SDLC 110: Cultural Post 5

[Tenaya Bien]

For this cultural presentation, Joora and I worked together to present on the topic of the transition between Ottoman Turkish and Modern Turkish. I learned that Ottoman Turkish was a language of the elite that used the Arabic alphabet and borrowed most of its words from Persian and Arabic. I was also interested in learning the history of the transition between the two languages which we talked about in our presentation. Basically, the first president of Turkey declared that he wanted to secularized the country and one of the biggest reforms was that he was going to make a new Modern Turkish that used a western, Latin alphabet and more exclusively Turkish words rather than Persian and Arabic words. They started by outlawing the use of Arabic number and then later the whole alphabet. They had scholars go around the country to teach the people of Turkey this essentially new language since now they had an entire country that was illiterate.