IBM Accidentally Designed Turkmenistanās Alphabet (maybe)
I claim that the 1993 Turkmen alphabet contained 4 currency symbols and 1 mystery glyph, because of IBM. Yes, I will elaborate.
by Haley Walker, published 2026 May 31
This is a mirror of my Substack blog post. The full text is reproduced below with minimal changes.
This blog post is in response to the article The Currency Symbol-Like Letters of the Turkmen Alphabet from Chris Shares. To summarize its contents:
Wikipedia states that the 1993ā1999 version of the Turkmen alphabet contained four currency symbols as letters: āØĀ£ā©, āØ$ā©, āØĀ¢ā©, and āØĀ„ā©.
Its author Christian expressed doubts about it, citing Rewriting the āNationā: Turkmen Literacy, Language, and Power, Dr. Victoria Clementās dissertation in 2005.
The dissertation states that āØ$ Ā¢ā© was replaced with āØÅ Åā© by 1995, with other currency symbols being phased out by 1996.
Upon traveling to Turkmenistan, Christian saw instances of old āØĆ Ć±ā© instead of the current āØÅ Åā©, datable to 2004 and 2006.
Upon further online image-searching, Christian found banknotes and postage stamps using āØ$ā© and āØĀ„ā©.
He also found a Turkmen alphabet table using all four currency symbols, but concluded from its letterforms that āØ$ā© and āØĀ¢ā© were intended to be āØÅā© and āØƧā© with an upside-down cedilla above, and āØĀ„ā© was intended to be the Kazakh Cyrillic letter āØŅ°ā©.
ā² A printed Turkmen alphabet table showing all the weird glyphs of the original proposal. Image retrieved from Christianās blog post.
However, Christian did not address two oddities with the original 1993 proposal. Firstly, where did the lowercase āØĀ£ā© come from? It has never been used in any Latin or Cyrillic alphabet before, that I know of. Secondly, why was uppercase āØĆæā© was chosen to be āØĀ„ā©, or in Christianās hypothesis, āØŅ°ā©? āØŅ°ā© has a lowercase in Kazakh, doesnāt it?
My hypothesis is that these letters are indeed currency symbols, and that the original 1993 Turkmen alphabet was designed for compatibility with IBM Code Page 437 first, and aesthetics second. It explains the weird letter casing correspondences and changes, though just as Christian, I couldnāt find primary sources to corroborate this online.
The full Code Page 437 character set. ASCII Latin characters are in green, except for Q, V, and X, which are not in the Turkmen alphabet and are in purple. Non-ASCII letters and symbols are in orange. Other characters, including numbers and punctuation, are grayed out. Original image.
Hi, Iām Haley, a computer science graduate fluent in Japanese and English (but not at all in Turkmen), and hereās my retrocomputing-informed educated guess as to why the 1993 Turkmen alphabet was so weird.
The Turkmen National Alphabetās goals, besides nationalism
Then-President NyĆ½azow, the spearhead of the Turkmen National Alphabet project, stated that the goals of the Turkmen Latin alphabet (besides symbolizing a new Turkmen culture) included access to information technology:
However, in the end, Turkmenistan pursued an alphabet ābased on its own unique letters in order to mark every single [Turkmen] phoneme. (Clement 2005, p150) [...] Moreover, in every speech [President NyĆ½azow] gave in 1993 [about the 1993 Turkmen alphabet], he mentioned the importance of information technology as the ānumber twoā reason for pursuing a Latin-based script; the ānumber oneā reason was cultural pride. (p151)
Clue 1: the Mystery Glyph
But in that case, why the mystery glyph for the lowercase āØĀ£ā©? Wikipedia, citing the alphabet table image, says it looked like āØÅæā© but placed lower, having a descender. That has never been a letter in any Latin alphabet that I know of, nor an āinternationally recognized signāāalthough it coincidentally looks like the letter for /v/ in the Shavian alphabet for English āØšā©.
Methinks that the lowercase āØĀ£ā© is the smoking gun that this alphabet was designed for an IBM PC or compatible. All the letters (and currency symbols) of the original 1993 Turkmen alphabet are representable in Code Page 437, the default character set for IBM PCs which supported a range of mathematical symbols, except for that lowercase āØĀ£ā©. I think that lowercase āØĀ£ā© was originally ātop half integralā āØā ā©. It fits the bill: it looks like āØÅæā© but descends below the baseline.
The lack of a serif at the bottom of the mystery glyph also corroborates that this is a top half integral. The integral parts are designed as extensible symbols, with āØā ā© and āØā”ā© being the top and bottom halves of the integral symbol, and with āØā®ā© extending the integral if more height is needed. As such, they end in a bare stroke with no adornments.
