by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/02/23 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/02/23/10132959.aspx
THE WINDOWS 7 TURKMEN LANGUAGE INTERFACE PACK IS LIVE!
You can download the 32-bit version right over here and the 64-bit version right over here.
It does not currently have a download page for reasons that are not the fault of any of the people i respect and which I don't feel like getting into....
It can be installed on Windows 7 SP1(you must have SP1 installed!) with either Russian or English resources, and either 32-bit or 64-bit (just pick the right download, of course!).
The Turkmen Windows 7 LIP is produced as part of the Local Language Program sponsored by Public Sector.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON TURKMEN:
Number of Speakers:
4 million
Name in the langauge itself:
türkmençe
Turkmen is the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3 million people in Turkmenistan, and by approximately 380,000 in northwestern Afghanistan and 500,000 in northeastern Iran.
Fun Fact:
Like other Turkic languages, Turkmen is characterized by vowel harmony. In general, words of native origin consist either entirely of front vowels (inçe çekimli sesler) or entirely of back vowels (ýogyn çekimli sesler). Prefixes and suffixes reflect this harmony, taking different forms depending on the word to which they are attached.
Click here for more information about the Turkmen language.
Classification:
Turkmen belongs to the group of South Turkic languages in the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. It shares this group with Turkish and Azerbaijani.
Click here for more information about Turkmen classification.
Script:
Turkmen only started to appear in writing at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was written with the Arabic script. Between 1928 and 1940 it was written with the Latin alphabet, and from 1940 it was written with the Cyrillic alphabet. Since Turkmenistan declared independence in 1991, Turkmen has been written with a version of the Latin alphabet based on Turkish.
Click here for more information about the Turkmen script.
Microsoft-specific:
It is unclear whether it was intentional or not, but despite being based on the Turkish alphabet, the Turkmen locale on Windows does not do Turkic casing. If this is wrong, someone should tell us so we can fix it some day.
Enjoy!
John Cowan on 23 Feb 2011 8:33 AM:
No, it's correct not to use Turkic casing: Türkmen doesn't have ı, so I and i are a casing pair as normal. The orthography is only vaguely like Turkish: it uses y for Turkish ı and ý for Turkish y (same as English y), and it uses j and ž rather than Turkish c and j for the palatal voiced affricate and fricative respectively.
At least the Türkmenistan government ditched their earlier proposal that used $ and ¢ instead of Turkish-style Ş and ş; otherwise Unicode would have to add LATIN LETTER DOLLAR SIGN and LATIN LETTER CENT SIGN!
Michael S. Kaplan on 23 Feb 2011 9:49 AM:
Good info John, thanks.
Though I would have loved those latin letters.... a letter based on a symbol based on a letter? That is like "Victor Victoria" for Unicode!
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