Introduction / (Dis)Claimers

These are texts on the Kazakh language that I found on the web. (The Unilang.org web site is an amazing resource...) The original documents were PDF files containing TIFF images of the scanned pages of the originals. Since these scans were not always legible I decided to manually transcribe them into HTML. The original documents are still freely available online. I have tried to preserve as much of the original look/formatting as possible, but I've also made compromises where necessary to simplify the HTML coding.

I've also corrected any typos/misspellings in the English text of these documents. I've probably added several errors in the Cyrillic text; if you find any errors please notify me so I can fix them.

Note that while I don't make any claims about the copyright of the original source documents, this HTML rendering was the result of many hours of intensive labor and research, and required a fair amount of creativity as well. As such I do claim full copyright on this HTML version of these documents. You're free to link to these pages, but please do not copy them without obtaining my permission first.

Also, one of the documents lists the Kazakh alphabet in handwritten cursive as well as print. I chose not to copy/paste those bits of the scans here. Instead, I searched for a cursive Cyrillic font that looked similar. This turned out to be a difficult search; I finally ended up using the Parsek Cyrillic@ font which I found at http://www.newfonts.net/index.php?pa=show_font&id=151 . This font didn't contain the 9 Kazakh-specific letters though, so I added them using FontForge. You can download my version of this font here: Parsek-Cyrillic@.ttf. I've also embedded a reference to this font in the actual document, but if your browser doesn't support embedded web fonts you can simply install the font manually.

Wherever it was necessary to include graphic images in the document, I've used Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to allow these documents to be displayed at any arbitrary resolution.

The Documents

Kazakh: Language Competencies for Peace Corps Volunteers in Kazakhstan
By Ilse Cirtautas, 1992. This text seems to be superseded by the one below.
Original Document on ERIC: ED353810
HTML Version (This transcription is still incomplete.)
Kazakh: Language Course for Peace Corps Volunteers in Kazakhstan
By staff of the Peace Corps, Almaty (Kazakhstan) May 1995.
Original Document on ERIC: ED402757
HTML Version (The text is complete but the illustrations are missing. 2008-12-21)
Kazakh (Qazaq-) Grammatical Sketch with Affix List
By Karl A. Krippes, 1993. This is some pretty technically dense reading; you probably should get more familiarity with the language elsewhere before tackling it.
Original Document on ERIC: ED404842
HTML Version