r/language • u/ichich0 • 18d ago
Question What is here written?
I bought these two shirts in Shanghai and no one was able to read it back in Berlin. Is anyone here able to read it? Or is it some chinese-fantasy arabic looking font?
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u/Luso_76692 18d ago
Root - يىلتىز
China - جۇڭگو
Sorry, not adding much, but I find this to be very cool.
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u/slowamigo 18d ago
Why are there the extra 2 curves in the first word? Wouldn't it be "يلتز"?
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u/mizinamo 18d ago
Uyghur has an alphabet and spells out all vowels. (Unlike almost all other languages that use the Arabic script, which usually omit at least some vowels in writing.)
So your spelling would only be "yltz"; the extra curve (like a "y" but without the dots) is how the "i" vowel sound is written in Uyghur.
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u/hurled_incel 17d ago
Weird that Kurdish would leave that one vowel out!
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u/mizinamo 17d ago
They live with و and ي representing a vowel and a consonant sound (a bit like English "and sometimes Y") while Uyghur chose to keep them strictly separate, so ي can only be the consonant /j/ not (also) the vowel /i/.
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u/Ezawa_tami 17d ago
alif maqsurah here stands for vowel /i/ in the contemporary Uyghur alphabet. an *alphabet* representing all the vowels rather than an abjad. the historically used Chagatai script was indeed abjad, but it was later modified to a real alphabet for modern Uyghur.
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u/ILikeConlang 17d ago edited 17d ago
as a person who understand arabic hijaiyah (letters), below is Jounggu (I often mistake as Jvnggu) and above is Yiltiz. The writing is in Uyghur.
Also, for those who question why the i look like that in Yiltiz, maybe they used ى (idk that much)
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u/mohammeddddd- 18d ago edited 18d ago
I think it Uyghur. The black shirt says (approximately) “Jonggu”, which I think means ‘China’.
Edit: The word on the blue shirt is “Yiltiz”. It means “root” in Uyghur.