Customer Reviews

The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford Linguistics)

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The changes in the Turkish language over the past century are fascinating, and this book does a great job of explaining some of the political and social background. The author is an expert and extremely knowledgeable on this topic. To me the most telling summary was seeing a paragraph of one of Ataturk's most famous speeches presented in the original, then in a retranslation done later, then a re-retranslation done yet later! The first retranslation was necessary because the original could hardly be understood any more, with all the Arabic-derived words etc. The second retranslation was necessary because even the first retranslation could hardly be understood today! This book will be mostly interesting to those who know at least some Turkish already (and the more the better) or to those interested in linguistic change and social engineering. As the other reviews mention, the changes in Turkish are the result of deliberate re-engineering of the language, not of the more usual processes of linguistic evolution. Imagine taking English and trying to get rid of all the words derived from Latin or French and use only Anglo-Saxon words or words newly derived from other Germanic languages, and you will get a partial picture of what happened with Turkish. The author's views are probably summed up by the subtitle: a catastrophic success. The language reform was effective and some of it was valuable but it may have gone too far in destroying some useful distinctions and making Turkish a somewhat less effective and graceful means of expression.

Prof. Lewis' book gives the full account of the reengeneering of today's Turkish which was essentially for political reasons. The author, atrue erudite and scholar, in about 200 pages pens the process of the death of the ottoman Turkish and the birth of modern Turkish with sometimes bizarre and tragi-comic results. The book must certainly appeal to all Turkish intellectuals irrespective of their ideological position. But it is equally appealing to linguists and orientalists. I cannot praise this book high enough and recommend it strongly.

Turkish Language Reform, from its beginnings in the thirties to this day, has been a highly politicized issue in Turkey. Professor Lewis, a lover of "Beautiful Turkish", gives an excellent account of the historical development of this language engineering while successfully keeping his views out of the realm of language politics of Turkey. Any criticisms he has to make about the Turkish Language Association (Turk Dil Kurumu) come subtly and delicately through the carefully selected quotations from others.

This book is a must for lovers of Turkish language, linguists, historians of language (and surely for the Turkish Language Association), and it can be a fun to read for a non-Turkish taxpayer whose tax money could not be reached to finance the whole project.

For a better grasp of the book, some knowledge of Turkish language helps; the more the better to really get the beautiful "taste" of this excellent book.

I just finished the book -- reading 1-2 hours daily for 3 days -- and a very brief summary of what I learned might be:

*** Ataturk's insistence on converting from the Arabic script to Latin letters was a huge success in pushing Turkish citizens towards literacy (1924=9%, 1995=82.3%), no doubt among the highest literacy rates in the Muslim world;

*** For some hyper-nationalistic intellectuals, the reform became a grand excuse for ridding Turkish of Arabic vocabulary and Persian phrases/grammar, regardless of whether a) These "foreign" words had already been well integrated into Turkish anyway; b) Feasible, "truly" Turkish synonyms actually existed. The result: A 21st-century Turkish language greatly impoverished -- and not noticeably clearer -- than the one inherited from the centuries-old Ottoman empire when the republic was founded in 1923.

*** The language "engineers" who peopled the official "Language Society" during and after Ataturk's death were big on intervention and nationalist thinking but sadly lacking in professional qualifications, to put it mildly. The role of the Language Society is documented in (painstaking) detail, and this case study confirms that language is too dynamic to be shaped by committee!

I found the book well written, well researched and even witty at times. The author knows his subject inside and out, and insists on translating almost all the Turkish words and short texts into English, which made it readable even for me, a beginning student of Turkish.

However, I found the book did not address certain questions of great interest to me personally! These are:

*** One of the strongest motivations for the language reform was to rid it of unnecessary foreign vocabulary in favor of so-called "Turkish" words. Frustratingly, at no point does the author detail the history of Turkish prior to the 20th century: Where do the roots of "Turkish" lie, geographically and ethnically speaking? What is the relation of Turkish spoken in Anatolia with other Turkic languages/dialects, and when synonyms (or inspiration for neologisms) were sought in languages/dialects outside Turkey, which languages did scholars look to? And why were these languages/dialects considered "valid" when others were not?

