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by quant18 5912 days ago
Yes, when you ask a committee of linguists to design an orthography for you --- you get a godawful almost-IPA "one phoneme = one grapheme" academic exercise which is utterly impractical for everyday use. (Again, an object lesson in the robustness of top-down-designed systems vs. ones which evolved from centuries of use). Azerbaijan would have had the same problem even if they had stayed with the Cyrillic alphabet. E.g. after Kazakhstan became independent, they had lots of trouble trying to use Kazakh as the administrative language due to a shortage of typewriters with the appropriate letters.

Uzbekistan is greatly underappreciated for having done something really neat after the Soviet breakup --- designing an orthography with no "funny letters". They use context to distinguish the "back" and "front" versions of phonemes like i [1]. And in the two cases where that would be too confusing (o and u), they put an apostrophe after the letter --- i.e. u', instead of something like ΓΌ.

[1] Turkey, which speaks a closely-related language, solved the "front i" vs "back i" problem by making one dotted and the other dotless --- those of us here probably know all of the toLowerCase-related bugs that caused, I think articles about this have been posted a couple of months ago