Yañalif

Jaꞑalif, Janalif or Yañalif (Tatar jaꞑa əlifba/yaña älifba → jaꞑalif/yañalif [jʌŋɑˈlif], Cyrillic Яңалиф, "new alphabet") was the first Latin alphabet used during the Soviet epoch for the Tatar language in the 1930s. It replaced the Yaña imlâ Arabic script-based alphabet in 1928 and was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1939.

There were 33 letters in Jaꞑalif; nine were for vowels. The apostrophe was used for the glottal stop (həmzə/hämzä) and was sometimes sorted as a letter. Other characters were also in use for foreign names. The small letter B looks like ʙ (to prevent confusion with Ь ь), and the capital letter Y looks like У. The letter Ꞑ ꞑ ( ) looks like N n/ŋ which has a descender as in Cyrillic letters Щ, Җ, Ң. The letter no. 33 (similar to Zhuang Ƅ) isn't represented in Unicode, but it looks exactly like Cyrillic soft sign (Ь). Capital Ə also looks like Russian Э in some fonts.

History

The earliest example of the Kipchak language, specifically the Cuman language, the main ancestor of the modern Tatar language and written with Latin characters, is the Codex Cumanicus. These letters could be used for Catholic devotions among Turkic Catholics within the Golden Horde. Nevertheless, the culture of Catholic Hordians disappeared and this alphabet was lost.