Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish,sci.lang
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From: cbstone@tucson.princeton.edu (Christopher Bradford Stone)
Subject: Re: Is Turkish a new language?
Message-ID: <1995Feb16.012953.15511@Princeton.EDU>
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Date: Thu, 16 Feb 1995 01:29:53 GMT
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No, in fact Turkish is a very old language.  It belongs to the 
Ural-Altaic family of languages and is purportedly rather difficult to 
learn -- certainly much more so than Indo-European languages.  It makes 
extensive use of prefixes and suffixes, and its word order is exceeding 
different from that of both Indo-European languages and Semitic languages.

Turkish is in no way related to Arabic, which is a Semitic language.  At 
best a few Arabic loan words have appeared in Turkish, but nothing more.  
Turkish was written with the Arabic alphabet until 1921 (or thereabouts, 
as I can't remember the precise year), but that does not mean it is 
related gramatically or etomologically to Arabic.  In fact, the Arabic 
alphabet does not do justice to Turkish, as the Arabic alphabet 
deemphasizes vowels, which are very important in Turkish.

Some linguists have in fact argued that some Native American languages 
are related to Turkish.  (This claim was often made in Turkish 
nationalist propaganda of the early 1900's, when it was exaggerated 
beyond belief, but I have read that it contains a nugget of truth.)

Ataturk discontinued the use of the Arabic alphabet as part of his 
modernization program.  I believe he also introduced some other minor 
linguistic reforms, but they were peripheral to the language as a whole.  
(The Bolsheviki in Russia also introduced minor linguistic reforms soon 
after taking power, but likewise they were peripheral to the Russian 
language.)

I believe that Turkish also contains many loan words from Persian, which 
is an Indo-European language written with Arabic script.  The Ottoman 
caliph in fact wrote poetry in Persian, and the Iranian shah wrote poetry 
in Turkish.  Recall that there is a substantial Turkish-speaking 
population in Iranian Azerbaijan, which no doubt contributes to the 
exchange between Persian and Turkish.  Also, even though Persian is the 
"prestige language" in Iran, the use of Turkish has been growing there.  
The "dividing line" between Teherani Persian and Iranian Azerbaijan has 
been moving southward, not northward.  Linguists have had trouble 
explaining why this is so.

I believe that various indigenous Turkish alphabets have existed in 
history, but they have not been used for quite some time.

It should also be noted that during the existence of the USSR, Turkic 
Central Asian languages were written in Cyrillic.  Turkmen and Uzbek are 
fairly close to Anatolian Turkish (the Oguz branch of the language), 
whereas Kyrgyz and Kazakh are from the Kipchak branch and are less 
similar to Istanbuli Turkish.  In the early part of this century, a Tatar 
reformer by the name of Ismail Bey Gasprinski attempted to bridge the gap 
between these two dialects of Turkish by establishing a common language 
based on Istanbuli Turkish.  He published a newspaper called _Tarjom_ in 
this hybrid Turkish dialect.  I believe that Gasprinski used Arabic 
script for his new dialect, although I am not certain.

All four Turkic Central Asian republics, plus Azerbaijan, have now 
officially switched over to the use of the Latin script.  A Turkmen
linguist at Princeton who recently completed a Turkmen-English phrase
book was very proud of the fact that she used the Latin script.  It is
unclear, however, how far the decision to use Latin script has actually
been implemented.  I believe that most Uzbek newspapers are still
printing in Cyrillic, for instance.  Azerbaijan has gone the furthest in 
making the change to Latin characters.

To Mustafa Soysal: perhaps this information should be added to the 
soc.culture.turkish FAQ?
-- 
    //////   //  //   //////   //   //////             Christopher B. Stone
   //       //////   /////    //   ///     
  //       //  //   //  //   //      ///          "Consensus is the negation
 //////   //  //   //   //  //   //////   of leadership." -Margaret Thatcher
