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Advanced English Skills

04 Oct 2024 19:26

r genocide in these searches,” he said.

How has this name been rendered over time?

“Uyghur” contains sounds that aren’t easily rendered in English. When spoken, it sounds closer to “oy-gher” than “wee-ger,” as most Westerners enunciate it.

One early original source in English for the history of the region, British explorer T. D. Forsyth’s “Report of a Mission to Yarkand in 1873,” refers to the “Uighur” people. Other early spellings include “Ouighour” and “Ouigour,” derived from French and German scholars' renderings.

What is the basis for Boreham’s assertion?

Previously, China had included an “h” in the English spelling. An official directive issued on Oct. 11, 2006, from the Committee for the Language and Writing of the People’s Republic of China used “Uyghur.”

But on May 15, 2012, the China Daily, the English-language newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party, reported that the word had been officially standardized as “Uygur.”

Since then, official Chinese websites, including those of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Government and Chinese embassies in the United States and Europe, have used the “Uygur” spelling.

What do experts say?

Scholars and experts on the region rejected the latest call for a spelling change.

The word “Uyghur” is one of the most commonly used terms in Turkology in the Western world, and it is also used to refer to the script known today as Old Uyghur, they say.

Similar terms, like “Afghanistan” or “Mughal Empire” are often rendered with “gh” in Western languages because the “gh” sound does not exist in English. This is why Boreham’s suggestion to remove the “h” from the English form of “Uyghur” has been widely criticized.

Timothy Grose, a professor of China studies who is an expert in ethnicity and ethnic policy in China at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, said Boreham’s dictum was “completely wrong.”

“The sound here is closer to ‘gh,’ so it is most accurately expressed with that spelling,” he said.

“It neglects that Uyghurs themselves have their own culture and their own language, and it is really the duty and obligation of others to see this language and culture for its itself and on its own terms,” he said. Juha Janhunen explains his own stance:

My preferred spelling is Uighur, pronounced Weeger [wi:gər]. Since there is no sequence /ui/ in English it becomes automatically /wi:/, which is why we also have to say "a Uighur" and not "an Uighur". An alternative would be [ju:igər], as in Buick [bju:ik], but I do not know if anyone uses this pronunciation. Marcel Erdal provides an extensive phonological-philological analysis of the problem:

The third sound in the name of the Uyghurs is pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative, like what is spelled with gh in the name of Afghanistan, phonetic symbol [ʁ]. It is quite similar to the second sound in Greek εγώ ‘I’, but that is a voiced velar fricative [γ], i.e. a bit less back than [ʁ]. There is a tradition in the west to spell these fricatives, which do not exist in the major Western European languages and therefore has no standard western spelling, with the letter combination gh; but this is just a convention. (Danes, Dutch and Ukrainians have other ways for spelling this sound.) The Italians use this letter combination for expressing the sound [g], the voiced velar stop/plosive, before front vowels, as in the proper name Gherardo.

The Septuagint scholars translating the Old Testament into Greek had this problem when transcribing the name of the city which is now, in the west, called Gaza. In Arabic, the name is غَزَّة , with the Arabic letter ghain, غ. Also already in Philistine times, there was a voiced uvular fricative in its onset, which was, in the 3rd cent. A.D., translated into Greek with the letter γ (which originally represented a stop – but I am not sure till when). Beside ghain, غ, Arabic also has a voiced uvular approximant, cain, ع. Classical Hebrew united these two sounds into the sound cain, so the Hebrew n[...]