The development of modern Turkish
Modern Turkish mainly differs from Ottoman Turkish in that it has been purged (or been attempted to be purged) of much of the Arabic and Persian influences. Since 1932, the Türk Dil Kurumu (TDK - Turkish Language Institute) has been responsible for regulating the Turkish language. One big element of this has been replacing Arabic and Persian loanwords with native Turkish synonyms (and constructing those synonyms if need be). Still, a large portion of the Turkish language has loanwords, especially in common, every day words. Looking at a recent vocabulary list, at least have a dozen of these words have origins outside in Persian or Arabic: hafta, fakir, tarih, şehir, mahalle, çanta, kitap, mutfak, zaman (in order: week, poor, history, city, neighborhood, bag, kitchen, time). The question, 80 or so years later, is whether or not the TDK has done the right thing. That largely depends on your point of view. If your goal is for Turkish to be spoken the same today as it was 150 years ago, then the TDK has done something quite horrible, but from the perspective of trying to boost Turkish nationalism and create a more Turkish Turkish language, then they have succeeded. I would imagine few Turkish speakers would be consciously aware that when they’re speaking about zaman, they’re using a Persian word not a Turkish one, and that seems like the broader goal of the TDK: not to purge the Turkish language of foreign influence but to make it more Turkish, at least in popular perception, which means that using archaic Turkic roots might be counter productive. If it weren’t for the fact that I have a lot of prior exposure to Arabic and am actively looking for connections between the two languages, I would likely have not caught onto the majority, or even any, of the loanwords.
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