Turkish alphabet
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The Turkish alphabet consists of the following 29 letters:
and in the lowercase:
Please see the Turkish language article for information on the sounds of the Turkish language.
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[edit] History
[edit] Early history
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The earliest known Turkish alphabet is the Orkhon script. In general, Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets including Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Latin and some other Asiatic writing systems.
[edit] Modern Turkish alphabet
The current 29-letter Turkish alphabet, used for the Turkish language, was established by the Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet, numbered 1353, in Turkey on November 1, 1928, as a vital step in the cultural part of Atatürk's Reforms.[1] Replacing the earlier Ottoman Turkish script, the script was created as an extended version of the Latin alphabet at the initiative of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
The alphabet reform, combined later with the foundation of Turkish Language Association in 1932, campaigns by the Ministry of Education including the opening of Public Education Centers throughout the country, and the active encouragement of people by Atatürk with many trips to the countryside often involving him teaching the new alphabet, succeeded in achieving a substantial increase in the literacy rate of the population from a figure around 20% to over 90%.[2] The reforms were also backed up by the Law on Copyrights, issued in 1934, encouraging and strengthening the private publishing sector.[3] In 1939, The First Turkish Publications Congress was organized in Ankara, for discussing the issues like copyright, printing, the progress on improving the literacy rate and scientific publications, with the attendance of 186 deputies.
The work of preparing the new alphabet based on the Latin letters and incorporating necessary modifications to account for sounds specific to Turkish language, was undertaken by the Language Commission (Dil Encümeni) consisting of the following members:
- Linguists
- Ragıp Hulûsi Özdem,
- Ahmet Cevat Emre,
- İbrahim Grandi Grantay,
- Educators
- Mehmet Emin Erişirgil,
- İhsan Sungu,
- Fazıl Ahmet Aykaç,
- Writers and members of parliament
- Falih Rıfkı Atay,
- Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın,
- Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu.
The commission started the work on the new alphabet on June 26, 1928. The letter Ö was adopted from the Swedish alphabet by suggestion from the Swedish interpreter of the Dragoman House (ambassador house) present at the commission for discussing the new alphabet[citation needed]. Ç was adopted from the Albanian alphabet, Ş was from the S-comma of the Romanian alphabet, and Ü is from the German alphabet.
[edit] Distinctive features
Note that dotted and dotless I are separate letters, each with its own uppercase and lowercase form. I is the capital form of ı, and İ is the capital form of i. (In the original law establishing the alphabet, the dotted İ came before the undotted I; now their places are reversed [Yazım Kılavuzu].) The letter J, however, uses a tittle in the same way English does, with a dotted lowercase version, and a dotless uppercase version.
Optional circumflex accents can be used with "â", "î" and "û" to disambiguate words with different meanings but otherwise the same spelling (for example, while "kar" means "snow", "kâr" means "profit"), or to indicate palatalization of a preceding consonant, or long vowels in loanwords, particularly from Arabic. These are seen as variants of "a", "i", and "u" and are becoming quite rare in modern usage.
The Turkish alphabet has no q, w or x. Instead, those characters are transliterated into Turkish as k, v and ks. The 1928 establishing Law 1353 made the writing of q, w and x illegal; the 1982 Constitution explicitly retains this law.[4] In practice, this ban is enforced mainly against words from Kurdish language, where the letters are used; some Kurdish personal names cannot be registered on birth certificates as a result.[5]
[edit] Trivia
- In Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, there are several fictional scenes relating to the various committees supposedly assigned to create the New Turkish Alphabet, each one for a different letter, each one advocating their letter at the expense of other alternative transliterations of the sound in question.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Yazım Kılavuzu, Dil Derneği, 2002 (the writing guide of the Turkish language)
- ^ Harf İnkılâbı Text of the speech by Prof. Dr. Zeynep Korkmaz on the website of Turkish Language Association, for the 70th anniversary of the Alphabet Reform, delivered at the Dolmabahçe Palace, on September 26, 1998
- ^ Press and Publications in Turkey, article on Newspot, June 2006, published by the Office of the Prime Minister, Directorate General of Press and Information.
- ^ THE CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY (English translation). Turkish Directorate General of Press and Information. Retrieved on 2006-11-07.
- ^ Karakaş, Saniye; Diyarbakır Branch of the Contemporary Lawyers Association (March 2004). Submission to the Sub-Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights: Working Group of Minorities; Tenth Session, Agenda Item 3 (a) (MS Word). United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Retrieved on 2006-11-07. “Kurds have been officially allowed since September 2003 to take Kurdish names, but cannot use the letters "x,w or q", which are common in Kurdish but do not exist in Turkey's version of the Latin alphabet. [...] Those letters, however, are used in Turkey in the names of companies, TV and radio channels, and trademarks. For example Turkish Army has company under the name of AXA OYAK and there is SHOW TV television channel in Turkey.”
