Oxford LINGUISTICS The Turkish Language Reform A Catastrophic Success Geoffrey Lewis THE TURKISH LANGUAGE REFORM The Turkish Language Reform A Catastrophic Success GEOFFREY LEWIS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Geoffrey Lewis 1999 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lewis, Geoffrey L. The Turkish language reform: a catastrophic success / Geoffrey Lewis, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). 1. Turkish language—Reform. 2. Turkish language—History. I. Title. PL115.L47 1999 494'-35—dc2i 99-24289 ISBN 0-19-823856-8 13579 10 8642 Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Bookcraft (BathJJJfiUJ^idsomer Norton Acknowledgements To all the many friends who supplied me with material, my deep gratitude. Most of them said that if I criticized the language reform too harshly they would not mind a bit. My especial thanks to Fuat M. Andie, Emre Araci, Cigdem Bahm, Ruth Davis, Sitki Egeli, fjiikrti Elchin, Selim ilkin, Iverach McDonald, Andrew Mango, Bengisu Rona, and Ali Suat Orguplii. Contents Abbreviations Note on the Text 1. Introduction 2. Ottoman Turkish 3. The New Alphabet 4. Atatiirk and the Language Reform until 1936 5. The Sun-Language Theory and After 6. Atay, Ata<;, Sayili 7. Ingredients 8. Concoctions 9. Technical Terms 10. The New Yoke 11. The New Turkish 12. What Happened to the Language Society References General Index Index of Words, Phrases, and Suffixes Abbreviations [A] Arabic ATD Ataturk ve Turk Dili (Ankara: TDK, 1963) AKDTYK Atatiirk Kiiltiir, Dil ve Tarih Yiiksek Kurumu AODTC Ankara Oniversitesi Dil Tarih-Cografya Fakiiltesi DLT Diwan Lugat al-Turk [F] French [G] Greek JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of London [M] Mongolian OT Old Turkic [P] Persian TBMM Tiirkiye Biiyuk Millet Meclisi TDK Tiirk Dil Kurumu TDTC Turk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti TL Tiirk Lirasi (Turkish lira) TTK Tiirk Tarih Kurumu Note on the Text Turkish words under discussion are in italic unless there is no possibility of con¬ fusion with a similar English word. Words from other languages, as well as book titles, are also shown in italic, likewise words of Arabic or Persian origin in some of the quotations, words of native origin being in roman. An [A], [P], [F], [G], or [M] after a word shows its origin as Arabic, Persian, French, Greek, or Mongolian respectively; [PA] after a two-word phrase means that the first word is of Persian origin, the second Arabic. Square brackets are also used (a) to enclose the author’s comments within translations of quotations, (b) to cite the original wording where the full text is not included (which happens rarely, only when there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the Turkish), and (c) round surnames later assumed by people who come into the story before the Surnames Law of 1934. Logic would demand that the founder of the Republic should be called Mustafa Kemal (or just Kemal, which he preferred) until the story comes down to the time of that law; nevertheless he is sometimes referred to anachronistically as Atatiirk, the name by which he is best remembered. In transliterations of Arabic and Persian words, c stands for the sound of English ch; d for English th in this; gfor English j; g for Arabic ghayn, the gargling sound of the Parisian and Northumbrian r, h for kh as in Bukhara; j for French j; s for English sh; t for English th in think. (In the Chaghatay passage quoted in Chapter 2 I have followed Levend’s transliteration; he uses f and $, not c and s.) While most references to Turk Dili, the Turk Dil Kurumu’s monthly journal, are by volume number and page, some give the number or date of the individual monthly part, because volume numbers were not always shown and because the pagination was not always cumulative, so that a volume may contain, say, a dozen pages numbered 27. The aim has been to make the references clear, though not necessarily consistent. A pair of forward strokes encloses a representation of pronunciation, for which ordinary characters, not the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, are used: /gyavur/. An asterisk preceding a word shows it to be a hypothetical form. OT stands for Old Turkic, Turkic (the current Turkish for which is Turk! [A]) being the unattractive but generally accepted term for the family of which Turkish, the language of Turkey, is a member. The term Old Turkic is properly applied to languages of the family from the eighth to the tenth century, while the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth century is Middle Turkic. I beg the reader’s indulgence if on occasion I have misapplied ‘OT’ to a Middle Turkic word. 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 bibli¬ ographical 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 T. 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 human¬ ity; 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 2 Introduction of bodacious, apparently a combination of bold and audacious, first recorded in British English in 1845. These, however, are not what I intend by linguistic engineering. I mean the sort of deliberate campaign that has been carried out at various times by Germans, Swedes, Hungarians, Finns, and Albanians, among others, for nationalistic reasons, to purge their languages of foreign words and substitute native words for them. In lands of German speech the encroachment of French began at the end of the sixteenth century. The first stirrings of protest came a century later, although clearly with no effect on King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia (1713-40), to judge by his celebrated declaration to his nobles: ‘Ich stabiliere die Souverainet6 wie einen Rocher de Bronze.’ The modern German vocabulary shows the results of another such campaign, with Fernsprecher and Kraftwagen replacing the international Telefon and Auto, though the latter two have staged a comeback.