with little matters, such as theirs vs there's,
its vs it's, dog's vs dogs, man's vs mans and Trump's vs trumps
(not to mention CDs vs CD's)
but the poor old Kazakhs are facing the fourth change in their alphabet,
which will use Latin letters (as in Uzbek) plus
apostrophes to represent sounds not accounted for
in the lame 26-letter Latin alphabet.
O' is thus pronounced differently from O,
and G' pronounced differently from G.
So a four-letter word could have two or three apostrophes.
Kazakhstan has about 15 different ethnic groups
and several languages, not all of them Turkic.
In the east of the country, as in the neighouring part of China
an adapted Arabic script is still employed
(as it was from around 1200 to 1929).
Kazakh was first written in runes.
Wikipedia's Kazakh entries are in Cyrillic:
Қазақ әліпбиі
which came into effect in 1940
after 11 years of a Turko-Latin alphabet
with which Stalin replaced the 'unwieldy' Arabic in 1929.
I can find no text on Google in the new script,
except for the national anthem here.
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