The Turkish Language Reform : A Catastrophic Success: A Catastrophic SuccessOUP Oxford, Nov 18, 1999 - 200 pages This is the first full account of the transformation of Ottoman Turkish into modern Turkish. It is based on the author's knowledge, experience and continuing study of the language, history, and people of Turkey. That transformation of the Turkish language is probably the most thorough-going piece of linguistics engineering in history. Its prelude came in 1928, when the Arabo-Persian alphabet was outlawed and replaced by the Latin alphabet. It began in earnest in 1930 when Ataturk declared: Turkish is one of the richest of languages. It needs only to be used with discrimination. The Turkish nation, which is well able to protect its territory and its sublime independence, must also liberate its language from the yoke of foreign languages. A government-sponsored campaign was waged to replace words of Arabic or Persian origin by words collected from popular speech, or resurrected from ancient texts, or coined from native roots and suffixes. The snag - identified by the author as one element in the catastrophic aspect of the reform - was that when these sources failed to provide the needed words, the reformers simply invented them. The reform was central to the young republic's aspiration to be western and secular, but it did not please those who remained wedded to their mother tongue or to the Islamic past. The controversy is by no means over, but Ottoman Turkish is dead. Professor Lewis both acquaints the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragicomic but never dull story of the reform, and provides a lively and incisive account for students of Turkish and the relations between culture, politics and language with some stimulating reading. The author draws on his own wide experience of Turkey and his personal knowledge of many of the leading actors. The general reader will not be at a disadvantage, because no Turkish word or quotation has been left untranslated. This book is important for the light it throws on twentieth-century Turkish politics and society, as much as it is for the study of linguistic change. It is not only scholarly and accessible; it is also an extremely good read. |
Contents
1 | |
Ottoman Turkish | 5 |
The New Alphabet | 27 |
Atatürk and the Language Reform until 1936 | 40 |
The SunLanguage Theory and After | 57 |
Atay Ataç Sayılı | 75 |
Ingredients | 94 |
Concoctions | 107 |
Technical Terms | 124 |
The New Yoke | 133 |
The New Turkish | 140 |
What Happened to the Language Society | 153 |
References | 169 |
177 | |
183 | |
Other editions - View all
The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success Geoffrey L. Lewis,Geoffrey Lewis No preview available - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
adjective alphabet Anatolia Ankara Arabic Arabic and Persian Ataç Ataç's Atatürk Atatürk'ün Atay aynı başka bilim bizim borrowing böyle Bunun bütün Büyük calque century Cep Kılavuzu 1935 derived Derleme dialects dictionary dilin diye Doğan English etmek example expression foreign words French genel gibi Gökalp Grand National Assembly guage halk Hürriyet invented İsmet İnönü Istanbul izafet İzmir kelime kelimeler kelimesi Kemal kendi Kültür Kurultay Kurultayı language reform Language Society Latin letters Levend lisan meaning Mehmet Meselâ neologisms newspaper noun okul old word olduğu origin Ottoman language Öztürkçe Pasha Persian pure Turkish rakı replace Sayılı sense şey söz sözcükler speech suffix Sun-Language Theory Tanzimat Tarama Dergisi 1934 Tarama Sözlüğü Tarih TDK's technical terms Tekin terim Terimleri tilcik Türk Dili Türkçenin Turkey Turkic Turkish equivalents Turkish language Turkish words Türkiye Turks türlü vardır verb vocabulary vowels writing yabancı yazı yeni yerine Ziya Ziya Gökalp
Popular passages
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