A new alphabet for Turkish: Latin characters in writing
11 July 1928
A new alphabet for Turkish has been unanimously selected by the Latin Characters Commission sitting at Angora. The invention of new letters has been avoided. Some letters can bear accents to denote the extra sounds needed. All Turkish words can be written with the new alphabet.
The Commission is beginning to draw up a dictionary giving an official Latin orthography to which all must conform. Grammatical rules are made uniform by eliminating the special formations of Persian and Arabic words that still encumber Turkish, and making them follow the rules of Turkish proper.
Editorial: the Turkish language
23 July 1928
The machiavellian policy, initiated at the Tower of Babel, has always been distressingly successful in keeping the nations of the world apart. The problem of intercourse in different languages has been further complicated by a variety of scripts. Thus the decision of the more or less philosophic despotism reigning in Turkey to substitute Latin characters for Arabic ones is a step, even if a small one, towards the unity of nations. According to reports it is hoped that all education will be Latinised in its script in the course of seven years, while newspapers will be compelled to begin the transformation in some of their columns as soon as the law is finally passed. The Turkish government has a short way with conservative opinion, and one presumes that not many years hence it will be as dangerous to put up a notice in the traditional and highly decorative Arabic characters as it now is to wear a fez.
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The new Turkish language: aim of the reform
From our correspondent
5 September 1928
Constantinople
The whole of Turkey is mobilising to learn to read and write in the new alphabet in the shortest time possible. An immense change has come over the official view of the matter since the Linguistic Commission set to work, and from 15 years, which the reform was expected to take, the time allowed has fallen to two years. Provincial administrations, government departments, banks, and commercial institutions are all organising courses for their employees, and in many cases are offering bonuses for a rapid mastery of the new script.
The script itself has been made as simple as possible, and the rules which govern spelling and grammar are far easier than those of the Arabic script. The alphabet consists of twenty consonants, eight vowels, and three principal signs – the apostrophe to mark a pause in the middle of a word, the hyphen, which will be very frequent and will establish the separations of the roots of verbs from their terminations and other separations, and the circumflex accent. One peculiarity is that there are two i’s, one of which is spelt without a dot. Otherwise the letters are all familiar Latin European letters. As for spelling, it is to be purely phonetic, and is to follow the Constantinople pronunciation.
The reform is regarded under a number of important aspects. Not only is it to produce a general literacy throughout the country instead of the 10% of literacy which exists at present, and which Kemal Pasha has indicted as a disgrace to any modern nation, but it is to introduce the nation to a new culture. It is urged that the Turkish literary and artistic genius has always been held back from a proper self-expression by being cast in the Arabic and Persian moulds, which were really foreign to it. The national literature, it is said, has consisted of thin imitations of those Oriental models belonging to another civilisation and that a civilisation which, owing to its inherent faults of fanaticism and tyranny, soon became decadent and obsolete. So the Turkish Conservatives and Orientalists are confronted with the argument that the artistic sterility of Turkey is directly due to its unfortunate linguistic inheritance. Modern civilisation, it is pointed out, needs a new terminology, and it is useless to try to adapt the Arabic script to it. The Turkish nation must have a malleable means of expressing modern scientific needs and philosophic theories, and cannot continue to torture into new shapes the fixed and inadequate Arabic letters which were devised for quite another epochs
The change of alphabet, then, is regarded as the final step away from the old Oriental culture and as the means of assimilating all the elements of the one civilisation which by its practical results has justified itself and leads the world – namely, European civilisation.
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Turkey: the new alphabet
From our correspondent
3 November 1928
Constantinople
The voting of the new alphabet at the first Assembly sitting yesterday is regarded as marking the elimination of the last Oriental aspect from Turkish life. One deputy says: “The old script hung round twentieth-century Turkey like a medieval soutane; it was the only remaining element of the so-called picturesqueness which westerners found so amusing. We do not want people to amuse themselves at our expense. Arabic writing has gone where the dervish’s bonnet has gone – namely, to the museum. It is not right to consider the matter merely as linguistic. Arabic writing made us a kind of Perso-Arabic colony. Our brain, our thoughts were not our own: our tongue was paralysed. National culture will now develop in an atmosphere of linguistic freedom.”
