Éditeur : Oxford University Press | Date & Lieu : 1999, Oxford |
Préface : | Pages : 262 |
Traduction : | ISBN : 0-19-823856-8 |
Langue : Anglais | Format : 130x215 mm |
Code FIKP : Liv. En. | Thème : Linguistique |
Présentation
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Table des Matières | Introduction | Identité | ||
The Turkish Language Reform a catastrophic success |
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 … |