Uyghur or Uygur
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I'll be right up front by saying that I always spell the name as "Uyghur" because doing so helps me pronounce the name more like the way the Uyghurs themselves say their ethnonym. If I spell the name as "Uygur", it has more of a tendency to come out sounding like a slur on an American ethnic group.
"EXPLAINED: What’s the controversy over ‘Uygur’ vs ‘Uyghur’? Beijing’s use of the former ignores Uyghurs’ preference and aims to sow division: experts" By Kurban Niyaz for RFA Uyghur (2024.09.10)
Recently, a China-based New Zealander who’s a columnist for the Shanghai Daily generated a stir when he declared on X that “Uyghur” — referring to the 12 million-strong ethnic group living in northwestern China — should be spelled in English without an “h.”
Andy Boreham, who has a history of using his social media platforms to propagate Beijing’s political messages, says the word should be spelled “Uygur,” per a Chinese government directive back in 2012.
This upset linguists and Uyghur advocates alike, who said the alternative spelling was incorrect, ignored Uyghurs’ preference and played into Beijing’s attempts to divide the Uyghur people.
Boreham, whose Chinese name is An Boran, said that the use of “Uyghur” with an “h” would be banned on all social media platforms or websites published in China. “The central government has ordered it, so it must be followed,” he wrote in the Sept. 6 post.
So be it. That's that. Logic with Chinese characteristics.
But there's more to it than the CCP's ex cathedra proclamation. There's also history, culture, and phonology.
The Uyghurs are a Turkic, mostly Muslim ethnic group living in what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China — which Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan.
They trace their roots in the region back centuries. The term “Uyghur” first appears on inscriptions on standing stones in present-day Mongolia dated to the 7th century.
In recent decades, the Uyghurs have been subjected to oppression and human rights abuses by the Chinese government that the United States and other Western governments have labeled a genocide.
Since 2017, an estimated 1.8 million have been herded into concentration camps, and thousands have been imprisoned. China says the facilities are job training sites to provide skills and alleviate poverty, and that most of the camps have been shut down.
Why is this alternative spelling a big deal to Uyghurs?
Members of the mostly Muslim ethnic group overwhelmingly prefer the spelling “Uyghur” because it more closely approximates the proper orthography and pronunciation in their native language.
To propose another spelling is disrespectful — and promotes division within the Uyghur community, they say.
“A white colonialist who works for another colonial empire is trying to tell us Uyghurs how to write and read our own national name. Who does he think he is?” said Dilnur Reyhan, president of the Paris-based European Uyghur Institute.
Boreham’s assertion may seem small, but it employs a familiar tactic from the Chinese government’s playbook — to sow division, said Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, vice chairman at the World Uyghur Congress.
By trying to get some Uyghurs to embrace the spelling “Uygur” without the “h,” China wants to create a version of Uyghurs who are members of the big China family, he said, separate from other Uyghurs.
This approach aligns with China’s long-standing political slogan: “Break their roots, break their connections, and break their origin,” he said.
Similarly, China has also replaced “Tibet” in official documents with “Xizang.”
Hassan said that having two spellings would cause confusion in online searches and could hinder access to important information.
“The risk is that we could lose parts of Uyghur history, literature, traditions, and even the ongoing Uyghur genocide in these searches,” he said.
How has this name been rendered over time?
“Uyghur” contains sounds that aren’t easily rendered in English. When spoken, it sounds closer to “oy-gher” than “wee-ger,” as most Westerners enunciate it.
One early original source in English for the history of the region, British explorer T. D. Forsyth’s “Report of a Mission to Yarkand in 1873,” refers to the “Uighur” people. Other early spellings include “Ouighour” and “Ouigour,” derived from French and German scholars' renderings.
What is the basis for Boreham’s assertion?
Previously, China had included an “h” in the English spelling. An official directive issued on Oct. 11, 2006, from the Committee for the Language and Writing of the People’s Republic of China used “Uyghur.”
But on May 15, 2012, the China Daily, the English-language newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party, reported that the word had been officially standardized as “Uygur.”
Since then, official Chinese websites, including those of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Government and Chinese embassies in the United States and Europe, have used the “Uygur” spelling.
What do experts say?
Scholars and experts on the region rejected the latest call for a spelling change.
The word “Uyghur” is one of the most commonly used terms in Turkology in the Western world, and it is also used to refer to the script known today as Old Uyghur, they say.
Similar terms, like “Afghanistan” or “Mughal Empire” are often rendered with “gh” in Western languages because the “gh” sound does not exist in English. This is why Boreham’s suggestion to remove the “h” from the English form of “Uyghur” has been widely criticized.
Timothy Grose, a professor of China studies who is an expert in ethnicity and ethnic policy in China at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, said Boreham’s dictum was “completely wrong.”
