Talk:Wakhi language

Renovated

I've renmoved the following sentence:

The education ratio among Wakhi Tajiks in the northern areas of Pakistan is about 60%.

As it stands. it's much too vague; does it refer to literacy, or more advanced education? If the latter, to what level? Could someone fil in the details, so that it can be put back? I'm also unclear as to the meaning of the last sentence in the article (about computers). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 15:07, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

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Language Question

Why is this under Wakhi language and not Wakhi Tajiki language? Madd4Max 10:58, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The Wakhi, Tajiks and politics in Tajikistan

This article identifies the Wakhi as "Tajiks" and implies that the language Wakhi is a dialect of Tajik. This is very controversial and involves the politics of language in Tajikistan. Few linguists would call Wakhi a dialect of Tajik. It really constitutes it's own language and is categorized by linguists as one of the Pamir languages. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a separatist movement in Gorno-Badakhshan, home of the Pamiri, also called Badakhshani, people in Tajikistan. Pamiris were targeted for massacres during the 1992-1997 Civil War in Tajikistan. Many Tajik nationalists insist on calling all the Pamir languages Tajik, but there is no consensus on this and, in my opinion, wikipedia articles should not endorse this idea. I'm changing the article.--David Straub 00:34, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Classification

So is Wakhi actually classified under the Pamir subfamily of the Southeastern Iranian languages, or is it broken out from them in its own subfamily? Different sources say different things; I'm going with the Ethnologue classification for now, but feel free to change it if you have more reliable/up-to-date sources. Incidentally, the Eastern Iranian languages article has it listed separately from the Pamir languages, but the Pamir languages article itself mentions Wakhi. (My POV comment: as you can see from the vocabulary comparison, there are pretty clear differences between Wakhi on the one hand, and Shughni and Sarikoli on the other). cab 03:39, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Orthography

1953 alphabet

Wakhi alphabet

a	ā	ā̔	b	č	č̣	ċ
d	ḍ	ḏ	e	ə	f	g
ɣ	ɣ̆	h	i	j	ǰ	No clue
k	L	m	n	o	ō	ō̔
p	q	Ɵ	r	s	š	ṣ̌
t	ţ	ʦ	u	u̯	u̔	v
w	x	x̆	y	z	ẓ̌	ž

Current alphabet

Aa	Bb	Cc	Čč	Č̣č̣
Dd	Ḍḍ	Δδ	Ee	Əə
Ff	Gg	Ɣɣ	Ɣ̆ɣ̆	Hh
Jj	J̌ǰ	J̣̌ǰ̣	Kk	Ll
Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq
Rr	Ss	Šš	Ṣ̌ṣ̌	Tt
Ṭṭ	Θϑ	Uu	Vv	Ww
Xx	X̌x̌	Yy	Zz	Žž
Ẓ̌ẓ̌	Ʒʒ	Ыы

Discussion

Good find on the "elphabets" table --- where'd you get it? I've tried typing it up, but everytime I try to submit it, the server seems to choke --- does anyone know if this is an existing bug? Don't know if it will render properly in most browsers, though. Below is the description of how I did it; plus sign means two unicode characters. Enclosed each one in {{unicode}}. "x with y" means a single precomposited character. In the case of letters with two marks, there's several different ways to do it and I'm not really familiar with the technical issues of which way is best (e.g. the second to last letter in the first row; should it be c + two combining characters, or one of the c with xxx + other combining character)?

• a, a with macron, a with macron + combining inverse comma above, c with caron, c with caron + combining dot below, c with dot above
• d, d with dot below, d + combining macron below, e, schwa, f, g
• Latin gamma, Latin gamma + combining breve above, h, i, j, j + combining breve above use j with caron instead, No clue how to type this
• k, L, m, n, o, o with macron, o with macron + combining inverse comma above
• p, q, Latin Capital Letter O With Middle Tilde, r, s, s with caron, s with caron + combining dot below
• t, t with cedilla, latin digraph ts, u, u + combining inverted breve below (I suspect this is wrong), u + combining inverse comma above, v
• w, x, w + combining breve above, y, z, z with caron + combining dot below, z with caron

Comments? Should we replace the image with this? cab 23:39, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Great job with the chart! I was hoping somebody would do that, it makes things a lot neater. The "elphabets" picture I got from Ali Haqiqat's "Wakhi Language" (1952), it's a guide to the alphabet, kind of like what in Uyghur or Kazakh would be called an Alippe. I'm not sure though that it hasn't been changed since 1952, when the book was written, and wonder if it has been modified some.??

