How did Turkey undergo the adoption of a new writing system after World War I? Did all of a sudden every adult have to learn a new alphabet? Isn't that a difficult task? To make an entire nation start learning how to read and write from scratch?
How did Turkey undergo the adoption of a new writing system after World War I...
Jonathan Bennett
Xavier Scott
i want lebanon to go through a similar process.
Logan Ward
literacy rate was too low, that helped a lot.
Liam Myers
Tfw all of our neighbours have a special snowflake alphabet but were stuck with l*tin
James Cox
Literacy was already low to begin with.
Nolan Martin
Hmm. Why didn't the government try to create a variant of the Arabic script by adding diacritics to represent the vowels instead of adopting the Latin script which is a new script altogether? Wouldn't that be easier?
Cameron Turner
>chad latin vs virgin pedo muho worshipping ar*bic
that's why. and no it wouldn't.
Austin Perry
To the best of my knowledge, literacy rates in Turkey were very low prior to the introduction of the Latin alphabet--perhaps 10% of all adults could read and write, if that.
Do consider that not every alphabet works well with any given language. Turkish, for instance, is a very vowel-heavy language. However, Arabic script doesn't typically include "short vowels" in everyday communications. Thus, one either has to make an effort to include diacritics or be able to read and recognize words without them.
If you're familiar with the Devanagari alphabet, consider: there's no good way to transcribe and differentiate between the characters ड़ and र using Latin characters. So, in text messages, they're often rendered as "d" and "r," respectively, even though both are more proximal to ordinary uses of the letter "r." In a sense, the written language doesn't unilaterally fit the Latin alphabet, although it's been adjusted to do just that.
If anything, the modified Latin alphabet adopted by Turks works better with their language than an Arabic-derived alphabet. And Latin characters are far, far easier to learn than their Arabic- and Farsi-derived counterparts--in Arabic, almost every letter has three different forms, which vary upon position within a word. That's another hurdle to literacy.
Adopting a Latin alphabet made it a lot easier for most people to learn to read and write. And, if I'm not mistaken, there was a massive, government-led program to implement the "new" script in religious schools across the country. It was complemented by a broader, more inclusive educational regime.
Austin Allen
they wanted to westernize
Hunter White
Also this. Along with trying to make education more accessible to women, Ataturk and his contemporaries were making a concerted effort to leave the Ottoman past behind. They went so far as to dictate fashion for a while--for a few years, one couldn't even publicly wear a fez. And, IIRC, it was only recent and under the Erdogan administration that women could wear hijab while partaking into certain juridical and governmental processes.
Chase Jenkins
Atatürk was a euroboo, he tried to erase ottoman turkish.
Fez looks kino in old pictures
James Gonzalez
Because it was about becoming more westernized, not just linguistic reforms.
They even stopped using some consonants because they were used in Arabic too, it tells you how much childish were these Turkish nationalist. Try listening to some central Asian Turkic language and you'll find major differences in phonetics from the Gay sounding modern day Turkish.
Asher Wilson
Diacritics work very well with Urdu, although no one does it normally. All the vowels can be easily represented by the basic Arabic diacritics.
For example:
اس دشت میں اک شہر تھا۔
can be written as
اِس دشْت مَیں اِک شہر تھا۔
I don't know why the Pakistani government has never tried to implement mandatory diacritics and undergo a spelling reform. Homographs are distinguished between from context. There are tons of homographs in Urdu because the short vowels are not represented in writing.
Leo Hughes
kek, don't get butthurt this much, pedo muho worshipper.
Angel Kelly
t. tranny who won't like non secular society
Eli Martinez
Some of my best friends are ethnic Turks whose families were integrated into Russia and the Soviet Union for much of the past century. Although their variety of Turkish is a bit older than contemporary Turkish, both are still mutually intelligible.
Interestingly, your criticism of linguistic reforms leaves out the fact that modern Turkish phased out many non-Turkish loan-words, replacing them with indigenous creations.
Probably because mandatory diacritics would make the act of writing--whether in personal or commercial correspondence--considerably more labor intensive.
At the end of the day, it's an alien, outside alphabet being fitted to another language. There is NO ambiguity when reading Hindi-Urdu written with the Devanagari script--as long as you can recognize the characters, you don't even have to know Hindi-Urdu to read and correctly pronounce words.
Owen Perez
I'm not butthurt, I'm just telling facts. It's your people who are "butthurt" that they threw away their consonants just to sound less Arabic.
Bentley Davis
that's the stupidest comment on this topic i've ever read. just...
Landon Bennett
>I'm not butthurt, I'm just telling facts. It's your people who are "butthurt" that they threw away their consonants just to sound less Arabic.
Juan Anderson
Honestly, I’m just surprised they can read
Christopher Smith
I'm not against the revival of Turkish vocabulary of course. However, the fact that they stopped using some of their consonants just to sound more westernized is childish. Also, not all of the words they replaced with Arabic loan words were Turkish. For example the word tolerans is French, the word party is English and so on.
>Some of my best friends are ethnic Turks
Cool, I have two Turk friends too. One of them is Uzbek and the other is Turkish.
Juan Sanders
Not arguments.
Nolan Wright
>the word tolerans is French, the word party is English
what's your point, pedo muho worshipper? yeah, loan words, who would've thought, huh?
Evan Mitchell
Jace Peterson
I've heard that Turkish literacy was super low at the time so it wasn't actually that hard. Not sure how true that is.
Logan Flores
The point is that you could have still used these Arabic loan words when you couldn't find an equivalent of them in your mongol language, but instead you replaced them with French and English which tells how much you're butthurt about us and our superior language.
Jayden Martinez
>you're butthurt about us and our superior language.
keeek, I knew I shouldn't give any (you)s to an ar*p.