“The sound here is closer to ‘gh,’ so it is most accurately expressed with that spelling,” he said.
“It neglects that Uyghurs themselves have their own culture and their own language, and it is really the duty and obligation of others to see this language and culture for its itself and on its own terms,” he said.
Juha Janhunen explains his own stance:
My preferred spelling is Uighur, pronounced Weeger [wi:gər]. Since there is no sequence /ui/ in English it becomes automatically /wi:/, which is why we also have to say "a Uighur" and not "an Uighur". An alternative would be [ju:igər], as in Buick [bju:ik], but I do not know if anyone uses this pronunciation.
Marcel Erdal provides an extensive phonological-philological analysis of the problem:
The third sound in the name of the Uyghurs is pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative, like what is spelled with gh in the name of Afghanistan, phonetic symbol [ʁ]. It is quite similar to the second sound in Greek εγώ ‘I’, but that is a voiced velar fricative [γ], i.e. a bit less back than [ʁ]. There is a tradition in the west to spell these fricatives, which do not exist in the major Western European languages and therefore has no standard western spelling, with the letter combination gh; but this is just a convention. (Danes, Dutch and Ukrainians have other ways for spelling this sound.) The Italians use this letter combination for expressing the sound [g], the voiced velar stop/plosive, before front vowels, as in the proper name Gherardo.
The Septuagint scholars translating the Old Testament into Greek had this problem when transcribing the name of the city which is now, in the west, called Gaza. In Arabic, the name is غَزَّة , with the Arabic letter ghain, غ. Also already in Philistine times, there was a voiced uvular fricative in its onset, which was, in the 3rd cent. A.D., translated into Greek with the letter γ (which originally represented a stop – but I am not sure till when). Beside ghain, غ, Arabic also has a voiced uvular approximant, cain, ع. Classical Hebrew united these two sounds into the sound cain, so the Hebrew name of the city has an cain in its onset. But the Septuagint translators, who lived in Egypt, appear to have had local knowledge about the name of the place, and did not adopt the Biblical variant (as known today, at any rate).
The 11th century Turkic scholar Maḥmūd has a number of examples for the name of the Uyghurs, which he spells with the Arabic letter ghain, غ. But Arabic generally has no [g], so the Arabs did not need a letter for writing this sound. The Persians do have the sound [g], so they invented a letter for it (adopted by the Ottomans), but Maḥmūd uses the ‘normal’ Arabic alphabet (I’m not sure the Persians actually already invented the letter for [g] in the 11th century), so he had no choice if he wanted to write a voiced velar or uvular sound.
I am not going to go here into the possibilities which the medieval Uyghurs had when using the (Indian) Brāhmī alphabet and the Semitic alphabets for naming their ethnicity and language, nor the Tang and later transcriptions of the name (discussed by Peter Zieme, a.o.); that is a big topic.
Note that Jarring, e.g., calls the language ‘Eastern Turki’; the wider modern adoption of ‘Uighur’ / ‘Uyghur’ in the West took place, I believe, not much longer than a century ago.
Based on the Uyghurs own phonology and orthography, which should it be — Uyghur or Uygur? I always use the spelling with "gh" as more respectful and, I believe, more accurate.
Selected readings
- "Xinjiang Uygur" (8/7/19)
- "4 Uygur Theater" (6/12/09)
- See here for dozens of Wikipedia articles having to do with Uyghur language, people, culture, and history. There's even a Uyghur Wikipedia that was launched in June of 2012; here's the article on Uyghur language from it.
- "Uyghur language" == simple English Wikipedia
- "Growing up Chinese in Uyghurstan" (12/26/21)
- "Uyghurstan or Uyghuristan?" (6/25/19)
- "Uyghur, Cantonese, and other valuable languages of China " (2/20/16)
- "A confusion of languages and names " (7/8/16)
- "Gibberish Uyghur " (9/28/09)
- "Uyghur basketball player " (6/24/18)
- "Uyghur as a 'dialect' — NOT" (6/28/13)
- "Uyghur as ornament " (9/19/13)
- "Uyghur language outlawed in schools of the Uyghur Autonomous Region " (8/1/17)
- "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns " (7/15/09)
- "Education in Xinjiang " (1/13/15)
- "Pulled noodles: Uyghur läghmän and Mandarin lāmiàn " (8/8/14)
- "'Carrot' in Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Sinitic, Vietnamese, etc." (7/26/20)
- "A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns" (7/13/09)
- "Outlawed Uyghur names" (10/10/15)
- "Chinese Authorities Ban Muslim Names Among Uyghurs in Hoten" (9/24/15)
- "Yaourter" (7/21/09)
- "UIGHUR NAMES PRONOUNCED." (7/13/09) — includes this proclamation by Language Hat:
I will issue my standard disclaimer that English spellings and pronunciations are for the use and convenience of English speakers, and it is foolish and presumptuous to expect them to sound correct to speakers of other languages. I seriously doubt that a Uyghur speaker’s rendition of, say, “New York” would pass muster to an English speaker, and that’s as it should be. Different languages are different.
which he has sensibly adumbrated in diverse variations on his blog.
