Re: Turkish on stamps.

Tony Vella wrote:
I collect Turkish stamps. I noticed that about 1945 or so the umlaut on top
of the first "u" in "cumhuriyeti" was dropped. Can someone please tell me
the reason for this and what actual liguistic difference it made. Thanks in
advance.

This question has been cross-posted to alt.culture.turkish.

--
Tony Vella in Ottawa, Canada

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Ataturk's Language Reforms

Within the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had constituted merely one of many
linguistic and ethnic groups. In fact, for the ruling elite, the word
Türk connoted crudeness and boorishness. Members of the civil,
military, and religious elites conversed and conducted their business
in Ottoman Turkish, which was a mixture of Arabic, Persian, and
Turkish.

Arabic remained the primary language of religion and religious law.
Persian was the language of art, refined literature, and diplomacy. At
an official level, Ottoman Turkish usually was used only for matters
pertaining to the administration of the empire. Ottoman Turkish not
only borrowed vocabulary from Arabic and Persian but also lifted entire
expressions and syntactic structures out of these languages and
incorporated them into the Ottoman idiom.

The multiple linguistic influences on Ottoman Turkish caused
difficulties in spelling and writing. The constituent parts--Turkish,
Persian, and Arabic--belong to three different language
families--Ural-Altaic, Indo-European, and Semitic, respectively--and
the writing system fits only Semitic. Phonological, grammatical, and
etymological principles are quite different among the three families.

For these reasons, modernist intellectuals during the nineteenth
century began to call for a reform of the language. They advocated a
language that would be easier to read and write and contain more purely
Turkish words. The principle of Turkish language reform thus was tied
intimately to the reforms of the 1839-78 period.

Later in the nineteenth century, language reform became a political
issue. Turkish nationalists sought a language that would unite rather
than divide the people. In the writings of Ziya Gökalp (d. 1924),
Turkish nationalism was presented as the force uniting all those who
were Turks by language and ethnic background.

With the establishment of the republic, Atatürk made language reform
an important part of the nationalist program. The goal was to produce a
language that was more Turkish and less Arabic, Persian, and Islamic;
one that was more modern, practical, and precise, and less difficult to
learn. The republican language reform called for a drastic alteration
of both the spoken and the written language. This process was to be
accomplished through two basic strategies--adoption of a new alphabet
and purification of the vocabulary.

The language revolution (dil devrimi ) officially began in May 1928,
when numbers written in Arabic were replaced with their Western
equivalents. In November the Grand National Assembly approved a new
Latin alphabet that had been devised by a committee of scholars. Many
members of the assembly favored gradually introducing the new letters
over a period lasting up to five years. Atatürk, however, insisted
that the transition last only a few months, and his opinion prevailed.
With chalk and a portable blackboard, he traveled throughout the
country giving writing lessons in the new Latin alphabet in schools,
village squares, and other public places to a people whose illiteracy
rate was suddenly 100 percent. On January 1, 1929, it became unlawful
to use the Arabic alphabet to write Turkish.

The new Latin alphabet represented the Turkish vowels and consonants
more clearly than had the Arabic alphabet. One symbol was used for each
sound of standard Turkish, which was identified as the educated speech
of Istanbul. By replacing the Arabic with the Latin alphabet, Turkey
turned consciously toward the West and effectively severed a major link
with a part of its Islamic heritage. By providing the new generation no
need or opportunity to learn Arabic letters, the alphabet reform cut it
off from Turkey's Ottoman past, culture, and value system, as well as
from religion.

Atatürk and his language reformers viewed non-Turkish words as symbols
of the past. They encouraged a national campaign, supported by
government policies, to purify the language. Lexicographers began to
drop Arabic and Persian words from dictionaries, substituting for them
resurrected archaic terms or words from Turkish dialects or new words
coined from old stems and roots. The Turkish Language Society (Türk
Dil Kurumu), founded in 1932, supervised the collection and
dissemination of Turkish folk vocabulary and folk phrases to be used in
place of foreign words. The citizenry at large was invited to suggest
alternatives to words and expressions of non-Turkish origin, and many
responded. In 1934 lists of new Turkish words began to be published,
and in 1935 they began to appear in newspapers.

Enthusiasm for language reform reached its height in the mid-1930s.
Some of the suggested reforms were so extreme as to endanger the
comprehension of the language. Although purists and zealots favored the
complete banishment of all words of non-Turkish origin, many officials
realized that some of the suggested reforms verged on the ridiculous.

Atatürk resolved the problem with an ingenious political invention
that, although embarrassing to language experts, appealed to the
nationalists. He suggested the historically inaccurate but politically
efficacious Sun-Language Theory, which asserted that Turkish was the
"mother of all languages," and that therefore all foreign words
originally were Turkish. Thus, if a suitable Turkish equivalent for a
foreign word could not be found, the loanword could be retained without
violating the "purity" of the Turkish language.

By the late 1940s, considerable opposition to the purification movement
had emerged. Teachers, writers, poets, journalists, editors, and others
began to complain publicly about the instability and arbitrariness of
the officially sanctioned vocabulary. In 1950 the Turkish Language
Society lost its semi-official status. Eventually, some Arabic and
Persian loanwords began to reappear in government publications.

The language reform's long-term effects have been mixed. The
phonetically designed alphabet based on the Latin script facilitated
the quick acquisition of literacy. In addition, the developers of
modern Turkish consciously incorporated scientific and technological
terms. By making possible a uniform mass language that soon acquired
its own literature, the reform also helped to lessen the linguistic gap
between the classes, a legacy of Ottoman society.

Although the newly created works lacked some of the rich connotations
of the older lexicon, modern Turkish developed as a fertile literary
language as prose writers and poets created powerful works in this new
idiom, especially after 1950. The cost of language reform, however, has
been a drastic and permanent estrangement from the literary and
linguistic heritage of the Ottomans. Although some prerepublican
writings have been transliterated into the new alphabet, the vocabulary
and syntax are barely understandable to a speaker of modern Turkish.

Language and language reform continue to be political issues in Turkey.
Each decade since Atatürk's death has been characterized by its own
particular stance vis-à-vis language reform: whether to support a more
traditional lexicon or a modern, Turkified one abounding in Western
loanwords and indigenous coinages. Language reform and modern usage
have pushed forward during periods of liberal governments and been
deemphasized under conservative governments such as those of the 1980s.


Meanwhile, religious publications have not been as affected by language
reforms as secular literature. Religious publications have continued to
use an idiom that is heavily Arabic or Persian in vocabulary and
Persian in syntax. The emergence of a popular religious-oriented
political movement in the 1990s has resulted in the reintroduction of
many Islamic terms into spoken Turkish.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

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