Some Turks reconsidering Arabic connection to Turkish language

[Wholegrain]

Some Turks reconsidering Arabic connection to Turkish language | PRI.ORG

Some Turks reconsidering Arabic connection to Turkish language

Published 25 June, 2013 01:20:00 PRI's The World

Turkey is a country at the intersection of east and west, literally. The majority of the country in Asia, part in Europe. Majority Islamic, but the Turkish language is written in Latin script, rather than Arabic. But it wasn't always so. And now, some Turks are trying to once more learn the Arabic script version of Turkish.


On a recent Wednesday afternoon, seven students sit in a darkened classroom on the campus of Bosporus University in Istanbul.

They squint up at a projection of a 100-year-old, handwritten letter.

The letter is written in Ottoman Turkish — that is, Turkish in the Arabic alphabet. Slowly, the students read the script aloud from right to left. When they get stuck, Professor Edhem Eldem writes the word on a chalkboard.

It takes the class an hour and a half to read four pages.

Ottoman Turkish looks nothing like today’s Turkish. In the Arabic script, vowels are not marked. That’s confusing enough in Turkish. But Arabic script doesn’t differentiate between consonant sounds like G and K.

“You can write something in Ottoman Turkish that can be read gel, which means come or kel, meaning bald,” Eldem said.

And there are hundreds of examples like this: different words, written exactly the same in the old script.

With the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decreed an alphabetic revolution. The Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish was banned. And a new Turkish alphabet was invented based on Latin letters. Turkey’s population was mostly illiterate, and the story goes that Ataturk traveled the countryside with a chalkboard teaching villages to read this new Turkish.

The new alphabet is so phonetically correct that, “If it is written properly there is no where you can go wrong when reading a Turkish word,” Eldem said.

Literacy skyrocketted. But Ataturk’s alphabet revolution brought on a symbolic shift.

“Arabic is the East and the Latin script is the West,” Eldem said. “It is artificial, but ... people believe in it.”

Eldem says while his rational side supports the Latin script, he also feels the cultural loss.

“I am in a position to see to what extent the loss of that script has dispossessed Turks, especially students of history, with some kind of a contact with the past,” he said.

It’s true. Unless they study Ottoman Turkish, educated Turks cannot read the inscriptions on their great grandfathers’ headstones.

What Turkey did was radical. It was not just a script change. It was a cultural shift. Only a handful of countries have attempted to remake their alphabet. Most have stuck with the script they have. Iran, for example.

Persian, like Ottoman Turkish, is written in a slightly modified Arabic script, adopted around the 9th century when Persia converted to Islam. And like Turkish, some say it’s not the best fit.

Vowels are not marked. There are two letters for the sound T. Three letters for S and four for Z.

As a university student in Tehran in the 1970s and 80s, Hossein Samei dreamt of revolution. He and his classmates argued for the adoption of the Latin script.

“We wanted to change the world and because we were students of linguistics, we wanted to do it in language,” Samei said, smiling.

Today, Samei is a lecturer in Persian at Emory University in Atlanta. With a soft salt and pepper mustache and a worn orange polo shirt, he doesn’t look much like a revolutionary anymore. Those were youthful ideas, Samei says.

Now he thinks the Persian alphabet is fine just how it is.

The script, says Samei, links Iran east to Afghanistan and south to India. It’s a connection to history, to literature and art. Changing the script would not just mean reprinting books, it would place a barrier between the present and the past.

“We like our culture. We like our literature. We want to change, but we believe more in reform,” Samei said. “Even this recent election shows that.”

Instead, Samei says, he sees authors and bloggers reforming the Persian language. Some writers mark vowels to indicate the sound. Some add an extra letter to make a word more legible. Still it’s a real struggle to read. Especially for those outside Iran.

Every evening at their home in New Zealand, Fariz and Medio Azadi sit with their daughter, Wyana and help her sound out words in Persian. Persian is Wyana’s native tongue, but her dad says she has a hard time reading.

“She’s still struggling, that’s my observation, she is struggling with connecting the words,” Medio Azadi said.

Azadi is a linguist. He’s frustrated with the Persian script. But he also sees it as an expression of national character.

“It’s like the doctors writing a prescription, it looks mysterious,” he said. “If you are able to read the text, you are an insider. If you’re not able to read it, you’re an outsider.”

Azadi wishes Iranians would get behind a few small reforms that would make the script clearer. That way, his daughter would be more likely to master it.

 

[al-Hasani]

Another interesting article, Wholesgrain, as usual. You should be made a honorary citizen of some Arab country.

You are very knowledgeable about the Arab world, our history, diversity and complexity. Very few people know what you know especially among non-Arabs. I think that a person who has such knowledge about any topic or other cultures that are not his own deserve respect.