However, the long S āØÅæā© is intended as its own letter, so in serif fonts, it ends in a serif as does āØfā©. (A serif is a decorative line, at the end of the strokes of a letter.) When we look at the printed alphabet table from before, we can see that the mystery glyph has no serif at the end, indicating that itās not a long S, but a top half integral.
Comparison of ālong Sā āØÅæā© and ātop half integralā āØā ā© in the font Century Schoolbook, demonstrating that the bottom of the ālong Sā has a serif, but not the bottom of the ātop half integralā. Original image.
The typesetter either must have already had a sort (or a phototypesetting glyph, given the era and presence of the Cyrillic cursive equivalent) for the top half integral; or lacking one, must have made one, looking at a printout and noticing that it didnāt have a serif on the descender.
Clue 2: the Uppercase āØĆæā©
Other casing choices also support my hypothesis. Why was capital āØĆæā© āØĀ„ā©? If there were no problem with putting a dieresis on a lowercase āØyā©, there should be no problem with putting a dieresis on a capital āØYā©, right? And if the alphabet is supposed to borrow the Kazakh capital letter āØŅ°ā©, why didnāt it borrow its lowercase āØŅ±ā©? Was it just NĆ½yazowās random fancy?
No, this weirdness must have had a reason. Look at CP437 again, and notice that it contains the lowercase āØĆæā©, but it lacks a capital āØÅøā©. The team who designed CP437 (and ISO 8859-1, and Unicode) included the lowercase āØĆæā© for French, but they left out the capital āØÅøā© because it only occurred in all-caps text. But the team had included the currency symbol āØĀ„ā©, anticipating dealing with Japanese companies using the Japanese yen, and with Chinese companies using the Chinese yuan.
The full IBM Code Page 437 character set. You can find āØĆæā© below āØxā©, but the capital āØÅøā© is nowhere to be found.
Since āØĆæā© was the only āØyā©-like character with diacritics in CP437, and it did not have an uppercase version in the code page, the designers of the alphabet were forced to use āØĀ„ā© as its uppercase equivalent.
Impetus for Changes
With the spread of other text encodings, including ISO-8859-2, its IBM implementation Code Page 912, and eventually Unicode, these idiosyncrasies stopped having a practical purpose. I think that is why the weirdnesses were gradually ironed out. āØÅ Åā© for Turkish and āØĆ Ć½ Ž žā© for Czech were supported in CP912, so as soon as font support rolled out for them, Turkmen started to use them instead. Same with āØÅ Åā© for Czech instead of āØĆ Ć±ā© for Spanish, though as Christian notes, this transition still isnāt complete.
All characters in Code Page 912. Original image, using the font recreation by VileR.
While this code page also contained the dollar/escudo āØ$ā©, cent āØĀ¢ā©, and yen/yuan āØĀ„ā© signs, it left out the libra/pound āØĀ£ā©, the top half integral āØā ā©, eƱe/N with tilde āØĆ Ć±ā©, or y with dieresis āØĆæā©. I hypothesize that targeting this code page instead of CP437 further hastened the move away from the 1993 original proposal towards the current-day alphabet.
The most probable reason why some signs and inscriptions still used āØƱā© with tilde instead of āØÅā© with hĆ”Äek after the 1995 revision(s) is lack of font support, followed by Unicode making both āØƱā© and āØÅā© available at the same time, and the designer or userās ignorance/apathy since the two diacritics look so similar, especially at small sizes.
One oddity in this timeline is that ISO-8859-2, the parent standard of CP912, was first published in 1989. Even though I canāt find direct confirmation, github.com/unicode-org/icu-data calls Code Page 912 āibm-912_P100-1995ā, so Iām pretty sure that CP912 was first published in 1995, the same year that the weirdnesses of the Turkmen alphabet started being ironed out.
Discrepancies in the Printed Alphabet Table
I think the differences in letterform that Christian notes in his article can be explained as aesthetic or practical choices, and becauseāand this is purely my speculationāthe typesetter that printed it had suitable Cyrillic letters lying around.
The Serifless Lowercase āØĀ£ā©
As stated above, the lack of a serif at the bottom of lowercase āØĀ£ā© suggests that the glyph was originally intended for ātop half integralā rather than ālong Sā.
The āDouble-Cedillaā Hypothesis is Unlikely
Christian says that lowercase āØ$ā© is āa āØƧā© with another cedilla on the topā, but I find that unlikely. The ādouble cedillaā form of āØ$ā© and āØĀ¢ā© can be chalked up to a stylistic preference to make them look like letters consistent with āØĆ Ć§ā© instead of currency symbols. After all, many fonts, including the IBM PC font, have the bars missing in the middle as well.
