What’s that strange letter up here?”, I hear you ask. Let me introduce you, featured prominently here is Ə. A letter so weird it can break your browser’s otherwise great day browsing world ruly enough to be fully captured by ASCII characters. A character so powerful that it hides a complete story of (in chronological order) isolation, national aspirations, globalization, and its failure. An alien so familiar that you produce it all the time without so much as a tip of the hat (quite literally the most common vowel sound in English)! A letter that is younger than the United States of America!
Azeri alphabet is notorious for its promiscuity (see: Slavs and Tatars: Dig the Booty) This is some of the forms it took in the last 100 years. As if this was not bad enough, it also used to be written in Arabic and still is written in Persian script)!
Writing systems do not get enough of respect where I come from, ‘give us an alphabet, any, really, we’ll figure out a way to write with it’ I hear my ancestors cry. Perhaps the reason why my ancestors were so into changing the alphabet every other decade was because my ancestors were not quite into writing, to begin with, but I’m digressing.
Ə is very special. When one whole set of characters gave way to another, Ə stayed. It’s mesmerizing to watch how it survived 4 alphabet changes without any bruise until one fateful year we decided that we were done with it, only to bring it back the next year. Only Ə was brought back in 1992. We couldn’t do without Ə, it was our nod to the past when the past looked like just a set of bad decisions. The future was going to be different! The promise was no less than that of a full integration, an ultimate end to global division! Soon everyone will understand how great Ə is and they will welcome it into the prestigious group of cool characters! E and F will make some space between one another to let this rising star shine through with its curvy top part.
And yet, that was not to be. Promised integration never happened. Soon enough Ə’s started getting transliterated into A’s when others had to see it. We imprisoned Ə for internal use, it became a character of local importance. Þ had a good laugh at Ə from a distance. Þ could push its way into any context, “how hard is it to copy-paste a letter after all”, it would say, but Ə never quite managed to have its breakthrough moment. So I decided to give it one, here. And it happens to be the first letter of my name when I don’t have to mutate it for external consumption.