Kyrgyzstan, not Kazakhstan! (the "Penn -- Not Penn State' of Central Asia)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/01/29 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/01/29/10121823.aspx

Click here to download the Kyrgyz Windows 7 LIP via the Microsoft.com Download Center.

Please note that the Kyrgyz Windows 7 LIP can only be installed on a system that runs a Russian client version of Windows 7.

The Kyrgyz Windows 7 LIP is produced as part of the Local Language Program sponsored by Public Sector.

Kyrgyz is (together with Russian) the official language of the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan. In Kyrgyzstan, the percentage of people claiming Kyrgyz as their first language dropped from 67% to 44% in the years between 1926 and 1970 due to the large influx of non-Kyrgyz speakers. After Kyrgyzstan became an independent nation in 1991, an aggressive language policy tried to revert the trend and re-"Kyrgyzify" the country.

Outside of Kyrgyzstan, Kyrgyz is spoken in neighboring countries such as China (150,000 speakers, mainly in Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region), Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Kyrgyz is an agglutinative language: Suffixes are added to fixed stems to generate meaning. The word order in sentences is Subject-Object-Verb, and therefore Kyrgyz has postpositions rather than prepositions and relative clauses precede the verb.

• There has been some confusion around the terms Kyrgyz and Kazakh. Kazakh has been referred to as Kirghiz, Kirghiz-Kaisak, or Kazakh-Kirghiz while Kara-Kirghiz or Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz) was the term used for what we call Kyrgyz. Also, in Turkish, Kyrgyz is known as Kırgız Türkçesi (Kyrgyz Turkish).
• By only allowing Russian as a base langauge, they avoid several of the issues discussed in Майкрософт vs. Microsoft, aka On choosing the most reasonable inconsistency.

Kyrgyz is a member of the Kipchak group of languages which belongs to the Turkic languages (which also include Azerbaijani, Tartar or Uzbek). Its closest relative is Kazakh.

In Kyrgyztan, Kyrgyz has been written in a modified Cyrillic script (with 3 special characters) since 1940 (while in China a modified Arabic script is used). Until 1923 an Arabic script was used in Kyrgyztan and after, from 1928 to 1940, Kyrgyz used the Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet. There were plans to return to the Latin alphabet in the early 1990s, but these were never implemented.

Hello Mr.Kaplan , I'm very glad to contect with you via your blog ...I'm a kyrgyz from China , as you know we are using the Arabic alphabet , we want to know is that possible add our language(Arabic alphabet) to Microsoft OS? thankyou!

Ah, unfortunately it is not as simple as that. See this blog for more info on what goes into LIP picking....

Hello , as you konw ,we ,kyrgyz lives in China ,use the arabic alphabet , there are lot's of difculties in information processing by Computer , just because no Arabic_kyrgyz input method in any Operating system now . So is it possible to add our language's input method in Windows8 ? (Iust like Uyghur input method in Windows7)

Check out this blog for a response to your question....

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