There is a crisis over which kind of g to use in the word “stenography.” There is a lot of emotional attachment to the word around here. Tchitcherine one morning finds all the pencils in his conference room have mysteriously vanished. In revenge, he and Radnichny sneak in Blobadjian’s conference room next night with hacksaws, files and torches, and reform the alphabet on his typewriter. It is some fun in the morning. Blobadjian runs around in a prolonged screaming fit. Tchitcherine’s in conference, meeting’s called to order, CRASH! two dozen linguists and bureaucrats go toppling over on their ass. Noise echoes for a full two minutes. Tchitcherine, on his ass, notes that pieces of chair leg all around the table have been sawed off, reattached with wax and varnished over again. A professional job, all right. Could Radnichny be a double agent? The time for lighthearted practical jokes is past. Tchitcherine must go it alone. Painstakingly, by mid-watch lantern light, when the manipulations of letters are most apt to produce other kinds of illumination, Tchitcherine transliterates the opening sura of the holy Koran into the proposed NTA, and causes it to be circulated among the Arabists at the session, over the name of Igor Blobadjian.

This is asking for trouble, all right. These Arabists are truly a frenzied bunch. They have been lobbying passionately for a New Turkic Alphabet made up of Arabic letters. There are fistfights in the hallways with unreconstructed Cyrillicists, and whispers of a campaign to boycott, throughout the Islamic world, any Latin alphabet. (Actually nobody is really too keen on a Cyrillic NTA. Old Czarist albatrosses still hang around the Soviet neck. There is strong native resistance in Central Asia these days to anything suggesting Russification, and that goes even for the look of a printed language. The objections to an Arabic alphabet have to do with the absence of vowel symbols, and no strict one-to-one relation between sounds and characters. So this has left Latin, by default. But the Arabists aren’t giving up. They keep proposing reformed Arabic scripts—mostly on the model of one ratified at Bukhara in 1923 and used successfully among the Uzbeks. Palatal and velar vocalics of spoken Kazakh can be got round by using diacritical marks.) And there is a strong religious angle in all this. Using a non-Arabic alphabet is felt to be a sin against God—most of the Turkic peoples are, after all, Islamic, and Arabic script is the script of Islam, it is the script in which the word of Allah came down on the Night of Power, the script of the Koran—