People are convinced that the Arabic script is not suitable for writing Turkic languages, and in fact this was one of the motivations, or rather, excuses, for Atatürk's script reform. The successful application of the Perso-Arabic script to the Uyghur language, however, can provide a powerful démenti. But the obscurity of the Uyghur language is the major reason for the mistrust in Turcofied Perso-Arabic script. Uyghur, as we know, represents every phoneme orthographically - something all Turkic peoples were reluctant to do when they used to employ the Perso-Arabic script. To demonstrate that the Turkish language can be successfully written in Uyghur script, I typed up the third part in today's Daily Turkish Feed:
It is not about being unsuitable for Turkish, but it is about the will of the Turkish government to look Western. Arabic script is anything but western, and that is the main reason why the alphabet was changed.
ReplyDeleteI still think the Latin alphabet definitely suits Turkish more than a highly modified Arabic script, that it is as foreign as Latin script, and that won't help to recover the link with Ottoman Turkish that was broken after the language reform, since Ottoman Turkish is not only Turkish written in Arabic characters, but a language on its own that conveys not only a peculiar grammar, ortography and vocabulary, but also a complete cosmovision of the pre-revolution world.