Re: which languages use arabic alphabet?

phoglund@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 skreiv:

> On Jul 1, 9:52 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>> with references to Soviet sources very unlikely to be
>> available here (the Belarusian one was published in 1968 in a city
>> that appears to transliterate as Vilnius, which is a bit surprising).
> 
> Not that surprising, considering what a backwater Belarus itself has
> always been in comparison with the Baltic States - even and especially
> in the Soviet times.

Or it may be a result of Vilnius' pre-Soviet history as a multilingual 
metropolis. Not disregarding the Jiddisch and German speaking 
communities, the city is close to what used to be the language border 
between Lithuanian and Slavic and the religuous border between the Roman 
Catholic and the Russian Orthodox church. AFAIK the demography (or 
ethnography) of its population before WW1 is still disputed.

And I just might have a clue to the Arabic script Belarusian. I remember 
reading many years ago of a couple of south Lithuanian villages with a 
population of moslem Tartars, descendants of refugees from the Russian 
Tartar wars. (Yes, here's a web page about them: 
<http://www.szlachta.org/2selim.htm>.
Note the name of the author.) 
Apparently, they were linguistically assimilated by the end of the 18th 
century, divided in a Polish-speaking nobility and a Belarusian-speaking 
peaople.

I'll leave the rest to someone with some actual knowledge of the history 
of the Polish-Lithuanian union.


-- 
Trond Engen
- out on a sidetrack again