1926 Turkology Congress in Baku decided to switch scripts for Soviet Turkic languages from Arabic to Latin. This also inspired Turkey to do the same, two years later. And now, 99 years later, Kazakhstan is planning a return to Latin script.

There are several notable versions of how the new system should look like, however none of them is as good as the ones from Qazaq Grammar and Kazak Bubble. One of the letters that raises eyebrows is the "C" which is used for voiceless postalveolar fricative, ⟨ ʃ ⟩, or more commonly, the "SH" sound. '"SH" sound should be represented as such, that's how Latin script is!', people argue. Well, English is not THE Latin script, no matter how hard it tries to be and let me try to shed some light on the others.

"SH" sound can be expressed in various ways, ranging from a single letter to trigraph. Let's start with football and Hungary. Hungarian uses "S" for "SH" sound and the most beautiful goal award by FIFA, Puskás award, is pronounced like Puushkash. And since "SH" is taken by "S", "SZ" is used for what we know as a regular "S", think Szoboszlai.

S with something around is pretty standard with "Š" used by Czech, "Ŝ" used by Esperanto, "Ṣ" used by Yoruba, "Ş" used by Turkish and "Ș" used by Romanian. Are there any other letters to signify the "SH" sound? Yes! "Y" is Rioplatense Spanish, "X" in Portuguese and "C" in Berber languages.

Let's look at the digraphs! Obviously, Albanian "SH" comes to mind. Beside that there is "LL" in Rioplatense Spanish, "SJ" in Dutch, "CH" in French, "SC" in Italian, "SZ" in Polish and "SY" in Malay, among others.

For trigraphs we get German "SCH" and when we return to English, we can find such words as sugar, mission, information, ocean, precious and etc.

Finally, a letter is not equal to a sound and everybody can assign a letter with a sound, just like the folks from Qazaq Grammar and Kazak Bubble did, following the historical Kazakh script of the 1930s.
#kazakh

One of the World's most known Arabic-language TV networks is called الجزيرة, or Al Jazeera, which can be translated as "The Island", meaning the Arabian Peninsula, where it is located. 
If you take its plural, الجزائر or Al Jazair, you will get the Arabic name of Algeria, which means "the islands", referring to the small islands near its capital, Algiers.

And if the name of Algeria, which came to English and German via French (Algérie), was adapted to fit the consonant pronunciation of "g" in particular, its capital name was made as what I call "Fake French". Instead of "Alger" it became "Algiers" and "Algier" respectively, probably to justify the French pronunciation of "g". 

These kinds of vowel and consonant adaptations are quite spread when a country name comes to a language. However the structure and the order of syllables are preserved, despite sound adjustments. Unless it's Spanish and we're talking about Algeria and Ukraine. For whatever reason, Spanish decided that Algeria and Ucraina would be too cumbersome to pronounce and changed the order of the letters! They are called Argelia and Ucrania.
#arabic #german #english #spanish #french

Starting the 14th century, the Netherlands began to reclaim land in order to protect its existence. First done with the help of primitive dikes and from the 15th century with usage of windmills as drainage pumps.

In the late Middle Ages, Niderlant was a territory between Meuse (?? Maas) and Rhine (?? Rhein), including today's Lower Rhine (?? Niederrhein) in Germany. It was called so as opposed to Oberland, which began around the Cologne (?? Köln) area. With 26% of its current territory situated below sea level, Netherlands literally means "lower countries".

?? Nizozemska
?? Alankomaat
?? Pays Bas
?? An Ísiltír

#dutch #croatian #finnish #french #irish

Maschinengewehr 08 (MG 08) was a standard German machine gun made in 1908 and used in World War I. In 1915 there was a "rather misguided attempt" to improve the gun, make it lighter and portable. Despite better developments such as from Bergmann and Dreyse, MG 08/15 remained the most used common machine gun deployed by Germany in WWI.

Soldiers had to complete daily lengthy,monotonous and sometimes boring routines with MG 08/15. Some gun parts were standardized and could be produced by the factories making bicycles or typing machines. Maybe that also led to ever-decreasing quality and reliability of MG 08/15, but the fact is, it all coined an interesting phrase, which is still in use today.

Whenever something is extra ordinary, and not in a good way, pejoratively average and maybe even "standardized" and subpar, the Germans would say it's "Null-acht-fünfzehn", 08/15.
#german

Funny enough, once I switched from a startup to an enterprise, where agile rituals were religiously followed, the development speed overall seemed to stall. One of those rituals was a meeting of grooming or trying to specify the tasks in more detail.

The other day I was watching a Kazakh podcast where the speakers were discussing how the public tends to neglect their terrible deeds or allegations, like sexual misconduct, when it comes to their favorite artists. And this is how I learned that the word grooming has one other meaning, to gain trust of a child or vulnerable person in order to take advantage of or exploit them, especially sexually.

For writing software, let's maybe use the term refinement instead.
#english

Whether it's Afrikaans skryf, Bokmål skrive, Faroese skriva or Yiddish שרײַבן‎ the verb to write is derived from Latin scrībere.

Romance languages prefer the Latin origin as well, as seen in Aragonese escriure, Corsican scriva, Galician escrever and Romanian scrie, among others.

Where does the English to write come from, if not from Romance or Germanic (which are the same in this case) origins?

With some exceptions like Old Church Slavonic pьsā́tī*, which meant to paint, the majority of Indo-European languages, including Old Germanic wrītan, Latin scrībere and Greek γράφω*, used the words which originally meant "to carve, scratch, cut" to describe the act of writing.

So English "to write" is a cognate of German reißen, "to tear, rip", Swedish rita, "to draw" and Czech rýt, “to engrave, dig”.
#germanic #romance #english

If today is the first of Ramadan, why was the first Taraweeh prayer done yesterday?

For a lot of people, including myself, the next day begins at midnight. The clock makes it to 00:00 and the calendar increments the day counter. More than being reasonable, this is a familiar concept.

In Swahili, however, the next day begins at the sunrise, which in my humble opinion, makes a lot of sense.

And in Islamic and Jewish calendar, the new day begins right after the previous ended, at the sunset.

That's why the first of Ramadan began yesterday evening and the first Taraweeh took place.
#swahili #arabic

Imagine fierce, unforgiving weather. Severe warnings of harsh times coming to us. The air is biting and cold, with a sharp edge that stings exposed skin. The wind howls relentlessly, carrying fine, icy particles that whip through the air. Snow falls heavily and persistently.

This adjective of "severe, fierce and harsh" is the same word that Belarusians (люты), Poles (luty) and Ukrainians (лютий) use to name February.
#belarusian #polish #ukrainian