The Sakha (Yakutia) alphabet

The alphabet used for the Sakha (Yakutia) language of north-east Russia is the following (in alphabetic order):

It has 40 characters:

The 33 characters of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.
2 digraphs, using a pair of Cyrillic characters.
5 extended Cyrillic characters, also used in other languages spelled with Cyrillic letters.

All these characters are present in the 16-bit Unicode character set (see the Unicode Home Page http://unicode.org ). Microsoft Word uses Unicode as its character set, and web pages can be written and viewed in Unicode.

Therefore in principle anyone can type and print in the Sakha (Yakutia) language in Word and create and read web-pages in the Sakha (Yakutia) language.

In practice you may have problems. You may have to:

Set your web browser to an encoding preference called 'Unicode'.
On Internet Explorer this would be:
```
View > Encoding > Unicode (UTF-8)
```
Set your browser to use a font (for example, Arial Unicode MS, Tahoma, Lucida Sans Unicode, and Microsoft Sans Serif) that has a readable and printable representation for each Unicode character.
On Internet Explorer this would be:
```
Tools > Internet Options > General > Fonts
Language script = Latin based
Web page font = Arial Unicode MS (or other font above)
```

Now for the test. Click this link when you are ready: UnicodeNotags.html.

If you see no characters at all, try suggestion 1 above.

If you can see some of the characters but not all of them (typically the Chinese and the Sakha (Yakutia) characters) try suggestion 2 above.

One warning: You may have the fonts named above in incomplete versions, and some of the characters may still not appear. At present I don't know what to advise you to do then.

Thanks!
Nicholas Zvegintzov
141 Saint Marks Place, Suite 5F
Staten Island NY 10301 USA
telephone +1-718-816-5522
email zvegint@hotmail.com
http://www.maint.com
January 25, 2004