Last week, we were still learning the expressions of numbers and we began to practice listening. Hazal asked her friends to record their greetings and self-introduction and she played these recordings to me. It was really fun! But at the beginning, I could not understand a thing at all, because I never practiced Turkish listening before. After practicing for a while, it began to become better! Also, we used a Turkish learning tool during the class, and I found my studying result is not bad! I can get a 95 on average for some spelling and listening tests. However, I kept forgetting there are no letter q, w, or x in Turkish and I asked my friend who learned Turkish for a long time. Here are some reasons he told me.
He said this question is the same as why we no longer use traditional Chinese characters in Chinese now. In fact, most Turkish don't know much about this problem (as we do not know too much about traditional Chinese characters as well) and don't care a lot, because these 29 letters are enough, and they don't need extra Q, W, X to compose words (simplified characters are more convenient to use).
First of all, Turkish belongs to Turkic language family, and Turkic language family focuses a lot on spoken language, so how to read is more important than how to write in the Turkish language. As for letters, it's enough as long as people can read and understand. So the requirement of letters is not that high. Of course, the later Ottoman Turkic culture reached its peak, and the writing became more and more advanced.
Another reason is that the primary reason for the change from Osman to Latin in the period of character reformation was to reduce the pressure on people to read. At that time, the purpose was to be as simple and easy to read as possible, so unnecessary letters were left out, including Q, W, X.
In fact, the corresponding letters of Q, W, X are K, V, H. in Turkish, Q, W, X and K, V, H are basically homophones, for example, tavuk and tawuk (chicken) have the same pronunciation, so in Turkish view, W and V are basically the same. So why bother to have three more redundant letters.
Comments