*** Access to pre-1920 Turkish culture and history: The author mentions in passing that only a very small amount of Turkish writing from Ottoman times (in Arabic script) has been transcribed and published in modern Turkish using Latin letters. He also implies that most 21st-century Turks cannot read Turkish written in the former Arabic script. Which piqued my interest: How many of Ottoman Turkish works have been reprinted in the modern script? Are students regularly taught "classical" Turkish (script and texts) in the way that some Westerners study Latin, or Chinese in the PRC might study their own classics in traditional characters? If not, hasn't language reform effectively cut 21st-century Turkey off from an understanding of their society's role as one of the largest and ethnically diverse empires in the history of mankind?

*** Turkish as spoken by the man-in-the-street: Geoffrey Lewis focuses almost entirely on how patriotic, but often blindly nationalistic or ideologically driven intellectuals have made modern written Turkish a bit of a mish-mash. But what about "spoken" Turkish: What impact, if any, has the official language reform movement had on it?

Bruce Humes
Shenzhen, China

Geoffrey Lewis' THE TURKISH LANGUAGE REFORM: A Catastrophic Success is a presentation of the wild transformation of Standard Turkish over the course of the 20th century. Ottoman Turkish was an arcane written language understandable only to a tiny elite, filled with Arabic and Persian constructions. The Turkish of today is closer to the speech of the masses, but government fiat succeeded in pushing hundreds of neologisms into the language, some respecting the structure of Turkish and others bizarre inventions out of whole cloth. In any event, the average Turk today cannot understand texts from a century ago, and even works from a few decades ago (after the reform had started) can be unintelligible already. This severing of Turkey from its past is the "catastrophic success" of the subtitle. Lewis' work requires of course some basic knowledge of Turkish, but all quotations are translated and the book is quite accessible to even beginners in the language.

The initiator of language reform was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. A written language freed of Arabic and Persian elements was for him just one more part of turning the country into a westward-looking secular republic. Ataturk's goals might have been sincere but, as Lewis entertainingly describes, his views on linguistics were amateur and often downright nutty. For example, the dictator supported the notion (the "Sun-Language Theory") that Turkish is the original language of all mankind, and foreign words could be allowed to remain if it could be demonstrated that they were derived from this primal Turkic speech.

After the death of Ataturk, the language reform office that he founded, the Turk Dil Kurumu, continued its work with the generous funding established in his will. Much of the book documents the TDK's work, as well as influential figures such as Atay, Atac and Sayili. The origins of major new word-building elements like -sel (e.g. "dinsel") and -l (as in "okul") are given. Finally, Lewis tells of how the TDK was rendered more or less powerless in a 1983 shakeup, now making simple recommendations for Turkish equivalents of international terminology in computing and the sciences, but the damage is already done.

The back matter consists of an ample bibliography, as well as an index of all Turkish words cited in the book which proves quite handy.

I myself don't work much with Turkish -- my Turkic interests are the languages of Central Asia, but I found Lewis' account very accessible and often quite funny. While this is a respectable academic work, Lewis occasionally makes a wry comment on the absurdity of so much of the reform, which taxes a commentator's ability to be neutral and dispassionate. There are quite a few chuckles here. Anyone with an interest in historical linguistics or language engineering ought to enjoy this book.

Absolutely first rate explication of the mishmash modern Turkish has become because of the misguided, so-called language reform. For an elderly Turkish speaker such as I am, I have to keep a dictionary at hand just to read newspapers and books even. Ugly, ugly words, though they are not, of course, for the younger generations to whom they come quite naturally. I would be foolish to be deadset against neologisms, neologisms that arise naturally to meet a need. I suppose that's something that annoys me most: how terribly ugly so many of the artificially contrived neologisms are. But the worse thing is that I can see the range of concise, precise expression in the language has steadily narrowed. The author Geoffrey Lewis is quite correct when he states that the vocabulary of Turkish once rivalled that of English. If the country had stressed education without dumbed-down nationalism,it might still. One longs for writers of the caliber of Resat Nuri Guntekin, for instance. The modern novelist Sulhi Dolek does approach that standard as does the journalist Ebru Capa who fearlessly for precision's sake often uses words that I'm sure cause her younger readers to reach for the dictionary (if they have any sense of language at all). Orhan Pamuk, who I don't consider a particularly inspiring writer in his use of language per se, at least has the good sense not to overload his work with obscure and often laughable neologisms. Language is all about change, of course, but heaven help it when the ignorant, nationalistic, government-sanctioned get their hands on it. Modern Turkish is a perfect example.

