tajikistanweb.com

Tajik bloggers have been congratulating each other on the birth of the first ever personal Tajik Word text editor last Monday. The news brings to mind a hilarious Churchill quote: "From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put."

The impossible has been made possible by a group of computer programmers in Dushanbe led by the head of the Mathematics Department of the Tajik Academy of Sciences, Zafar Usmanov.

The $40 software will be prompting regular order and proper spelling of Persian words and sentences in Cyrillic, known as Tajik.

How the software is going to cope with the chaotic state of the Tajik spelling and grammar is still blurred. The Tajik alphabet has undergone an official revision. However, the government’s attempts to impose the official version of spelling have failed so far. Some are still persistently trying to maintain the Soviet style of Tajik spelling, while those familiar with the Persian script prefer to apply the Persian orthography in their writings by ignoring both former and present official versions.

Cyrillic Persian writing is not among popular scripts in the Internet and Tajik programmers have been struggling for years to introduce a Tajik Unicode that could be recognized throughout the world-wide web. Only in 2007 Microsoft included Tajik Cyrillic script in its latest Windows Vista program. Therefore, Tajik webloggers are keen to use largely accessible Russian fonts rather than Tajik script that might end up showing question marks or square boxes instead of specific Tajik characters.

Tajik Word Editor has been pre-programmed for identifying 72 000 Persian (Tajik) words and requires 5 Mb of free hard disk space. It is compatible with both Windows XP and Windows Vista. The software has been launched together with the first Russian-Tajik computer dictionary authored by linguist Sanawbar Khalmatova.