The Turkish Language Reform a catastrophic success
Geoffrey Lewis
Oxford University press
Turkish words under discussion are in italic unless there is no possibility of confusion with a similar English word. Words from other languages, as well as book titles, are also shown in italic, likewise words of Arabic or Persian origin in some of the quotations, words of native origin being in roman.
An [A], [P], [F], [G], or [M] after a word shows its origin as Arabic, Persian, French, Greek, or Mongolian respectively; [PA] after a two-word phrase means that the first word is of Persian origin, the second Arabic.
.....
Contents
Abbreviations / viii
Note on the text / ix
1. Introduction / 1
2. Ottoman Turkish / 5
3. The New Alphabet / 27
4. Atatürk and the Language Reform until 1936 / 40
5. The Sun-Language Theory and After / 57
6. Atay, Ataç, Sayılı / 75
7. Ingredients / 94
8. Concoctions / 107
9. Technical Terms / 124
10. The New Yoke / 133
11. The New Turkish / 140
12. What Happened to the Language Society / 153
References / 169
General Index / 177
Index of Words, Phrases, and Suffixes / 183
Abbreviations
[A] Arabic
ATD Atatürk ve Türk Dili (Ankara: TDK, 1963)
AKDTYK Atatürk Kültür, Dil ve Tarih Yüksek Kurumu
AÜDTC Ankara Üniversitesi Dil Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi
DLT Diwän Lugät al-Turk
[F] French
[G] Greek
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of London
[M] Mongolian
OT Old Turkic
[P] Persian
TBMM Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi
TDK Türk Dil Kurumu
TDTC Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti
TL Türk Lirası (Turkish lira)
TTK Türk Tarih Kurumu
NOTE ON THE TEXT
Turkish words under discussion are in italic unless there is no possibility of confusion with a similar English word. Words from other languages, as well as book titles, are also shown in italic, likewise words of Arabic or Persian origin in some of the quotations, words of native origin being in roman.
An [A], [P], [F], [G], or [M] after a word shows its origin as Arabic, Persian, French, Greek, or Mongolian respectively; [PA] after a two-word phrase means that the first word is of Persian origin, the second Arabic. Square brackets are also used (a) to enclose the authors comments within translations of quotations, (b) to cite the original wording where the full text is not included (which happens rarely, only when there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the Turkish), and (c) round surnames later assumed by people who come into the story before the Surnames Law of 1934. Logic would demand that the founder of the Republic should be called Mustafa Kemal (or just Kemal, which he preferred) until the story comes down to the time of that law; nevertheless he is sometimes referred to anachronistically as Atatürk, the name by which he is best remembered.
In transliterations of Arabic and Persian words, c stands for the sound of English ch; d for English th in this; g for English j; g for Arabic ghayn, the gargling sound of the Parisian and Northumbrian r, h for kh as in Bukhara; j for French j; s for English sh; t for English th in think. (In the Chaghatay passage quoted in Chapter 2 I have followed Levends transliteration; he uses ç and şy not č and š.)
While most references to Türk Dili, the Türk Dil Kurumuş monthly journal, are by volume number and page, some give the number or date of the individual monthly part, because volume numbers were not always shown and because the pagination was not always cumulative, so that a volume may contain, say, a dozen pages numbered 27. The aim has been to make the references clear, though not necessarily consistent.
A pair of forward strokes encloses a representation of pronunciation, for which ordinary characters, not the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, are used: /gyävur/.
An asterisk preceding a word shows it to be a hypothetical form. OT stands for Old Turkic, Turkic (the current Turkish for which is Türkî [A] ) being the unattractive but generally accepted term for the family of which Turkish, the language of Turkey, is a member. The term Old Turkic is properly applied to languages of the family from the eighth to the tenth century, while the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth century is Middle Turkic. I beg the reader s
indulgence if on occasion I have misapplied ΌΤ' to a Middle Turkic word.
1
Introduction
This book has two purposes. The first is to acquaint the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragicomic, but never dull story of the Turkish language reform. The second is to provide students of Turkish at every level with some useful and stimulating reading matter. With both purposes in mind, no word, phrase, or sentence of Turkish has been left untranslated, apart from names of books and articles, as it is assumed that the reader who wishes to chase up bibliographical references will understand the meaning of the titles. The second purpose accounts for the references to the author's Turkish Grammar and for the abundance of footnotes and digressions.
The language reform is not so well known abroad as other aspects of the Kemalist revolution because, having lasted for more than half a century, it is not the stuff of which headlines are made, but its effects are evident if we compare the Turkish of today with that of even thirty years ago.
Not a few nations have gone in for linguistic engineering. By this I mean tinkering with language with the express purpose of changing people's speech habits and the way they write. I am not referring to the introduction of new words for technical innovations such as vaccination, radar, or the modem, or to the creation of new non-technical words by individuals intending to amuse or to express ideas for which they find no words in the existing language. The names that come to mind in these last two categories are, on the one hand, Lewis Carroll, on the other hand, James Joyce, and, in the middle, the American Gelett Burgess, whom we have to thank for the word blurb. In his Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed (1914) he defines it as A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher/ An earlier (1906) success of his had been to popularize bromide, previously meaning a sedative, in the sense of a boringly trite remark. He gives as an example: 'It isn't the money, it's the principle of the thing', and points out that what makes it a bromide is not just its triteness but its inevitability. He was by no means the first such benefactor of humanity; there was, for example, the unknown seventeenth-century genius who combined dumbstruck and confounded to make dumbfounded. Nor was he the last; the earliest recorded appearance in print of guesstimate later guestimate, was in 1936, in the New York Times, and such inventions keep coming. During the Gulf War of 1991 we were reminded by an American general of the existence …
Geoffrey Lewis
The Turkish Language Reform a catastrophic success
Oxford
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© Geoffrey Lewis 1999
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lewis, Geoffrey L.
The Turkish language reform: a catastrophic success / Geoffrey
Lewis,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. Turkish language—Reform. 2. Turkish language—History.
I. Title.
PL115.L47 1999
4 9 4 /35—dc2i 99-24289
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd., Midsomer Norton
ISBN 0-19-823856-8
