entire cultural stratum based on the Cyrillic alphabet will be lost. This point of view is not correct since our extensive borders with Russia will not allow us to isolate ourselves from each other, so much the more that our cultural and alliance links are firmly bound so that we are “doomed” to be together during our lives. The knowledge of Russian, the competence in the Cyrillic alphabet in future will, as we think, the major criterion of a man of education. It is our national and cultural asset and, according to the President, «it is important that this people’s asset could not be lost for the future generations of the Kazakhstan people, and we ought to treat the Russian language and the Cyrillic alphabet as much carefully as in relation to the Kazakh language, and the competence in Russian is the historical advantage of our nation».

It was linguists, who caught the idea of latinization as the very first ones, as due to their profession they, like nobody else, understand the importance and the necessity of alphabet reforms during the epoch of the Kazakh language renaissance, the informational technological expansion, the globalization and the computerization of our life [3]. For the time being, there is already a lot of drafts of a new alphabet. After the available variants have been studied and summarized, to our mind, the scientists of the A. Baitursynov Institute of Linguistics should have the last word as in such difficult and responsible step of the change-over to the Latin alphabet, the linguists, who are competent in the matters of phonetics and phonology, orthography and orthoepy, should be involved.

The alphabet reform is of great practical importance [4]. It is much easier for a first-form schoolboy to learn 26 Latin letters than 42 Cyrillic ones. As a result of the phonological system development, there are much more phonemes than graphemes in the European languages. For example, there are 35 phonemes in French and 44 ones in English [5]. These numerous phonemes are only conveyed with 26 Latin letters. But in Kazakh, 28 original sounds-phonemes are conveyed with even 42 letters. Therefore, it is much more difficult for the said little countryman to learn Kazakh than a little European - his English or French. The mere letter а in French corresponds to the following three phonemes: «а» – front, «а» - back, «а» – nasal. The letter о is also realized in three phonemes as follows: «о» – open, «о» – closed and «о» – nasal. The letter е is, accordingly, realized in the three phonemes: «е» – open, «е» – closed and «е» – nasal.

It’s common perception that such alphabet should be deemed to be ideal, in which there is an individual graphical unit for each phoneme [6]. But the other thing is already proved namely that such method

of the phoneme designation is not only unnecessary but is not always desirable as it is unthrifty [7].

The linguists tried to establish mathematical formulas of phoneme and grapheme combinations involving the establishment of a formula to build the most thrifty alphabet [8]. In the Russian language, the alphabet building economy is achieved by the fact that differential features of hardness and softness peculiar to the consonant phonemes are designated with the following further vowels. This method for the Russian writing was referred to as the syllabic principle of the Russian orthography. As applied to the Russian language where there is a great deal of consonants distinguished according to the consonant softness and hardness, the syllabic principle of graphics is very advantageous as it reduces the number of necessary letters in the alphabet to designate soft consonants with special letters, one would have to invent and learn 15 new letters. The designation of the consonant softness by using five «palatalizing» vowels (ya, yu, ye, yo, i) creates much economy of graphical tools that is very important for computer typesetting and letter. And hard and soft consonants can alternate within one word. In the Kazakh language, unlike Russian, the consonant softness and hardness is of no phonological importance. Please compare, in Russian the consonant phonemes are used for the word distinction in the examples kоn and kон’, mol and mоl. In Kazakh, in the examples tаn and ta’n, tys and tіs the distinctive function of the words is performed by the hard and soft vowels, which influence the neighboring consonants.

In the Kazakh language, a thrifty letter was proposed by the founder of the Kazakh linguistics A. Baitursynov. According to the Vowel Harmony Law, the Kazakh words may be pronounced hard or softly. For the soft word pronunciation, the scientist used the characters, which were placed at the beginning of whole word. It was also the first professor of the Kazakh philology K. Zhubanov, who wrote about the necessity to reduce letters in the Kazakh alphabet. In 1935, he prepared a draft to change the Kazakh orthography and alphabet on the basis of the Latin graphics, which proposed to reduce the number of letters due to the double designations of vowels, and to the individual designation of hard and soft varieties of sounds. As we can see, the ideas expressed by our scientists over half a century ago, have not lost their applicability to the present day.

It would be inconvenient and disadvantageous to designate softness of consonants with any special mark, for instance with an apostrophe (which is proposed sometimes). On the one hand, the apostrophe, if used often, is inconvenient, uniform and cannot be seen. On the other hand, it bears excess information as the soft vowel phonemes already sensitize the speaker to the soft pronounciation of consonants. Please