Tat alphabet

The Tat alphabet is used for writing in the Tat language, which has two main dialects - the northern one, spoken by Mountain Jews, and the southern one, spoken by the Tats. During its existence, the Tat writing functioned primarily in the northern dialect and at the same time changed its graphic basis several times and was reformed several times. Currently, the writing of the Mountain Jews is in Cyrillic alphabets, and the writing of the Muslim Tats is in the Latin alphabet. There are four stages in the history of Tat writing:

Until 1928, the Arabic script was used. Subsequently, the Muslim Tat language became practically unwritten. Before the annexation of Transcaucasia to the Russian Empire, the Tats used only Farsi as a written language; even the spoken dialect of the Muslim Tats had and still has this name in Absheron. Writing based on the Azerbaijani Latin alphabet is used rarely and sporadically.

The first records of Judeo-Tat writing date back to the late 1870s and early 1880s, when Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhaki compiled the first Tat book, “Thesaurus of Judeo-Tat (Juhuri) language of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus.” This book used Hebrew writing, adapted to the needs of Tat phonetics. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Tat script on a Jewish graphic basis became more widely used - books began to be published in it, and in 1915 an attempt was made to publish a newspaper. In 1921, the first primer New School (Judeo-Tat: Таза школа) was published in this alphabet. In 1927, at the All-Union Conference on cultural work among the Mountain Jews, held in Moscow, it was decided to reflect in writing all the vowel sounds of the Judeo-Tat dialect (א [æ], אַ [a], אָ [о], י [i], ו [v], וּ [u]). However, at that time the process of transitioning the Tat language to the Latin script was beginning, which made the reform irrelevant.

The Judeo-Tat alphabet based on the Hebrew script looked like this:

In the 1920s, the process of romanization of scripts was underway in the USSR. In May 1925, Y. Agarunov compiled the first draft of a Latinized alphabet for Mountain Jews. On May 15–20, 1926, at the regional congress of Mountain Jews in Nalchik, it was decided to transfer the Tat writing system to a Latin graphic basis. Since that time, preparatory work on Latinization began in the North Caucasus and Azerbaijan. In 1928, several projects for a new script were submitted to the committee for a new alphabet for consideration. Thus, the project of Z. Yu. Khudainatov included the following letters: А a, B в, V v, G g, D d, H h, Z z, Ӡ ӡ, ħ, I i, J j, K k, X x, L ʟ, M m, N n, S s, Y y, P p, F f, C c, Ç ç, ꜧ, R r, Ş ş, T t, O o, U u, Ú ú, E e.

On April 28–30, 1929, the All-Union Conference of representatives of the Mountain Jewish people were held in Baku. It finally approved the new alphabet for the Judeo-Tat language proposed by Boris Miller. It looked like this:

This alphabet was actively used in the field of education, book publishing and the media. In 1932, the first standard grammar of the Tat language was published.

In later editions in Latin, the letter Đ đ is absent, but is present (only in borrowings) E e