Given a research grant to conduct of linguistic study of Turkish, I would focus upon the (relatively) recent transition from New Ottoman Turkish into what is known as Modern Turkish. This occurred around 1928, with the President of Turkey, Atatürk, promoting a nationalistic agenda advocating a separation from traditional Arabic culture. While this change did not have an impact upon the phonetics of Turkish (with the exception that the Latin alphabet characters showed more clearly what was already being pronounced), it did have a large impact upon word choice and vocabulary. Indeed, the Turkish Language Society (founded 1932) was responsible for replacing many words of Persian or Arabic origin with those of other Turkish dialects. In some instances, new words entirely were created from old stems and roots. Investigating how these old morphemes were combined in such a way as to create new words would be an interesting aspect of my linguistic study.
Another part of my analysis may be the origin of Turkish, particularly its relationship with Arabic and Persian, especially in regard to the language reforms of the 1930’s. During this time, Atatürk and his associates advocated for the Sun-Language Theory, a historically inaccurate theory asserting that Turkish is the mother of all languages. This theory was used as an excuse to retain some of the words and phrases in Turkish (like “Merhaba”) for which it might be difficult to find a non-Arabic replacement. While the Sun-Theory is inaccurate, it will still be worthwhile to investigate the similarities in morphemes between Turkish and other languages, as well as how these shared morphemes have changed phonetically over time.
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