#8 Reflection on the History of Turkish

[Yazmeen Nunez]

Turkish language history is rich and interesting indeed. The earliest notable usage of earlier versions of the language goes back from at least 730 AD, in Mongolia. The language spread from former Siberia to the Mediterranean over the course of the Middle Ages in a time known as the Turkic expansion. As the group who would come to be known as the Ottoman Empire adopted Islam as their religion, they continued to speak their brand of "Ottoman Turkish", but also sampled a variety of Persian and Arabic words as they associated more and more with representatives of those languages. This kind of Turkish was considered in the Ottoman Empire as a more sophisticated branch of the language, and those who spoke what is now modern-day Turkish language were considered to live in rural areas that were lower-class than Ottoman Turkish speakers.

When the Ottoman Empire turned into The Republic of Turkey, the language was reformed to fit a modified version of the Latin alphabet. Furthermore, Ataturk, the leader of the revolution, employed the Turkish Language Association to change loan words from Persian and Arabic to Turkish words, presumably to bolster nationalism and exterminate other nationalistic movements and groups within the newly forming republic.

It is good to know where a language comes from because it can help you understand why certain categories of words are similar to Romance, Germanic, Persian or Arabic words. Also it is interesting to see how this language has been not just developed naturally, but almost engineered, especially during the reforms installed by the Turkish Language Association. You can tell when a word is borrowed and has been reformed easily; words that do not follow the rules of vowel harmony are probably former loan words that had been incorporated into Turkish previously. When you keep that in mind, it is easier to figure out in your mind how to pronounce certain words, and to realize that if you're pronouncing a word and it sounds a little weird and you're pretty sure you're doing the best you can, it's probably a foreign word. I haven't been able to figure this out, but I know that anahtar in Turkish means "key". I've never seen a Turkish word that has -h and -t together; I'm not sure if it's a foreign word, but that makes me believe that it is.