If I were to get a research grant to conduct a study into Turkish, I would focus on the activities of the Turkish Language Association in the 1930’s. It was at this time that the Association began to nationalize the Ottoman language into Turkish. There was a perceived need for Ottoman, a hybrid language, to be purified after a millennium of corruption into something that could properly be called Turkish. Turkish words that had been sidelined in favor of Greek, Arabic, and Persian words had to regain their prominence, even if they did not exist or had fallen completely out of use. Verbal archaisms were revived. Like the stones of the Colosseum, old roots were put to new functions. In cases where there was no Turkish equivalent to a word originating in another regional language, a Turkish word had to be constructed. I have little doubt that the Association members created a hypothetical language without blemish. However, in reality, not all their reforms stuck and there was resistance to the typically top-down Kemalist reform. My interest lies in the resurrection of anachronistic words. One might imagine that the hypothetical language they created was something like mixing contemporary English with that of Shakespeare or even Chaucer. My source material would be the edicts coming from the Association as well as the various forums in which their suggestions were criticized. Further, I would try to trace back the words to the place from which they were drawn. I would have to look at the older sources, perhaps from the Seljuk period or the early years of the Ottomans to see how those words were used in context. The goal would be to understand the methodology of the members. It would also reveal changes or continuities in grammatical structure of Turkish over time. Perhaps suffixes were less commonly used than today. Further, it may be insightful as the degree to which written Turkish was ever pure.
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