I found this book some what lacking in describing the process used to select the new set of Latin letters; I thought the public outcry against this reform was not explored and that the reasons cited for switching over to the Latin letters were poor at best as it merely reiterated the anti-Arab propaganda of the time;

The increase in literacy rates being attributed to the language reform is surely misleading and would undoubtedly be due to the emphasis placed on education by the government and the access to remote-areas with the advent of telecommunications and transportation by motor cars and the like. I am personally not even sure if the literacy rate was really as poor as indicated, because firstly the population was never really surveyed until after 1930s, post the language reform, and it is also well known that the Quran, the religious book of the Turkish people, emphasises reading/learning/researching/reflecting which can all be summed up in the very first word revealed to Prophet Muhammad (s.a.v), "Iqra" which literary means "Read!", an imperative word at that. The word "Quran" literary means "to read continuously". This is one of the reasons why Muslim countries have for hundreds of centuries enjoyed a very high level of literacy rates.

The language reform was not scientific it was political in nature. Based on the research I have done, the reform was introduced in an effort to cut-off the Turkish nation from the cultural and spiritual ties imbued in the Ottoman generation, otherwise there was absolutely no justifiable reason to turn an entire nation into illiterates over night. Israel, whose language is Hebrew (also a Semitic language) has a higher literacy rate than Turkey even today, so what does this say about the Turkish language reform and its so called success ??

The examples quoted from certain individuals in this book in an attempt to discredit the Ottoman script is certainly not based on scientific merit but alas praised by the author nonetheless.

For instance, the following sentence is used to demonstrate the supposed perplexity offered by the Ottoman script: "Mehmed pasa oldu" written in the ottoman script can be understood either as "Mehmet became a Pasha" or "Pasha Mehmet has died", however this does not even register as a problem if the additional diacritical marks are used to spell out this sentence (but these marks are often not used because Ottoman is cursive and thus can be written rapidly using only consonants and long vowels, which generally does not hinder continuity or coherence. This in itself is a big advantage over other forms of writing where each vowel is spelt out) but even if these additional case markings are not used, the sentence can easily be understood from its context, otherwise as is the case in Ottoman style of writing which is indicative of their culture, polite, respectful and sometimes elaborate language is used to communicate the message.

The equivalent of the cited example in the English language could be like in the case of the sentence; "John read already"; does this sentence mean, John has completed reading already or is this an invitation for John to start reading already. This can only be understood from its context, even the word "read" in this case can only be pronounced correctly (reed or red) once the context is understood.

One aspect of the book which does stand out is in reference to the eloquence of the Ottoman language, especially in comparison with the modern day Turkish which is peppered with "made-up" words and bland expressions, that have been rather rudely injected into the diction of the Turkish populace through the press.

Disappointingly the adaptability of the Ottoman script in accommodating varying pronunciations of Ottoman letters within different regions of Anatolia has not been mentioned in this book, for sake of brevity I won't elaborate further, however this advantage the Turks once possessed has been lost with the transition to Latin letters. In fact, Latin letters are so inept in capturing the vocalisation of the Turkish letters, that many words have been "lost in pronunciation" after the adoption of these letters; even today authors don't know how to spell certain words using the limited Latin letters available to them, and as such they resort to using not letters but characters like the apostrophe (for `ayn or hamze) and the hyphen to try and mimic the Ottoman script. They also introduce various other letters which are not found in the new Turkish alphabet like ā or ī etc...

Despite the national movement of the time, which acted as a catalyst in promoting these reforms, the Turks of Turkiye have ironically been further separated from their counterparts in Turkic countries because of this new language barrier created after the language reform. These Turkic countries have adopted different Latin letters than the ones used in Turkiye and a minority in remote areas kept the Ottoman script altogether .

It must've been a trying time for the generation which were subjected to this kind of a radical change.

Overall the book does have historical value, however as I have indicated above it is lacking in some respects and moreover I don't agree with the conclusions that have been drawn, which I believe to be politically motivated.