I actually learnt something new about my people, history, culture etc. despite being in general quite, or some people would even claim, very knowledgeable about our history be it Arabic or Semitic, from your threads each time!

 

[farag]

Really interesting

 

[revojam]

There was never something called Ottoman "Turkish" it was only Ottoman language , plus it was a mixture of Arabic and Persian words almost without a single Turkish word in it.Our original language was Old Turkic alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia but because of Ottomans we lost the language our ancestors used and whats more funny outside the palace courts simple man in the street was not even aware there was a freak-of-a-language called Ottoman language existed.So my point is many muslims ignorant to our rootS love to say "Kafir Ataturk replaced old Ottoman Turkish with Western latin alphabet" no it did not happen like that : Our root language was forgotten because of Ottomans Ataturk simply restored it after abolishing this Arabic-Persian language.Thanks to modern Turkish today we can easily understand our kinship (Turkic people) from Middle-East to all over Central Asia if it wasn't for modern Turkish we could not even understands whats Azeri Turks living in next door saying.

 

[Ahiska]

Oh no please not Arabic scripts or language the only reason somebody should write or speak in Arabic is when they go to the mosque nothing more nothing less.
Latin alphabet is 10 times better for the turkish language then arabic.
And the most important thing Turks are Turkic and have except religion nothing to do with Arabs i dont dislike Arabs but we are something completely different.

 

[Hussein]

for our language it is very clear latin alphabet would work much better

 

[Charon]

Most Turks are satisfied with the Latin alphabet. Why should we use the Arabic script? Ottomans are history and most Turks couldn't write or read in that time. Turks have nothing to do with Arabs besides Islam and even with Islam we take it easy unlike Arabs. Our ancestors had culturally nothing to do with Arabs and so are we. Instead of arabization we should discover our real roots and use the alphabet of Gökturks!

 

[INDIC]

for our language it is very clear latin alphabet would work much better

For our Indian languages even Latin Alphabet won't work.

 

[Kompromat]

Turkish original script was beautiful.

 

[Yabgu]

No this news isn't true and it's not going to change not because Arabic script is bad or anything but latin script is more useful and easier for the language. If there is ever a change it would be to orkhon script mixed with latin.

 

[al-Hasani]

Did people even bother to read the article?

There is no talk about a change or anything. Some Turks are just discovering their past and the past of the Ottoman Empire including the language and alphabet used.

Also what they are trying to learn is not the Arabic scripture we Arabs use. It is a morphed version just like the Persian alphabet which is based on the Arabic script.

You cannot just erase history.

Anyway Turks are not Arabs and we let them decide what they want to use themselves. They adopted the Western Latin alphabet and then so be it.

I doubt this is even news in the Arab world. Just some Turkish students taking a interest in their past. Big deal.

Many Arab students also study some of our ancient Semitic languages and alphabets (the oldest in the world) but nobody talks about removing the Arabic alphabet, LOL.

 

[Shapur Zol Aktaf]

for our language it is very clear latin alphabet would work much better

I agree 100%
Other option would be to reform the alphabet. I think todays technology and the technology of near future would make mass translation of literature not that difficult. When changing alphabet, you have also to change all the literature of the country.

Persian, like Ottoman Turkish, is written in a slightly modified Arabic script, adopted around the 9th century when Persia converted to Islam. And like Turkish, some say it’s not the best fit.

Vowels are not marked. There are two letters for the sound T. Three letters for S and four for Z.

 

[Surenas]

I agree 100%
Other option would be to reform the alphabet. I think todays technology and the technology of near future would make mass translation of literature not that difficult. When changing alphabet, you have also to change all the literature of the country.

You'll bet that after the mullahs are gone Iran's language will eventually be Persianized too. Perhaps even a swift to Latin alphabet, although that would be quite extreme. Or even use Old Persian script, which was different from Semite scripts at that time.

Old Persian texts were written from left to right in the syllabic Old Persian cuneiform script and had 36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms. The usage of such characters are not obligatory. The script was surprisingly not a result of evolution of the script used in the nearby civilisation of Mesopotamia. Despite the fact that Old Persian was written in cuneiform script, the script was not a direct continuation of Mesopotamian tradition and in fact, according to Schmitt, was a "deliberate creation of the sixth century BCE".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian

 

[INDIC]

I agree 100%
Other option would be to reform the alphabet. I think todays technology and the technology of near future would make mass translation of literature not that difficult. When changing alphabet, you have also to change all the literature of the country.

Softwares can make such tasks to be executed in minutes.

 

[dravidianhero]

i have been trying to learn persian script for so many years but i have not made much progress.indian languages have the most sophisticated form of writing in the entire world.an indian after learning to read and write his mother tongue finds it extremely tough to learn persian script as it is not read as it is written.moreover u have four Zs,two Rs, many letters resembling each other(like p ,b and r z).latin script is way better than persian script but i would say even that cant beat indian system