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Why did the Turkish alphabet change? | ||
Tags: Turkish | Writing System | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Lugubert Heptaglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6649 days ago 186 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, EnglishC2, German, Dutch, French Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 9 of 14 30 November 2011 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
For purposes of illustration, you can picture the Turkish vowels at the corners of a cube. There's a nice illustration [/url=http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~bakovic/111/LIGN111-H13-Turkish-Vowels.pdf]here[/url], which also explains hoe the vowel harmony works. Atatürk consulted a linguist from northern Europe, so the letters ü and ö came to be used.
If Ottoman Turkish used the same conventions as Arabic,only (some of) the three long vowels were represented in normal writing, not the short ones. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| xuxakat Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 4530 days ago 15 posts - 17 votes Speaks: German*, Italian, Spanish, English Studies: Turkish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 10 of 14 02 December 2011 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry, I don't really get your point, Lugubert :(
Actually I understand the vowel harmony and the vowel system and I think that Ottoman used the same conventions. i just wanted to state that in my opinion in Turkish vowels are kind of more important and variable compared to Arabic and so the importance of writing them might be higher than in Arabic. So the scripture of Arabic might not be the very best one for Turkish. That's why I think that the decision to change the alphabet was not that bad at all and using the help of linguists made it extremely easy to read and write Turkish as it is very logic. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lugubert Heptaglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6649 days ago 186 posts - 235 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, EnglishC2, German, Dutch, French Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 11 of 14 03 December 2011 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, kind of the point I tried to make.
Omitting eight Turkish vowels from writing must lose more information that omitting three Arabic ones. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6054 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 12 of 14 20 February 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The language has changed so much that even speeches by Atatürk (who died in 1938) have sometimes had to have their vocabulary modernised to be properly understood today. In at least some volumes of poetry by Nazim Hikmet, extensive glosses have been added because some of his vocabulary was deemed by the editors to be incomprehensible to the modern reader, yet Hikmet is hardly ancient history - he died in 1963.
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| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6441 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 13 of 14 03 May 2012 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would say that if a Turk who knew how to read Ottoman orthography also could read and understand parts of the
Qur'an, then that's suffering from severe diglossia. As I've understood it many arabisms (heck, the name of the language is lišani Osmani, *lšn is a semitic root!) and persianisms were used in the writing system due to either showing how educated you were, or due having to because of the lack of clarity an abjad gives a very vowel rich language. This reminds me of Pahlavi, and abjad used to write Middle Persian, but was so unfit for the language that entire words were written out in Aramean to be read as if they were in Persian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ToyCar Diglot Newbie Turkey Joined 4370 days ago 2 posts - 1 votes Speaks: Turkish*, English | Message 14 of 14 03 May 2012 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It isn't suffering. A muslim have to read and understand Quran, so the language used helps in the goal, how can it be suffering? Many German words can be recognised by an English-speaker, is it suffering? No, conversely, it is useful. There are loanwords taken from Persian to decorate literature but most of them are common and have taken due to needs and some of them even lost the meaning came from its origin. There are Latin words which didn't exist in the language before Turks came to Anatolia and they have been being used for centuries now.
I can't claim Turkish was or is pure. Like all other languages, Turkish has/had adopted loanwords but they were used in Turkish grammatical constituent. Invented so-called Turkish words are not generally derived from Turkish suffixes but they are served as pure Turkish, so this is a suffering because Arabic and Persian words are known as what they are but if you look in the dictionary for these new ones, they'll seem Turkish. In Turkish law, today, still Ottoman Turkish is used to express everything detailed because modern Turkish is not sufficient to bear the meanings in short. Edited by ToyCar on 07 May 2012 at 7:50am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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