The Turkish Language Reform : A Catastrophic Success

The Turkish Language Reform : A Catastrophic Success PDF

Author: Geoffrey Lewis

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 1999-11-18

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0191583227

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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.

Tradition,Tension and Translation in Turkey

Tradition,Tension and Translation in Turkey PDF

Author: Şehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2015-07-15

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 9027268479

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The articles in this volume examine historical, cultural, literary and political facets of translation in Turkey, a society in tortuous transformation since the 19th century from empire to nation-state. Some draw attention to tradition in Ottoman practices and agents of translation and interpreting, while others explore the republican period, starting in 1923, with the revolutionary change in script from Arabic to Roman coming in 1928, making a powerful impact on publication and translation practices. Areas covered include the German Jewish academic involvement in translation, traditional and current practices of translating from Kurdish into Turkish, censorship of translated literature, intralingual translations from Ottoman into modern Turkish, pseudotranslation, ideological manipulation and resistance in translation, imitativeness vs. originality and metonymics of literary reviewing.

The Turkish Language Reform and Beyond

The Turkish Language Reform and Beyond PDF

Author: Ruth Bartholoma

Publisher:

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9783447116961

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Debates on language policy and planning in the Republic of Turkey are the focus of this volume, which is the outcome of a conference held at the University of Freiburg in April 2019. The eight chapters deal with various aspects related to both the official language Turkish and the other languages used in Turkey, whether autochthonous minority languages or languages that have recently become important through migration. For their analyses, the authors, coming from different disciplinary backgrounds like Turkology, political science or history, use methods like discourse analysis, mixed-method approaches or concepts from the field of linguistic landscapes research.0Topics include re-evaluations of the Turkish Language Reform of the 1920s and 1930s, analyses of debates concerning the Turkish language in connection with questions of gender, loanwords and use in political speeches, the language on public and private signs, demands raised in connection with the so-called Democratic Opening? initiated in 2009 or the migration of refugees from Syria since 2011. Attention to current developments also provides new perspectives on the early phase of language policy in Turkey and the question whether such developments can be seen as continuities or discontinuities. In any case, this book makes an engaging contribution to what seems to be a never-ending story?.

Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey

Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey PDF

Author: Nergis Ertürk

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2011-10-19

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0199746680

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The 1928 Turkish alphabet reform replacing the Perso-Arabic script with the Latin phonetic alphabet is an emblem of Turkish modernization. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey traces the history of Turkish alphabet and language reform from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, examining its effects on modern Turkish literature. In readings of the novels, essays, and poetry of Ahmed Midhat, Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, Omer Seyfeddin, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Peyami Safa, and Nazim Hikmet, Nergis Erturk argues that modern Turkish literature is profoundly self-conscious of dramatic change in its own historical conditions of possibility. Where literary historiography has sometimes idealized the Turkish language reforms as the culmination of a successful project of Westernizing modernization, Erturk suggests a different critical narrative: one of the consolidation of control over communication, forging a unitary nation and language from a pluralistic and multilingual society.

The Turkic Languages

The Turkic Languages PDF

Author: Lars Johanson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-27

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 1000488241

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The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from southern Iran to the Arctic Ocean and from the Balkans to the great wall of China. There are currently 20 literary languages in the group, the most important among them being Turkish with over 70 million speakers; other major languages covered include Azeri, Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Noghay, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, Yakut, Yellow Uyghur and languages of Iran and South Siberia. The Turkic Languages is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family. Seen from a linguistic typology point of view, Turkic languages are particularly interesting because of their astonishing morphosyntactic regularity, their vast geographical distribution, and their great stability over time. This volume builds upon a work which has already become a defining classic of Turkic language study. The present, thoroughly revised edition updates and augments those authoritative accounts and reflects recent and ongoing developments in the languages themselves, as well as our further enhanced understanding of the relations and patterns of influence between them. The result is the fruit of decades-long experience in the teaching of the Turkic languages, their philology and literature, and also of a wealth of new insights into the linguistic phenomena and cultural interactions defining their development and use, both historically and in the present day. Each chapter combines modern linguistic analysis with traditional historical linguistics; a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. Written by an international team of experts, The Turkic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, Turcology, and Near Eastern and Oriental Studies.

The New Turkey

The New Turkey PDF

Author: Chris Morris

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1783780312

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Updated since the decision to begin Turkey's admission to the European Union. Turkey is a country in a state of flux, swept along by an extraordinary process of change. In the last few years, a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms has swept away much of the old order which ruled the country for so long. Some people call it a second Turkish revolution. But resistance to reform remains strong. Pressure for change has come from ordinary people fed up with the old ways; it's also been motivated by the dominant issue of Turkish political life - the long pursuit of membership of the European Union. And yet Turkey remains a mystery to many outsiders; a complex country hard to understand. It's secular and Muslim, Western and Eastern, democratic and authoritarian, all at the same time. This book examines the potential and the problems of the new Turkey, and the expectations of the people who live there, drawing on first-hand interviews and observations gathered over several years.

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