history (1)

Turkish Language History

It is quite interesting how Turkish, the modern form spoken today, came about. As my research describes, the current form of Turkish is quite new, springing up from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire and developing into its new state thanks to Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal). The leader of the new Turkey decided to get rid of many of the foreign adopted words in the current form of Turkish in order to give Turkish a more pure form. For example, a lot of words that existed in Ottoman Turkish (mix of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic) were thrown out and replaced by the old Turkic forms from centuries ago.

From the reading that was assigned for this week, I noticed that the modern form of Turkish doesn't really apply to many of the families. Ataturk strode to be as Western as possible, ditching the Arabic script for the Latin one; however, he maintained a true Turkish spirit by ridding his new language of foreign words.

Connecting to a language that has its own branch (a daughter of the main base of the family tree), Armenian is a language that has barely changed whatsoever since its first introduction many, many centuries ago. The only division that I know of is when the modern Armenian (both Eastern and Western dialects) stemmed away from the old, liturgical Armenian that we still use today during mass.
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