Lonely Planet Central Asia Phrasebook & Dictionary
S**T
Non-standard spelling
It's a shame that in the Uzbek section, which is what I bought it for, this book doesn't use the spelling standard adopted by the Uzbek government. So o‘ is represented here by ö, g‘ is represented by gh and x by kh. It also introduces ë for ye, but then spells eng as ëng, while in Cyrillic it would be энг. It spells qayerda as qaerda and poyezd as poezd, but both have the ye sound, so I would expect to see ë rather than e if it was consistent. Using gh for g‘ is also ambiguous, as ngh (as in qaronghi for example) could be n followed by gh or ng followed by h. It might be obvious which is intended to an Uzbek speaker, but not to the kind of person who wants a basic phrase book. Every other source I've seen also spells it qorong‘i with an o as the first vowel, not a. Learning Uzbek, when some material is in Cyrillic and some in the Latin alphabet is hard enough without introducing a different way of spelling it in the Latin alphabet.The Tajik section is entirely in Latin alphabet, which may be fine for speaking, but doesn't help for reading Tajik, which is written in Cyrillic.
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