we do our readers a disservice by lumping it in with non-ATR systems, as if there were no difference; we also do our readers a disservice if we only report ATR systems from Africa, as if they were somehow unique to that continent. kwami (talk) 10:11, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Tense, aspect and mood

Could someone say what the source is of the information on tense, aspect and mood? I am living in Kazakhstan and learning Kazakh, and I find the descriptions of the aspectual meanings of the auxiliaries (тұру жүру отыру жатыру) interesting, but they do not correspond to the Russian-language descriptions I have access to, or the witness of my language informants. Is this description of the aspectual differences widely accepted in the English-language literature? In any case, some inline citations would be helpful. Harlandski (talk) 17:54, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Kazakh = mutually intelligible with Turkish?

Is the Kazakh language mutually intelligible with Turkish? --77.178.146.66 (talk) 21:21, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

To some extent, especially if people talk slowly, rather like the Romance and German languages are. — kwami (talk) 03:37, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Germanic, surely. --Thnidu (talk) 07:04, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

No, I meant German, as in the many mutually unintelligible varieties of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. — kwami (talk) 17:01, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

As i native speaker of both and half Kazakh half Turkish descent.They can understand each other at daily basis if they keep it simple and slow.At least understand what sentence is about — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.142.92.56 (talk) 08:00, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Amount of speakers

Amount of speakers of Kazakh is greater than what is said in article.

https://www.ethnologue.com/language/kaz Sabatoj (talk) 18:30, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps. But the data is older than the source we have now, and for some countries (the 1M in Uzbekistan) has no date at all, so we don't know how old it is. We have decided as a community to use the Swedish encyclopedia for most languages with large numbers of speakers, because Ethnologue has not been a reliable source for them. If you can find a source that's more authoritative/reliable than either Ethnologue or the Swedish encyclopedia, we'll be happy to take a look.

BTW, we frequently get people insisting that we use whichever source gives their language the greatest number of speakers. We try to avoid such WP:cherry-picking by using a neutral source across the board, as we have here. — kwami (talk) 20:46, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Understood. Sabatoj (talk) 23:33, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Phoneme inventory

The phonetic section says “The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are in bold” – but they are not. --78.104.174.15 (talk) 07:50, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Competition with Russian and conservation status

Neither this article nor the very short Languages of Kazakhstan article make clear to what extant Kazakh is actually used. There are 17.6 million Kazakh, of whom, according to this article, only 10 million speak Kazakh. The remainder (presumably) mostly speak Russian. But who exactly? Is there a stable diglossia, where urban people tend to speak Russian and Kazakh rules on the countryside? Or is the entire country gradually shifting towards Russian, with younger generations being predominantly Russian-speaking? Steinbach (talk) 11:47, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Any ideas? Or is my question so stupid that it needs to remain unanswered? Steinbach (talk) 11:01, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

this article states that the move is towards the native language in schools, so I would say Russian will be on the way out in a decade or so

There are 17.6 million Kazakhstanis. About 10 million Kazakhstanis are ethnic Kazakhs, so I believe ethnic Kazakhs generally speak both Kazakh and Russian, while ethnic Russian Kazakhstanis generally only speak Russian. I believe the government is trying to get improve the status of the Kazakh language in relation to Russian. Last edited by: (talk) 22:40, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

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And the Kazakh WMF projects...

...have failed to get the message; they're still using Cyrillic as their default, and the Latin setting is the outdated alphabet used briefly during the Soviet era. KMF (talk) 04:23, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Our main page blurb says the change will be phased in over eight years, maybe that explains it. Neutron (talk) 20:27, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Should Kazakhstan article names follow current transliteration rules?

