The first three Abkhaz alphabets

The alphabet that Uslar created for Abkhaz in 1862 consisted of 37 letters. Most of these were based on Cyrillic letters, with various diacritical marks and squibbles attached. But a few Latin letters were included (h, i, j), and also the lower-case Greek letter nu (in two variants).⁶

The second Abkhaz alphabet, created in 1909 by Alexei Chochua, was a modified and expanded version of Uslar’s alphabet. It consisted of 55 letters, again mostly based on Cyrillic letters but with a few Latin letters (I, q, h) and the Greek nu.⁷

The third Abkhaz alphabet was the so-called Abkhaz Analytical Alphabet of 77 letters, devised by Academician Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr in 1926 on the basis of the Latin script with abundant use of diacritical marks (and a few letters based on Cyrillic, e.g. sh).

This article belongs to http://abkhazworld.com