From a recent translation of the Lord's Prayer into Wakhi (From the Gospel of St. Luke in the Bible) [1], it seems like it there is another letter 'ы'. And then I notice also that this Wakhi dictionary[2] seems to have done away with a lot of the letters? Also maybe interesting is [3]

As far as I know Wakhi in Xinjiang don't have a written langauge. If they would write it they'd use the Uyghur script (or a modification thereof). All there schools are either in Uighur or in Chinese. On your chart everything looks correct to me except the final a, o, and two of the u's. Of course also that funny j one isn't there.--Erkin2008 03:42, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, hmm; combining inverted comma above doesn't seem to be the right mark (looks like it crosses the macron in most fonts, not to mention looking a bit short). Let me take another look. Also I switched the second j for a precomposited form which doesn't have the dot.

As for the j-like thing, I squinted at Windows Charmap for a while, then asked about it on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages#Unicode question; no luck yet. I thought it was a ҕ, that is, a Cyrillic г with a hook, but I guess not. ј҅ (a hack; Cyrillic je + combining Dasia Pneumata, which looked like it might be vaguely right) doesn't seem to render at all in IE. cab 04:53, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I contacted the Институт перевода Библии (Institute for Bible Translation), and they gave me this new alphabet chart.--Erkin2008 21:54, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Good stuff --- I tried typing it out again; all the characters theoretically should be typable, but the results don't seem great --- do some of the letters with carons look strange to you too? cab 07:38, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

hmmm, I don't quite know what you mean by carons, I don't know that kind of terminology very well :) But here are the problems as I see them. The hat thingys on the second gamma, second x, third z, and the third s don't look correct. I can't see the dot under the third lower case j. The second theta is just a box with a question mark in it. Also there is an extra w, but I'll delete that.--Erkin2008 20:45, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

that's odd, after reloading most things work. the hat things are all there, but for some of them they are a little bit moved to the left direction. For the two last j's both hats seem to be on the little j, and I can't see the dot on the bottom of the little j either. Reloading again I've lost my old improvement--this is on a Firefox 2.0.0.2 Portable on Windows XP btw.--Erkin2008 20:51, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

More sources

If anybody is still working on this, there are some more websites around with a lot of info that may be helpful for making the Orthography part better:

• http://wakhi.wordpress.com/about/
• http://wakhi.wordpress.com/write-wakhi/
• http://www.gojal.net/languages_wakhi_%20alphabets.htm
• http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/multilingual_corpus/wakhi/
• http://bulbulek.webs.com/xikrasmulxhat.htm
• http://xikmurdum.ning.com/

--Linguist0932112 (talk) 17:54, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Sample text

Murad Bhatti Jana (talk) 07:05, 11 April 2009 (UTC)I think the example used in this section should be removed because it is from the Bible and seems like an attempt of proselytization, this is disrespectful to the Wakhi people who are Muslim, this is not the page to be spreading this kind of activity, so please I request to remove this offensive exampleMurad Bhatti Jana (talk) 07:05, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

It's not an attempt at proselytisation, but I think it's a better idea to use a different example too. Unfortunately other common sample texts like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights aren't available in Wakhi. Any suggestions? cab (talk) 05:27, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Calm down Murad Bhatti Jana! This isn't an attempt at proselyzation. The "Lord's Prayer" is a fairly standard text used for comparative purposes between languages (albiet, largely because of the number of translations of the Bible by missionaries). Who cares what the Wakhi people's religion is, it is irrelevant to a discussion of how their language compares to others. 64.88.170.40 (talk) 23:48, 30 November 2009 (UTC) Shabadoo

IPA

Could someone give the IPA equivalents for the letters of the Wakhi alphabet? I suspect consonants with dots are pharyngealized, but I don't have any idea what x̌ can be. Aminullah 12:21, 17 May 2007 (UTC)\

Wakhi Phonology

I have Lorimer's Wakhi Language books here with me, and would be happy to scan in a few pages for somebody if they would like to work with it. Perhaps the phonology charts? They aren't in proper IPA in the books. --Erkin2008 20:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

On the Ghalchah languages (Wakhand Sarikol (1876)

On the Ghalchah languages (Wakhand Sarikol (1876)

https://archive.org/details/onghalchahlangua00shaw

Rajmaan (talk) 23:11, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Retroflexes and dentals

Is it true that д./ḍ and т./ṭ stand for dentals while д/d and т/t stand for retroflexes? I'd expect it to be the other way round, especially since the other dotted letters ж./ẓ̌, ч./č̣, ҷ./ǰ̣, and ш./ṣ̌ do stand for retroflexes. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:27, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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Theta variant

Does this language use the cursive theta ϑ specifically, or can we use regular lowercase theta θ as readers will be more familiar with it and it's much easier to type and search? -- Beland (talk) 05:09, 7 February 2022 (UTC)