Khusqaian Writing Systems

The first writing system introduced into Khusqaikama was Chinese, for various (phonotactical and grammatical) reasons that writing system was never successfully adapted to the language, however. It was widely used by bureaucrats, but the language they used it for was classical Chinese, not Khusqaian. Nevertheless, it became common practice (later even law) to write names in Chinese characters, and that practice lives on until today.

The second writing system that was introduced was Gupta script used for writing Sanskrit from the 4th to approximately 7nd centuries, brought back from India by two visiting monks (who visited China first - more about them to be added later). Gupta was more easily adapted to Khusqaian phonology and became - after some time, and mixed with Chinese characters for imported Chinese words and names - the standard for written Khusqaian. The bureaucracy, however, for a long timed continued using classical Chinese as its official language.

At the end of the 19th century Cyrillic script was introduced, but this became important only after the Second World War when it was enforced as the official script for the language. Nevertheless, the Khusqaian Cyrillic alphabet deviates significantly from the Russian 'standard'.

At the end of the 20th century an official romanization (of the Cyrillic) was created (see Khusqaian Alphabet, but at the same time, the Gupta-derived traditional script regained popularity. Right now, most educated people in their 20s or 30s can read Cyrillic, traditional script, about a thousand Chinese characters, and Latin script, and many can also read some Japanese and/or Korean. The same is true for the more highly educated of the generation above them, but among that generation the Cyrillic remains the dominant standard.

Both the Cyrillic and the traditional Gupta-derived script have a largely phonemic orthography, although both deviate from that at some points. Most important deviation can be found in the Gupta-derived script that writes all vowels of a group only one of which can occur in a morpheme because of vowel harmony with the same diacritical mark.

Chinese characters

(history)

Nowadays Chinese characters are only used for names and in some specialist academic and/or Buddhist writings. Most Chinese characters that are used have a single reading/pronunciation based on the Chinese (or sometimes Korean) pronunciation. These (official) pronunciations are listed in the character dictionary created by [NAME] in [YEAR]. However, characters used in personal names and place names have a secondary Khusqaian (rather than Chinese) reading/pronunciation determined by the meaning of the character. These Khusqaian readings are only used in names (and not in names of organizations).

While character combinations in names are subject to vowel harmony, other character compounds are not. Hence, the Chinese-based (official/standard) readings/pronunciations do not harmonize. This is because such words tend to be used in the written language only. Those that did enter the spoken language became gradually adapted to Khusqaian phonology including vowel harmony, and are no longer written with Chinese characters.

Cyrillic

Main Article: Khusqaian Alphabet