[h.t. Arthur Waldron]
Thomas said,
October 4, 2024 @ 10:05 am
As long as one pronounces “Uyghur” as we-ger, I don't think it makes much sense to claim that omitting the H is in any way disrespectful or unfaithful to the true pronunciation. One might prefer the version with H in analogy to other Asian countries and ethnicities such as Afghan, but it the end this is just a matter of tradition and mere exposure. Now of course the PRC is trying to destroy the tradition, so it makes sense for them to dumb down the word.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 4, 2024 @ 10:34 am
Re one of the things Marcel Erdal says: Before the translation of the Septuagint began, Gaza was conquered by Alexander the Great and, after his empire dissolved into pieces, was an at least semi-Hellenized city belonging to Ptolemaic Egypt, with the Septuagint translation getting underway there before it got transferred to the Seleucids (alhough maybe not all the relevant verses mentioning Gaza had been translated by then). So it should be unsurprising rather than noteworthy that the Greek-speaking residents of Egypt who did the translation used a Greek name for the city that was already current in Hellenized Egypt at the time rather than trying to transliterate the Hebrew name from scratch. It is plausible that the Greek name (which may have existed even prior to conquest, if it was an important enough coastal city that the Greeks were already trading there) was based on trying to approximate a pronunciation and/or spelling from some other non-Hebrew Semitic language, but my general sense is that Greek versions of non-Greek toponyms in that era were not always reflective of particularly painstaking attempts to be as faithful to the original as Greek phonotactics and orthography could in theory permit.
In current English orthography, syllable-initial "gh" (unlike syllable-final "gh," which is often /f/ as in "cough" or "laugh") doesn't cue any sound other than /g/, but I suppose does lend a certain aura of exoticism (because not found in "native" words except for a few oddities like "ghost") and it's fair to want to keep that where it already exists even if perhaps not to add it where it doesn't.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 4, 2024 @ 10:39 am
I see now that one bit in the prior comment was confusingly phrased. Read the end of the first sentence as if it were "Egypt, where the Septuagint translation got underway before Gaza got transferred to the Seleucids." Both "there" and it" were unhelpfully ambiguous-to-misleading as to referent in what I had initially typed.
PeterB said,
October 4, 2024 @ 12:30 pm
English is not the national language of China. Chinese is not written in latin characters.
It doesn't matter how rational/irrational or accurate/inaccurate the conventional transliterations of Uighur from Uighur to European languages are. The problem is with the idea that the PRC gets to declare how non-Chinese people, writing for non-Chinese audiences, should be _permitted_ to render the name and language of other non-Chinese people in non-Chinese languages.
He Zhang said,
October 4, 2024 @ 1:10 pm
I can add a few more silly things like the changing Uyghur to Uygur. There was some standardization of the place names and Chinese translations in Xinjiang. I do not know when it exactly happened. But in the early 2000s, I learned:
Altay must be used only for the Altay regions outside of China, translated as 阿尔泰;
Altai must be used for Xinjiang Altai region, translated as 阿勒泰.
We have used Altai 阿尔泰 for many years in Xinjiang, suddenly, everyone must use 阿勒泰。
Kyrgyz and Kyrgyzstan must be 吉尔吉斯人 and 吉尔吉斯坦国
but the same people and place name in Xinjiang must be 柯尔克孜族 and 柯尔克孜乡 or 县
I just do not see rationale for such differentiation.
Peter B. Golden said,
October 4, 2024 @ 1:26 pm
An interesting conversation.
I use Uyğur in my scholarly writings (the ğ representing a ɣ ) and Uyghur for a general audience. “Uighur” is commonly used in the US and elsewhere, but I avoid it because it is too often pronounced as “weegur.” I have no political agenda.
Philip Taylor said,
October 4, 2024 @ 1:48 pm
Peter — “Uighur” is commonly used in the US and elsewhere, but I avoid it because it is too often pronounced as “weegur” — I have to confess, I have lacking a rhotic idiolect) — how, in your experience, is it generally pronounced in the US ? The LPD does not recognise the "y" version but offers for the "i" version only /ˈwiːɡ ə/ and variants thereof.
Geoff M said,
October 4, 2024 @ 1:53 pm
Hmm. I'm not American but when I was a teenager "wigger" was the slang used for white kids who e.g. embraced hip hop culture, dressed in basketball attire, and the like. It was a racial and aesthetic but not an ethnic category, and although some may have used the the term mildly disparagingly, the style itself was relatively prestigious, and "slur" feels like too strong a characterization to my ears. (It is, to be sure, a portmanteau formed in part from a deeply ugly one).
