The History of Turkish Language

 Turkish

Turkish is an individual language belonging to the Turkic Oguz language group and the Western Oguz language group, and is the official language of the Turkish Republic, located on the Anatolian Peninsula. The word'Turkish' can also be used in some cases to refer to all Turkic languages, so in order to limit the meaning of the Turkish language mainly used in the Turkish Republic, Istanbul Turkish (Istanbul Türkçesi, Istanbul Turkish) or Anatolian Turkish (Anadolu Türkçesi). , Anatolian Turkish). It has about 74 million speakers, and like Korean, it is a language that is agglutinative.

Turkey and Cyprus are all official languages, but as traces of the Ottoman Empire era, Turkish speakers can still be found everywhere, especially in Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania and Georgia. In addition, due to large-scale immigration since the 1960s, a large number of Turkish speakers exist in Germany, Belgium and France, as well as in Russia. In particular, there are many Turkish-German residents in Germany, and Turkish is spoken among them, and there are many restaurants that sell Turkish food.

Among the five Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan are Turkic countries, and the Republic of Tatarstan, even if it is not only a Turkic country. Gagaujia. There are quite a few regions where Turkic languages   are spoken, such as East Turkestan, and because they are relatively close in terms of language, learning is easy.

History

Turkish language, meaning'the language of the Turks living in Turkey (Anatolia)' was quite late in its establishment, and before that it had a common history with the Turkic languages. The Turkish language of the Anatolian Turks, which is distinct from other Turkic languages, is established in the 11th and 12th centuries.

 Ottoman

The Turks who migrated to the west embraced Islam and were greatly influenced by contact with Persians and Arabs. The text was also written as a naturally transformed Arabic script. As the Ottoman Empire flourished, they embraced a variety of vocabulary. For example, the Turks of Anatolia were originally nomads, so there were few terms related to the sea or names of fish, so most of the related terms were imported from Greek.

Modern turkish

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk led a large-scale language purification movement to find the original Turkish language. For this reason, the Turkish language spoken today has become a foreign language that barely communicates with the Ottoman language, which was widely used until only 80 years ago.

As an example of the Ottoman Turkic language, it is a satire about the counterfeit silver coins that wandered around during the age of Abdulhamit II as a magazine review in the 1890s. The text was written in Arabic, but if you read it, you can see that there is not much difference from the modern Turkish language. This period is considered to be the modern Turkish period, roughly from Tangi-Mat to the period before the character reform in 1928. If you look closely, you can see that the way to read letters is to add an h after a word ending in e, there is a p sound that is not found in Arabic letters, and in that و is pronounced as v, it is closer to Persian than Arabic.

Although the modern Turkish language purification project is a short period of time, it is one of the rare cases in the world that has achieved considerable results through very thorough language reform. The target of thinning was Arabic and Persian vocabulary, which were considered pre-modern. To this end, scholars and investigators were dispatched throughout the region where the Turkic people lived to scrape Turkic words, whether dialect or gore, and a wide range of language refining movements took place, including sending postcards to the people to participate in the creation of new words. This language purification project continues to this day. Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Institute, TDK) is managed by an institution such as the National Institute .

Character reform

Until the time of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish was written in Arabic scripts. Since the Turkish language is rich in vowels and soft pronunciation without accents, Arabic scripts that have few vowels and do not match the Turkish consonant system were inappropriate. Therefore, inevitably, the Turkish people accepted four letters from Persian to mark Turkish consonants and eight vowels that could not be written in Arabic letters, and made an additional . Naturally, it took a considerable amount of time to learn the letters, and as a result, the literacy rate was low. In 1927, about 70% of Turkish men and 90% of women did not know the letters.

Accordingly, in 1927, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish government implemented a letter reform and changed the letter to Latin. It is said that the reform was successful without much resistance thanks to the aforementioned low literacy rate. At the same time, the Soviet Union also introduced Latin scripts into the Turkic languages ​​spoken by the Turkic peoples in the territory, which stimulated Turkey and spread the spread of Latin scripts in Turkey. The Soviet Union was also influenced by Ataturk. ). In Turkey, the Latin script was used as it is, but in the Soviet Union, the Turkic script was replaced by Cyrillic script in the 1940s when Iosif Stalin came to power. I did. Modern Turkic countries are following Turkey to replace their own letters with Latin letters, and Kazakh plans to gradually replace Cyrillic writing with Latin letters.