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The Turkish Language Reform - A Catastrophic Success (Hardcover)
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The Turkish Language Reform - A Catastrophic Success (Hardcover)
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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.
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