Ottoman Turkish alphabet

The Ottoman Turkish alphabet ( ota, الفبا, ') is a version of the Arabic script used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet.

Though Ottoman Turkish was primarily written in this script, non-Muslim Ottoman subjects sometimes wrote it in other scripts, including the Armenian, Greek, Latin and Hebrew alphabets.

History

Origins

The various Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets, including Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Latin and other writing systems.

The earliest known Turkic alphabet is the Orkhon script. When Turks adopted Islam, they began to use Arabic script for their languages, especially under the Kara-Khanids. Though the Seljuks used Persian as their official language, in the late Seljuk period, Turkish began to be written again in Anatolia in the nascent Ottoman state.

The Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a form of the Perso-Arabic script. Well suited to writing Arabic borrowings, it was poorly suited to native Turkish words: Arabic has several consonants that do not exist in Turkish, making several Arabic letters superfluous except for Arabic loanwords; conversely, some Turkish sounds are not found in Arabic, such as ''g'' and ''p''. Turkish has eight different short vowels and no long ones, whereas Arabic has three short and three long vowels; and in the Arabic script, only long vowels are normally written.

The introduction of the telegraph and the printing press in the 19th century exposed further weaknesses in the Arabic script. Zürcher, Erik Jan. ''Turkey: a modern history'', p. 188. I. B.Tauris, 2004.

Some Turkish reformers promoted the Latin script well before Atatürk's reforms. In 1862, during an earlier period of reform, the statesman Münif Pasha advocated a reform of the alphabet. At the start of the 20th century, similar proposals were made by several writers associated with the Young Turk movement, including Hüseyin Cahit, Abdullah Cevdet and Celâl Nuri. In 1917, Enver Pasha introduced a revised alphabet, the ' representing Turkish sounds more accurately; it was based on Arabic letter forms, but written separately, not joined cursively. It was for a time the official script of the Army.

The romanization issue was raised again in 1923 during the İzmir Economic Congress of the new Turkish Republic, sparking a public debate that was to continue for several years. A move away from the Arabic script was strongly opposed by conservative and religious elements. It was argued that Romanization of the script would detach Turkey from the wider Islamic world, substituting a foreign (European) concept of national identity for the confessional community.

Others opposed Romanization on practical grounds, as there was no suitable adaptation of the Latin script that could be used for Turkish phonemes. Some suggested that a better alternative might be to modify the Arabic script to introduce extra characters for better representing Turkish vowels.

In 1926, the Turkic republics of the Soviet Union adopted the Latin script, giving a major boost to reformers in Turkey.

Replacement

Ottoman Turkish script was replaced by the Latin-based new Turkish alphabet. Its use became compulsory in all public communications in 1929. The change was formalized by the ''Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet'', passed on November 1, 1928, and effective on January 1, 1929.Erik Jan Zürcher (2004), ''Turkey: a Modern History'', pages 188–9.

Alphabet

As with Arabic, Persian and Urdu