I’ve been redoing the various logos for the site, adding in a number of scripts and languages that had otherwise been missed the first time around. More on that later. In doing this I’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking at Sogdian and Arabo-Persian derived scripts being used for languages within modern China’s borders.

In the 5th century the Sogdian alphabet was used to write Old Uyghur, but this eventually evolved into the Old Uyghur alphabet some centuries later. There are some inscriptions written in the Orkhon-Yeniséy alphabet, a script resembling runes, which was eventually spread to Southern Europe.

In case you’re wondering, here’s a sample¹ of the Orkhon-Yeniséy alphabet:

SInUglEt dFDHZhf sGlj ajSCdsBkKfg

By the 18th Century, the Old Uyghur script was falling out of favour. The Arabo-Persian script was known as Chagatai جغتای after the prestige language which it was used to write, itself named for the Chagatai Khanate. It replaced Old Uyghur and it is still in wide use today in and around Xinjiang.

To me the interesting thing about all of this is the use of Chagatai at all. It was, to my understanding, a prestige language used mainly for literary purposes. Still belonging to the Uyghuric family of languages, Chagatai had a much greater presence of Arabic and Persian words than other coetaneous Uyghuric languages. It spread through the area with the spread of Islam. Rather than speak Arabic or Persian as the primary prestige language, a variant of Uyghur developed. It was apparently also spoken in the Mughal courts. On this I’d love to hear more if anyone has any good resources.

It’s actually Uzbek that is considered to be the closest living language to Chagatai based on grammar and lexicon. Uyghur obviously has a great deal of influence from Mandarin which is obvious to anyone who’s tried to hit the markets in Ürümqi without relying on Chinese. According to Wikipedia, a literary form of Uzbek replaced Chagatai in the 1920s.

Unlike written Uyghur, in either the modern modified Arabic script or the Old Uyghur script, Chagatai lacked fully written vowels. Like Arabic, only the long vowels were typically written in Chagatai. Uyghur on the other hand is a full alphabet, not an abjad² like the writing systems of Arabic or Sogdian. This is actually my biggest gripe about xiao’erjin, were one permitted gripes about a dead transcription system. If the alphabetisation from Uyghur were used for xiao’erjin, there would be a much better correlation between the sounds of Chinese and the written transcription.

Oh well.

For those with €200 to blow, you can buy the famed Glossary of Chagatay by András J E Bodrogligeti. I’m sure it’s available for much less, but then what fun is posting that?

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1. If this doesn’t show up for you, leave a comment. I’ve modified an already custom font and embedded it into the HTML so there are any number of places in the process for a problem to have occurred.
2. An abjad, not to be confused with an abugida, is a writing system in which vowels are not obligatory. An abugida is a writing system for which they are obligatory but secondary, and an alphabet proper is a writing system in which vowels are or primary importance.