“We had a language which was very suitable for science; yet we slept over it one night and the next morning it was gone. Now we have been dragged down to the level of a country which learns and teaches science in foreign languages. Thousands of words and languages are forgotten. The structure of the language, which used to be suitable for deriving new words and expressions, was curbed.”
These sentences belong to Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan. He was delivering a speech on Dec. 24 in the award ceremony of Turkey’s Scientific and Technological Research Board (TÜBİTAK).
It was not the first time Erdoğan has mentioned this subject, though not as clearly as this time. It is important, since the remark was made in the wake of the debate to make the Ottoman language a compulsory course in the Turkish curriculum by the National Education Ministry.
Comments
By all means Dear Christian Thalmann.
> Arabic script is extremely well suited to semitic languages...; not so much for most other languages where vowels are treated as first-class citizens of the phonology.
@ That's how Arabic words are smartly made shorter in length and that's how the technically challenging vertical spread of the script is tackled.
> Arabic letters twist and mutate and sit on each other. For Latin, all you ever have to learn is the individual letters.
@ Arabic letters change tails not heads making self-explanatory and space-saving ligatures and that's how the technically challenging vertical spread of the script is tackled.
> In practice, the beauty of Arabic writing is often hidden under technical difficulties...
@ Beauty of Arabic can not be hidden under technical difficulties?!
> ... for Turkish language, but then you have tons of vowel signs floating around and exacerbating the already technically challenging vertical spread of the script.
@ Without exacerbating the technically challenging vertical spread of the script, Arabic letters are multiplied to cover Turkish and other languages simply by adding one or more dots instead of placing tons of vowel signs.
Happy exploring.
Why hangul?! The majority of Turks are Muslims. They do recite the Glorious Quran in Arabic!
https://www.quora.com/Do-Turks-recite-Quran-in-Arabic
@ I say:
@ I say:
@ I say: Stupid modernization for the old alphabet?!
@ I say: Absolutely True.
Koreans, Japanese and Chinese learn roman scripts.
I'm posting the link again... And more prominently this time, because when I revisited the thread, it took me a while to figure out where I got the quote from.
Then again, this leads me to a compromise: I would welcome an app that transliterates Turkish text into the Arabic script, the same as when the Chinese type pinyin and the autocorrect suggests the hanzi. I think for Turkish children to be taught basic Arabic orthography would not be valueless, but then again this is not my call to make by a long shot.
And what version of Arabic?? The turkish alphabet is just that - localized in a country. But there are differences between different Arabic scripts (ASFAIK), and the language has moved past Ottoman Turkish. Who is to decide what the orthography should be?
Here you can see this principle applied by a much better hand to a classical Bulgarian children's book (The Tales of Sheherazad) that I grew up on.
Fun fact: a big part of the Ottoman Imperial Library (some train wagons full) was sold as old paper by Ataturk... it now resides in our National Library and waits to share it's wonders.
To be fair to the Yale system: it was designed to teach American soldiers how to speak Chinese quickly during the second world war, and not for native speakers of Chinese.
Also, what Chinese are you talking about :-) Putonghua (mandarin), Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc. There are many languages that Chinese people speak.
https://www.ircica.org/event/11th-international-calligraphy-competition-registration-will-be-closing-on-31-december-2018