Yves Rehbein said,
October 4, 2024 @ 6:26 pm
The voiced velar fricative is said to be present in the local German dialect, approximated as uvular /ʁ/ (thus de.Wikipedia), but it has become rare and I cannot pronounce it between the vowels of Uyghur, or the other one in contrast with the final r.
The graphematic seems equally important, but google for one can handle the difference between and , and (standard in Swiss German) .
> So be it. That's that. Logic with Chinese characteristics.
Did you mean: "Cinese"?
My chemistry teacher said so!
Yves Rehbein said,
October 4, 2024 @ 6:33 pm
*google for one can handle the difference between ä and ae …
but the blog cannot, if set in angle brackets
Coby said,
October 4, 2024 @ 6:37 pm
I don't see why the initial diphthong can't be pronounced in English as /ui/ ("ooey", as in "hooey"), rather than /wi/. It is not unusual for the /j/ segment of diphthongs in other languages to be turned into the vowel /i/ in English, as in "fiesta" or "siesta" — two syllables in Spanish, three in English.
Philip Taylor said,
October 5, 2024 @ 6:51 am
Yves — enter the opening angle bracket as <
Peter — I sent the earlier message from a mobile telephone, which was clearly a mistake. It should have read :
Peter B. Golden said,
October 5, 2024 @ 9:28 am
Philip — my experience is that "Uighur" is invariably pronounced "wee-gur," the final -r (er) is maintained. I have never heard "weeguh" – although I can see where that could happen. What does surprise me is that there are some American scholars who know better but nonetheless pronounce it "weegur."
In an email to Victor, I noted "Weegur,” I must confess, grates on my ears…most probably the result of having part of my graduate education in Turkey, where they write "Uygur" and pronounce it as such (not as Uyɣur as Turkish no longer has a ɣ – Turkish ğ reflects what had earlier been a ɣ). Turkic people from elsewhere (some of my professors were Tatars) often slipped in a ɣ. In the PRC, there are the 裕固族 the Yoghurs (< Sarïğ Uyğur, Šera [or Šïra] Yoghur “Yellow Uyğurs," the latter used mainly by Sarïğ Uyğurs who have become Mongolic-speaking), one of the groups that descended from the post-imperial (after 840) Uyğurs and continue to speak an interesting Turkic language stemming from Old Uyğur (some use Mongol, and of course Chinese). Their counting (numerical) system retains forms that were found in some Old Turkic (Orkhon) texts. They are largely Buddhists.
Allan from Iowa said,
October 5, 2024 @ 9:30 am
Adding on to what Coby said: "ooey gooey", used mainly to describe butter cake.
David Marjanović said,
October 5, 2024 @ 10:57 am
Divide et impera – eliminate the evidence that the border of a supposed nation-state cuts across nationalities. This tactic used to be pretty popular in Europe, too.
As usual on blogs, everything in angle brackets is presumed to be an HTML tag, and HTML tags that don't exist are deleted before the comment is published. Instead of actually writing angle brackets, use the HTML entities for them: < and > (semicola included).
Tom said,
October 5, 2024 @ 11:06 am
Speak American Indian, then.
Victor Mair said,
October 5, 2024 @ 12:46 pm
From a regular LL reader:
You never said what the "gh" sound actually is! I assumed it's a voiced dorso-velar fricative, as in German sagen or Spanish haga?
VHM:
That's roughly how I try to say it.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 7, 2024 @ 1:52 am
Speaking of romanization of Turkic ethnonyms … I just became aware (I'm currently on vacation in Europe) of the existence of a vehicle called the Nissan Qashqai. Nissan hasn't used that model name in the U.S. market but somehow decided that for most other markets around the world the ethnonym for a Turkic minority ethnic group living in Iran would be a perfect name for a compact crossover SUV. Marketing considerations aside, it struck me that this looks exactly like the sort of ethnonym that would have had lots of alternative romanized spellings other than "Qashqai" in the earlier Turcological literature, maybe including some used in French or German scholarship but not in Anglophone writing. Maybe some historian of Turcology has a list? Dare we to hope that at least one previously used variant spelling might have employed the gh digraph in lieu of one or both of the q's?
Andreas Johansson said,
October 7, 2024 @ 1:55 am
@J.W. Brewer
Wikipedia provides the following list of alternative spellings: Qashqa'i, Qashqay, Kashkai, Kashkay, Qashqayı, Gashgai, Gashgay, Ghashghai, Ghashghaei
Vampyricon said,
October 15, 2024 @ 2:16 pm
Most people I know say /ˈwigɹ̩/ but I say /ˈujɣuɹ/. It helps that I have the rhyme /uɹ/ (the CURE "vowel") distinct from NORTH/FORCE /ɔɹ/