- Reflect on how knowing a language's history can help you learn the language.
By researching on the Reformation of Turkish alphabet, I learned how the cultural and religious reasons were there when the first president, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, who founded the Republic of Turkey, and his party changed Ottoman Turkish to modern Turkish. The government wanted to get rid of Islamic culture and make Turkey secular. It also aimed for young generation not to understand Ottoman legacy. I did not know that there were so many politics related to the big change of Turkish alphabet. Learning the reasons of the Reformation, I understood that there might be some inconvenience and linguistic gap between the young and old generation in Turkey, and learned how the government wanted Turkey to define itself as European/Western country by adapting the alphabet originated from the Latin alphabet that most of the European countries also use.
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