My point was only that this kind of reform can be relatively painless in what concerns literacy rates. While there seems now to be a reaction, for decades following Ataturk it was part of the national identity to which the Turkish elite aspired to insist that Turkey was 'part of Europe' which on usual geographical definitions only a small part of it, around Istanbul, really is.
Likewise that it was a 'secular' state even if most Turks were Muslim. This is probably part of the same tendency found to varying extents in many Asian countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Europe seemed so much more powerful, successful and more advanced that they wanted to copy it, in the hope they could become powerful, successful and advanced too.
This was partly a 'love-hate' relationship as one of the motivations was to beat the West at its own game. The Turkish alphabet is based on Latin but with several changes to fit their language e.
Could part of what is happening in Turkey now be explicable by the fact that the relative economic, industrial and military decline of Europe and the West in recent decades, and gradual rise to power of other parts of the world, mean that it no longer seems self-evident that copying Europe and the West is the road to success?
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Bregalad Bregalad 5, 2 2 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 69 69 bronze badges. I don't think it has been particularly inspired by German - the phone[mt]ic values of "y" and "j" point more towards Francoenglish inspiration than German, and the vowels were perhaps perceived as more or less neutral "paneuropean".
I don't think the Turks actually used the Latin alphabet: they created their own alphabet based on it, but with more letters, and with different pronunciation of some letters - e. Turkish 'c' is pronounced as 'j' per Wikipedia. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Schwern Schwern If the only thing that mattered was change as much things as possible , it's strange they didn't even change the flag, but go figure Bregalad I'm going to speculate that they wanted to cut ties with the Ottomans internally , but externally needed to present to the world as the legitimate successor to the Ottoman Empire.
Keeping the flag is a cheap way to do that. Offtopic but Weird that Ataturk removed the Persian loanwords and yet I can still understand the law name Turk is turk, Harf is letter, Kabul is acceptance, ve is and, tatbiki is teaching, kanun is law.
But then again my language derives from both Persian and Chagatai Turkic so that might be the case. Guess I should look up etymology of these words. VampireTooth VampireTooth 61 1 1 bronze badge. Tom Au Tom Au k 16 16 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. There were few similar cases in history. Alex Alex For a person who is already literate, there is no much difficulty in switching to another alphabet. Citation needed, I'm afraid. After adopting the Latin script for Turkish, the next move in would be to adopt the metric system for measurements.
What kind of scientific achievements Turks accomplished under the Ottoman dynasty through six centuries is a question mark. In the census it was estimated to be 10 percent. The controversial part of the move was its ideological basis, which assumed an ancient, hypothetical Turkish to be the mother of almost all existing languages on the planet.
Yet it also contributed a lot to the increased literacy rate in Turkey, especially in the austere years of the s and 40s. President that scientific achievements are not all about the language used, but rather more related with the perspective.
Recommended Election time in Turkish Cyprus. Mina Urgan who has studied linguistics and could fluently speak Turkish, English, and French plus a little from some other languages, has a part about that in her memoir. I'll add a picture of the original text for those who can speak Turkish. She says,. Despite being a kid at a normal level of intelligence who could learned two languages, I couldn't read my native language properly.
Due to the Arabic letters falling completely opposite to the Turkish language, I was getting totally confused by a Turkish text written in Arabic letters. Instead of them there were "vav" and that "vav" could be read in five different ways. Not just me who didn't have elementary school diploma at the time, but also the elderly Turks who have studied for years also couldn't read their own language without a mistake.
Literacy level was pathetic. They argued that the change would increase literacy and accelerate the development of a modern Turkish language that would unite the disparate regions of Anatolia.
It was also perhaps more cynically a means of marginalizing religious authorities and the Istanbul elite that had once dominated the realms of politics and education. The new alphabet has not been without its detractors.
It also may have decreased demand for Turkish press and publications among a public accustomed to reading the Ottoman alphabet. And whether or not they affirm the necessity of the change, Turkish speakers today increasingly lament it as one that alienated future generations of Turkish readers from the rich literary heritage of the Ottoman Empire. Triumph or trauma, self-inflicted or otherwise, the harf devrimi is one history's truly peculiar linguistic events.
Amidst all the examples of nationalistic language reforms, colonial and anti-colonial cultural politics, and the general standardization and transformation of speech that has occurred over the past century, Turkey stands alone in its adoption a completely different writing system, a measure that Geoffrey Lewis labelled "a catastrophic success.
This begs the question: what was the lived experience of the harf devrimi? In this article, my final post of , I'd like to offer a glimpse of the transition from an Arabo-Persian to Latin alphabet as expressed in the tiny world of the biweekly journal of the Adana region education ministry.
I will focus on the pragmatic aspects of the transition as experienced within at the education ministry's interface with the public, from the various activities involved with selling and implementing the alphabet reform to the emotional experience of parting once and for all with the Ottoman alphabet.
We can see from the discourses of the period that the adoption of a Latin alphabet was in part billed as leaving the East to join civilization, two categories that seem to be taken as given by the architects and advocates of the policy. However, the alphabet change aroused visceral reactions from those it affected.
It was a moment of apprehension, and that apprehension took many forms, including, as I will show here, animosity directed at the old letters themselves. Born to a gendarme officer from Edremit in , he briefly worked for the CUP during World War I before throwing his support behind the Kemalists through his work as an editor. During the s, he was posted to superintendentships for the school systems in Antalya and later Adana beginning in This publication served as a place where educators discussed developments in their field.
They also shared poetry, songs, essays and short historical pieces regarding the local geography, culture, and heritage of the greater Adana region. It was published at a time when major transformations were afoot in Turkey and reflects the impacts of those intellectual and administrative changes.
Beginning in August of , articles began to appear in the journal with the aim of preparing educators for the impending change to Latin letters. After all, it was no simple matter to reduce oneself to the level of an elementary student learning to read for the first time.
He explained that this hardship was why even those who acknowledged rationally the superiority of the Latin alphabet ran away from it. He continued in a philosophical tone: "You know there's clouds that look like mountains sometimes. The analogy was simple but apt. The spirit of Mustafa Kemal was to be the soothing breeze that would gently ease the pain of leaving behind the Ottoman past.
Habip emphasized that the sooner this change was made the better and easier it would be, indicating that they would begin teaching Turkish with the Latin alphabet with the new school year in September. In fact, preparations were already underway. The article referred to it as a type of mobilization for war seferberlik , conjuring the memory of struggle associated with the years of the First World War.
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