Kazakhstan (a country 4 times the size of Texas) has its own Windows 7 LIP!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/05/02 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/05/02/10005857.aspx


The Kazakh Language Interface Pack for Windows 7 is now available!

It is only available for 32-bit, but it can be installed atop either English or Russian Windows 7.

You can download it from right here....

A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON KAZAKH

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:  8.5 million native speakers

NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELFҚазақ

Official language of Kazakhstan (where it is spoken by roughly half of the population), and also traditionally spoken in China (1 million speakers) and Uzbekistan (1 million speakers) as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine. Germany has some Kazakh speakers because descendants of Germans living in Russian (mainly Volga Germans) who were deported to Kazakhstan in the second half of the 20th century came to Germany.

FUN FACTS:

Sam: In fact we were talking about the stability of former Soviet republics and their fear of Islamic extremism and I have to say that I made some very scholarly points regarding the remaining nuclear weapons in Kyrgyzstan and I have to believe...
Josh: Kazakhstan.
Sam: Hmm?
Josh: The nuclear weapons are in Kazakhstan.
Sam: I said Kyrgyzstan?
Josh: Yeah.
Sam: Yeah, well, Kyrgyzstan has no nuclear weapons.
Josh: No.
Sam: Kazakhstan's a country four times the size of Texas and has a sizable number of former Russian missile silos.
Josh: Yeah.
Sam: Kyrgyzstan's on the side of a hill near China and has mostly nomads and sheep. 

I have some friends who have claimed that not everyone in Kyrgyzstan was amused by the scene. I can't admit I'm entirely surprised, though Kyrgyzstan certainly fared better than the town of Chino did in The O.C. It was just one scene, after all....

Click here for more information about the Kazakh language

CLASSIFICATION: Kazakh belongs to the Kypchak (Northwestern) group of the Turkic languages. Other Turkic languages are, for example, Turkish, Kyrgyz, Azeri and Tatar. The Turkic languages are believed by some to be a subfamily of the disputed language family of Altaic languages which would include the Turkic languages along with the Mongolic and Tungusic languages and - according to some scholars - also Japanese and Korean.

Click here for more information about Kazakh classification

SCRIPT: Though Kazakh was traditionally written in the Arabic script, today it is written using the Cyrillic (Kazakhstan, Mongolia), the Latin (Turkey), and modified Arabic (China, Iran, Afghanistan) scripts. In Cyrillic the Kazakh script includes these 9 letters in addition to 33 Russian Cyrillic characters: Ә, Ғ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, Һ, İ.

Click here for more information about the Kazakh script

Now obviously given the wide number of countries in which Kazakh is used by some of the people, and the wide variety of scripts used both historically and in modern times, in those countries, I think it might be best to point out that the both the locale in Windows and the localization of the LIP is primarily targeted for Kazakh (Kazakhstan). Mutual intelligibility between the various other regions would depend on knowledge of the scripts and dialectical differences involved. The various "other Kazakhs" might make excellent custom locales for interested people. :-)

Enjoy!


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2010/06/01 It is with a tenge of sorrow that I say this

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