FYI, the WikiProject Kazakhstan RfC Should Kazakhstan article names follow current transliteration rules? discusses the naming of Kazakhstan articles in the context of the announced governmental switch from Cyrillic to Latin scripts. Batternut (talk) 08:18, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Qazaqsa

At the moment Qazaqsa is an article apparently about the use of the Latin script for Kazakh. I take it for granted (though one new editor has disagreed) that we don't need a separate article at this stage: the content is already present at Kazakh alphabets. The question, however, is whether Qazaqsa should redirect there or to Kazakh language (as apparently this is the name of the language). Any opinions? – Uanfala (talk) 00:46, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

That whole article is just wrong. Qazaqsa is not even the proper title, because it's misspelled and it means something else. I added my thoughts and my vote here: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Qazaqsa Selerian (talk) 21:56, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Wrong IPA transliterations of the Cyrillic "Іі" and "Ұұ"

Here, in the enwiki, just like in many other wikis, the IPA transcription of the Cyrillic "Іі" is shown to be /ɪ/, which is false, and easily proveable to be incorrect (I'd include examples, however Wikipedia hates YouTube links). The closest, most accurate sound in the IPA I could find is the /ɘ/ sound. I'd say something similar is happening to "Ұұ" being /o̙/ and not /ʊ/. I hope this misleading mistake will be fixed and thanks for your attention. Malik Nursultan B (talk) 12:45, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree. The whole IPA chart for vowels and some consonants seems strange. Ы is definitely not schwa, і is not /ɪ/, ж and ш aren't dj and tsh in the literary norm, only in dialects. 37.99.47.18 (talk) 11:27, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Who thinks that ж is zh and дж is j???

Seriously, Qazaq has ş and j which represent sh and French j respectively. Ч (ç?) is in loanwords from Russian only, the same with dj (дж) Pierro shirathar (talk) 14:30, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

‘Open’ ɵ?

The vowel chart shows an open, central vowel written ⟨ө/ö⟩ in Cyrillic/Latin, with the IPA value /ɵ/ – but IPA /ɵ/ is close-mid, not open, so this is clearly not correct. If /ɵ/ were the actual phoneme, this vowel should be placed above /ə/ ⟨ы/y⟩, not below it. I’m assuming the fact that the Cyrillic letter is virtually identical to the IPA symbol has caused an incorrect IPA transcription, but what is the actual pronunciation then? Kokoshneta (talk) 11:49, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Which chart are you referring too? In the 9-vowel phoneme chart, that chart is discussing the underlying phonemes, not the actual pronunciation. As I understand it what I think the article is trying to say (not from the cited papers though you can go through those if you like), for the purposes of analyzing vowel harmony and phonemes, ⟨ө/ö⟩ is at the intersection of the open series of vowels and neutral tongue root. It's pronunciation may not line up with the phonemic analysis. Eel of Oppo (talk) 19:00, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Vowel pronunciation: missing vowels

The phonology section of this article has two vowel charts, one for the underlying phonemes and one for their pronunciation. This is greatly appreciated, however there appears to be some issues.

The phoneme chart shows 12 phonemic vowels (really 11 with one confined to loanwords, though that is besides the point), and only 9 pronounced vowels. This on it's own is not worrying, but could easily be explained by mergers, deletion, or some other phenomena. However, the pronunciation chart doesn't show any such things, but rather doesn't list any actual pronunciation for the phonemes represented by ⟨и/i⟩, ⟨у/u⟩, and ⟨э/e⟩. Maybe I'm missing something? If I am, please excuse the rest of this comment.

Wagner and Dotton in their paper do have pronunciations for the phonemes I listed as missing, however they also list different pronunciations for other phonemes than the ones currently in the Wikipedia article. I could not access the Muhamedowa paper nor Vajda, and I understand that there are many competing analyses of both the vowel phonemes and pronunciation of Kazakh, but the pronunciation chart that is in the article right now is unacceptable (and frankly has nothing to do with their being). I'll also add that there are many, many papers on Kazakh phonology with competing opinions, and I only looked at one, so there is a lot more work to go. That raises the question of if it is a good idea to simply list multiple different phoneme charts and multiple different pronunciation charts corresponding to the analyses of different papers (like on the Tatar language Wikipedia article). Eel of Oppo (talk) 19:50, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: 'Crazy' Linguistically Rich Asian Languages

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2024 and 6 December 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Samantha224466, Cionna22 (article contribs).

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