Learning Journal #6

[Tenaya Bien]

This week Joora and I presented on the transition of Turkish from Ottoman Turkish to Modern Turkish. This was something that Sezgi mentioned in her presentation on Turkish culture before Spring break and we thought it was very unique and interesting. Through our research, we learned that Ottoman Turkish was a very complicated mixture of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. It surprised me that all these languages belong to different language families. With most of the words in Ottoman Turkish being Arabic loanwords, the reformation of the Turkish language to create Modern Turkish required the purging of most of the Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Literally people were asked to make up new words to replace the loan words. One of the main goals of reforming the Turkish language was to make it more simple and easier to learn. This makes sense to me as I was surprised by how relatively simple Turkish is and how easy it is to learn. Other than some phonetic sounds that are difficult to make, the language structure is simple without gendered words or endings and the changing of suffixes to denote change in person or time.