The transcript of Disc 1, Scene 2 of the movie Alimjan Bolumsizmu? is now up here. On YouTube, the scene starts here. If you missed Disc 1, Scene 1 then start here. In Disc 1, Scene 2 we learn more about Alimjan through his interactions with his mother, Xasiyet, at home. Alimjan likes to sleep […]
Learning from Uyghur Movies: Alimjan Bolumsizmu? 1-2 Read More »
The best situation for language acquisition is, of course, “immersion” or being a “growing participant” in a particular language community (that’s how you learned your first language!) When I started learning Uyghur in earnest I was in fact part of several new (to me) language communities. Quite early on someone introduced me to Uyghur movies,
Learning from Uyghur movies: Alimjan Bolumsizmu? Read More »
One aspect of the current war on Uyghur identity and culture is the mass disappearance of Uyghur publications and attempted rubbing out of Uyghur literary traditions. Seeking to play my small part in “saving the books” I recently added a new page to this website called eLibrary. On this page I have started putting up
Saving Uyghur books online Read More »
One of Memtimin Hoshur’s longer short stories, This Is Not A Dream (بۇ چۈش ئەمەس), could be described as a romantic tragedy. The story was turned into a movie by director Shirzat Yaqup, with music by Mexmut Sulayman (currently one of the coaches on the The Voice of the Silk Road). My translation of This
Memtimin Hoshur: This is Not a Dream, Part 1 Read More »
Memtimin Hoshur has been writing stories for more than five decades and it is no surprise to find works of very different kinds in his corpus. This story was written in 1961, in a period of intense socialist construction in China, complete with radical labels and slogans. The political background weighs heavily upon this story,
Works of Memtimin Hoshur: The Test Read More »
Asterix translator Anthea Bell on literary translators. One language is not enough for bookworms. If you want to read books in the original, ironically enough you qualify yourself to be a translator. There are in fact no special qualifications. I feel upset when young people write to me saying they’ve never done a post-graduate course
Asterix translator Anthea Bell on literary translators. Read More »
Memtimin Hoshur is probably the best-known and loved Uyghur writer alive today. I was privileged to meet him recently and speak with him about translating some of his works into English for publication. With his kind agreement, I have started the process of translating some of his short stories for publication. In the near future
Works of Memtimin Hoshur: The Boy Who Was Taken to the City Read More »
In a previous post I wrote about the latest candidate for longest word in the Uyghur language. In that post we saw that agglutinative languages like Uyghur can produce extremely long words. Another feature of such languages is the sheer number verbs forms that can be produced. Mood, voice, aspect, tense person and number are
Uyghur’s myriad verb forms produce over 42 million words Read More »
One of the fun little sidelines that come with learning an agglutinative language like Uyghur is competing to find the longest possible word. Things that need a whole sentence to say in English can be expressed in Uyghur with one long word. I remember talking some years ago with a linguist who was studying the
How long can one word be? Read More »
If you are wanting to study the Uyghur language, nothing beats spending time in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. It isn’t that the language schools are great – you may be lucky enough to get one of the better teachers but the overall teaching quality is not high, and none of the programs
Studying Uyghur in the States Read More »
Note: If you want to type in Uyghur-Arabic script, click here to see the standard keyboard. Of the numerous scripts that have been used throughout the history of the development of the Uyghur language, three of them are in use today – the Arabic script, the Cyrillic script, and the Latin script. The vast
Writing Uyghur – The Arabic Script Read More »
Whether you are just starting out in Uyghur studies, looking for ways to take your language skills to another level, or just curious about Uyghur language and culture – welcome to uyghurche.net! I am sure you will find something interesting and helpful to you somewhere on this site. I plan to post everything from language
