Have you read Vladimir Yefimov's essay on the Petrine Civil Type in Language Culture Type? It doesn't directly address the capital U question, but it does provide a fairly detailed history of the reform. Of course, at the final stage Peter the Great simply picked up a pen and crossed out a pile of stuff: alphabet reform by royal fiat, and I don't suppose the Tsar felt any need to explain himself.

You might also track down volumes 3:4 (1969) and 4:2 (1970) of the journal Visible Language, which contain a two-part essay on 'The Genesis of Russian Grazhdanskii Shrift or Civil Type' by Ivan L. Kaldor. I don't have my copies to hand, so I can't check what information they might include about the alphabet reform. Kaldor was principally interested in identifying the specific Latin types on which the Civil Type was based.

BTW, wassup with the code point 04AE in Unicode?

It's used in the Cyrillic orthographies of Azerbaijani, Bashkir and Kalmyk. Take a look at the lowercase form, U+04AF. I'm not sure when this developed. All three languages were written in variants of the Latin script in the 1920s and 1930s, until Stalin decided that the USSR should be a Cyrillic-only zone. But if you take a look at the images at this site, taken from M.I. Isaev's Yazykovoe strointel'stvo v SSSR, you'll see that the 'Y' is shown with a typical Russian U form. It is difficult to tell whether this represents the form used for these languages in the 1920s and 1930s or if this was simply what Isaev had available in 1979.

Peter the Great,

Peter the Great imposed the "fools act."?
Good thinking, would have saved me a lot of trouble.

I would be interested in reading the essay, Petrine Civil Type.

Obviously, I haven't read Yefimov's chapter yet. :-/
I'll have to bump it up my reading list... In fact I can make it second in line (after part 3 of that Ovink thing), not least because Typophile threads get "closed" after a month of inactivity...

And thanks for the VL references. I recently finished "mining" Quaerendo all the way back to the beginning, and VL/JoTR can be next. Long live UCLA! Well, at least their libraries...

> at the final stage Peter the Great simply picked up a pen and crossed out a pile of stuff

That's what I suspected. But I guess the preparatory stuff by "advisors" did guide the process to a large extent (at least I hope so). Nonetheless, what might be called the erratic, "human" nature of the process probably resulted in some strangeness. For example, for the cap U, I wonder if Peter saw a lc Latin "y", and since it's "tall" he thought it was a cap, and he just took a fancy to it? But this is mostly just my imagination for now - I'll read up that material soon.

>> 04AE
> Take a look at the lowercase form

Huh, it looks like a van Krimpen Greek gamma.

> All three languages were written in variants of the Latin script in the 1920s and 1930s

It seems that this is what would have made them used a more Latin form, although
that lc is still strange - maybe it was to differentiate it from the mainstream/Russian form.

hhp

It seems that this is what would have made them used a more Latin form, although
that lc is still strange - maybe it was to differentiate it from the mainstream/Russian form.

The differentiation was necessary because they're different letters in a single orthography. All three languages use this straight-leg form and the typical Cyrillic U. In the new Azerbaijani Latin orthography (1992), the latter is written u while the straight-leg letter is written as ü. I'm not sure of the exact phonetic value.

Oh, OK - that explains the lc form.
I wonder why they didn't just use an accent, since they have accents for other letters. But maybe it's better this way.

hhp

Further, regarding the Azerbaijani orthography:

When written in the Arabic script, Azerbaijani uses letters as vowels, not Arabic vocalisation marks (like the Yiddish and Ladino use of the Hebrew script). The close vowels discussed above, u and ü, as well as the vowels o and � are all written using the Arabic letter waw which may be optionally distinguished by the addition of superscript marks:

o = waw with sukun
� = waw with hamza
u = waw with damma
ü = waw with hamza

Obviously the distinction between the quality of the vowel sound is considered more important than the actual position of the sound, since both the � and ü are written the same way in the Azerbaijani Arabic orthography.

The Cyrillic orthographies for these languages don't use any floating accent marks, except those that occur in the Russian orthography (Ie with diaeresis and the short sign on the I). These orthographies all used newly invented letters for non-Russian sounds.

Sorry, I confused it with Turkish.

BTW, didn't Azerbaijan "officially" switch to Latin a few years ago? I'd guess they've modeled the switch on the Turkish precedent. But is Cyrillic still the de facto script? I remember that the switch was seen as a long-shot political ploy; which was in fact the case with Turkish, although having a strong leader -and the high illiteracy back then- made that one more effective.

In fact here's a story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2165547.stm

hhp

I'm not sure what the current state of play is in Azerbaijan. My guess is that the two scripts co-exist, with the Latin being given preference in schools and in all official publications.

It turns out that I had once copied part 2 of the Kaldor essay (the issue of VL containing part 1 is in storage - I'll have to call it up), and it contains a wonderful letter-by-letter analysis. In case anybody is interested I scanned it up (easier and better than re-typing):



hhp

Excellent! Thanks for this. I think I only have one half of Kaldor's essay in my own collection, and can't remember which half. [I'll be better able to keep track in future: I've just hired a librarian to catalogue the collection.]