And a letter is supposed to represent, ideally, one sound only. According to the traditional phonological theory, the smallest unit in the sound system of a language is called phoneme.

The reason for that is simple: classical Latin (for which the Roman alphabet was designed) had about 20 consonant sounds and five vowel sounds.

Because the Roman alphabet contains just 26 letters, additional provision has had to be made. The new Kazakh script will use the apostrophe to extend the number of letters to 32.

The answer, he concludes, is something he calls "script charisma". The most famous case of script change is, of course, Turkey's dropping of the Arabic alphabet for the Roman one in 1928.

In a presidential order published on February 20, he approved a new version of a Latin-based alphabet that removes apostrophes for several sounds in the Kazakh language and replaces them with ...