Thursday, April 12, 2007

Typing Kazakh

Kazakh is a Turkic language spoken in Kazakhstan and a few other areas. While both the Arabic and Latin scripts have been used to write it in the past, Cyrillic is now the standard. The alphabet is essentially the same as Russian but with 9 additional characters: Ә, Ғ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, Һ, І.

OS X comes with fonts that cover Kazakh, but with no keyboard layout. On my iDisk you can find two versions: KazakhCYR, which is the same as used on Windows machines, and KazakhPH, which is modeled on the Apple Russian-Phonetic layout and may be easier for people used to QWERTY.

Switching from Cyrillic back to Latin (which was used for a number of years before 1940) is reportedly under consideration by Kazakhstan.

6 comments:

Slovnyk said...

how can i get the kazakh fonts?
stokes@alumni.vanderbilt.edu

Tom Gewecke said...

All you need is already on your Mac -- Lucida Grande covers it.

McKenzie Clark said...

Call me computer illiterate, but I still can't figure it out. I have my computer in Cyrillic and I put on the Lucinda Grande CY font on Word, but I still only get the standard Russian Ciryllic alphabet.

Tom Gewecke said...

Are you perhaps using the obsolete Word X? Have you installed the keyboard downloaded from my site? Does it work in TextEdit? Email me (tom at bluesky dot org) and I'll try to help.

Sarah said...

Since iDisk no longer exists, could you post another link to KazakhPH. We have it on our other mac, but got a new one this summer and can't find the name of the KazakhPH file on the old mac. Thanks.

Tom Gewecke said...

Sarah -- Try

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/46870715/k/KazakhPH.keylayout