Besides, the Bashkir, Chuvash, and Enets alphabets have a Cyrillic letter called ātheā, better known as āes (āØŠ” Ńā©) with descenderā. Unlike in Latin C with cedilla āØĆ Ć§ā©, where the stroke below must at least curl towards the left, the stroke at the bottom of es with descender āØŅŖ Ņ«ā© could go straight down, or even curl to the right like the ogonek in Polish and Lithuanian (āØÄ Ä ÄÆ Å³ā©). I hypothesize that the letter table uses the glyphs originally intended for Cyrillic āØŅŖ Ņ«ā© instead of Latin āØĆ Ć§ā©, and uses a newly-struck metal type for āØ$ā© and āØĀ¢ā© that fits the design of the Cyrillic āØŅŖ Ņ«ā©.
The Kazakh-like Yen/Yuan Sign
And speaking of Cyrillic letters used in minority languages of the former USSR, since the typesetter had a Cyrillic Straight U with Stroke āØŅ°ā© lying around for Kazakh text, they used it instead of āØĀ„ā©.
The Reverse-Engineered Alphabet Table
I donāt know if any ātext modeā software was produced that supported the Turkmen alphabet, but here is a mock-up of what the alphabet may have looked like on a contemporary computer. Here is a table of the letters of the Turkmen alphabet using the default VGA font. Below it is Article 1 of the UNHRC translated into Turkmen, which happens to contain the rare letter āØžā©.
The original 1993-1995 proposal, represented as VGA Text Mode Art in Code Page 437.
The current version (in my timeline, proposed in 1995) represented as VGA Text Mode Art in Code Page 912.
Animated GIF comparing the two versions. The affected letters blink 4 times before switching over to the other standard.
Conclusion
My hypothesis is that the original 1993 proposal for the Turkmen National Alphabet does indeed contain four currency symbols (āØĀ£ā©, āØ$ā©, āØĀ¢ā©, and āØĀ„ā©), as well as one mathematical symbol āØā ā©, and it is specifically a compromise caused by the limitations of the default text encoding of the IBM PC. And as computers became more capable of representing a larger number of distinct letters, those limitations were lifted, and in 1995 with the release of IBM Code Page 912, those compromises were replaced with characters that make more sense (āØŽā© āØÅā© āØÅā© āØĆā© āØžā©).
Again, I canāt find primary sources for this hypothesis, nor can I even understand Turkmen. But at least, the timeline makes sense to me, and explains the weirdnesses of the 1993 Turkmen alphabet. What do you think?
Update: Daniel BunÄiÄ
Iāve discovered that at least one serious academic has stated that Code Page 437 compatibility was a design constraint of the 1993 Turkmen alphabet before me, almost a decade ago! His name isĀ Dr. Daniel BunÄiÄ, and he is a professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Cologne. (Turkmen is not Slavic but Turkic, but since Turkmen wanted a new alphabet to distance itself from its Soviet past, I think he counts as a relevant academic authority.)
Hereās an extract of his paperĀ Factors Influencing the Success and Failure of Writing ReformsĀ (2017), page 35, submitted toĀ Studi Slavistici XIVĀ (2017). (Bold emphasis is mine.) He also citesĀ Dr. Victoria ClementĀ like Christian did. Unfortunately, he doesnāt cite a primary source stating that NyĆ½azov targeted Code Page 437. Maybe Iāor better, a serious academicācould inquire Dr. Clement whether she has such a direct source. (The full paper is available on Open Access, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
The Latin alphabet for Turkmen created by authoritarian president Saparmyrat NyĆ½azow rather quickly in 1991 and obviously without competent linguistic advice, is a case in point:Ā with a view to circumventing technical problems with non-standard characters, he designed an alphabet consisting exclusively of characters available in codepage 437, which at the time was the standard on American configurations of ibm compatible computers.Ā For this reason, apart from a few special letters like ćƧć for /tĶŹ/, ćƤć for /Ʀ/, or ćƱć for /Å/, which happened to be present in the codepage, the new Turkmen alphabet contained several non-alphabetic characters reinterpreted as letters: The phoneme /Ź/ was represented by ćĀ¢ć as a small and ć$ć as a capital letter;Ā /Ź/ by small ćā ćĀ and capital ćĀ£ć; and /j/ by small ćĆæć and capital ćĀ„ć*. When it turned out that this alphabet would not be accepted by the population, a public debate ensued, which resulted in its revision in 1995, replacing ć$Ā¢ć with ćÅÅć, ćĀ£ā ć with 掞ć, and ćĀ„Ćæć with ćĆĆ½ć (and ćƱć was also changed to ćÅć; cfr. Clement 2008: 178-181). This second attempt at Latinization was rather successful (ibid.: 182). * Note that ćĆæć is included as a letter in codepage 437, but capital ćÅøć is missing (just as in ISO 8859-1), probably because in French this letter never occurs word-initially. The character ćā ć might have been chosen because of its similarity to long s ćÅæć; however, it is the top half of the integral symbol (positionĀ f4Ā in codepage 437,Ā u+2320Ā in Unicode; both are followed by the bottom half ćā”ć).
