Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
It hearkens back to that Persian? Or Farsi? post I did back in May of this year, and indeed some very similar issues about it exist. The question is whether the name of the language is Uighur or Uyghur....
The simplest answer (were I and all my readers to actually be the simplest people) would be to go to GoogleFight.com and discover that the web thinks of it as Uighur by a 3.3 to 1 margin. But we aren't the simplest people, or at least we try not to be. :-)
A slightly less simple answer is that of course it is not -- the name of the language is actually ئۇيغۇر, so that arguing about the English transliteration of it makes about as much sense as arguing about the best way to spell the transliteration of חנכה or معمر القذافي. In other words, it does not make very much sense....
Of course, one could also be really pedantic and claim that since the use of the Arabic script for the language is a relatively recent development, that even the transliteration is a translation of the original. As Omniglot point out:
Uyghur was originally written with the Orkhon alphabet, a runiform script derived from or inspired by the Sogdian script, which was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script. From the the 16th century until the early 20th century, Uyghur was written with a version of the Arabic alphabet known as 'Chagatai'. During the 20th century a number of versions of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were adopted to write Uyghur in different Uyghur-speaking regions. However the Latin alphabet was unpopular and in 1987 the Arabic script was reinstated as the official script for Uyghur in China.
Uyghur was originally written with the Orkhon alphabet, a runiform script derived from or inspired by the Sogdian script, which was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script.
From the the 16th century until the early 20th century, Uyghur was written with a version of the Arabic alphabet known as 'Chagatai'. During the 20th century a number of versions of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were adopted to write Uyghur in different Uyghur-speaking regions. However the Latin alphabet was unpopular and in 1987 the Arabic script was reinstated as the official script for Uyghur in China.
But such arguments are ultimately unconvincing, because in truth we do not really make up language name spellings by using such pure standards. The argument of needing the Aramaic spelling to get the "real" name becomes a clear case of reductio ad absurdum, and an argument we can discard.
As I pointed out in the later Persian? Or Farsi? Redux post, the argument there is really a transliteration for فارسی vs. a usage of a much older word for the language, in a much older civilization -- a bit like the argument of using the original Aramaic above! And while using "Farsi" for "Persian" may be like calling Spanish "Español" in English, anyone who watches Dora the Explorer (even I have a niece, you know!) may find that more and more common to be doing anyway. So the whole "connotation preference" argument seems much more reasonable and honest -- and the decision can be based on which connotation is generally preferred.
So what about Uighur and Uyghur? Neither of them holds much in the way of an obvious connotation preference, at least in English, right? And neither really has a common form used in English words -- this language, which is pronounced in English much like "wee-girl" without the L at the end, is not something that one can easily gleen from either spelling, and both look somewhat un-natural given how uncommon the forms are in English. You could make the official spelling in English Weegir and make folks in spelling bees that much happier. :-)
Of course it seems pretty common to keep words out of spelling bees that one could make a resonable case for causing an international incident over the way that the officials expect the word to be spelled, so we are spared that whole issue, in any case.
Now if you look at the language and its Turkic roots (or maybe more accurately branches), the Uyghur/Uygur spelling is more satisfying in Turkish, from the standpoint of both orthography and phonology (not to mention avoiding the violation of Turkish vowel harmony that Uighur/Uigur would be guilty of). Of course this too is not really an argument for the English spelling of the language, either.
It does appear that the government in China prefers the Uyghur spelling in many of its communications, which if it were consistent and broad based would probably be more convincing, at least in terms of a "Letting the largest person in the room settle the argument that was not all that important anyway" kind of resolution. But it seems inconistently applied there too, plus more often than not it is just 维吾尔语 there, anyway.
So is there one that is better? I guess I can see it both ways, and really have a hard time claiming it is the most pressing issue related to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Like many others, I am inclined to lack the energy to fight about which is better to use.
Vista, in the current builds I am looking at, uses Uighur, which if nothing else has the benefit of connection with the three letter ISO 639 code (uig) even though the two-letter code (ug) can obviously go either way. I suspect that this is the sort of thing that could easily change a bit between versions or not based on the passionate feelings of customers about the LOCALE_SENGLANGUAGE, just as Farsi/Persian has managed to do.
Or people might create custom locales to fix what the reasonably see as our mistakes, as I pointed out in Determining (and correcting) locale settings.
(Note: after I wrote all the above, I found a Wikipedia talk page that covers the very same issue, though it too has trouble coming to conclusions on the best spelling to choose -- if nothing else the article let me correct one point I had wrong in my initial text!)
This post brought to you by ئ (U+0626, a.k.a. ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE)