After a while, I realized that I had great difficulty in finding appropriate corresponding words in Turkish for some English words. I was looking for new dictionaries, and one day I came across a certain dictionary: the Ottoman-English dictionary by Redhouse. First its thickness struck me. Turkish-English dictionaries seemed very small and too thin compared to this one. And its content was even more striking. English is a rich language; there is no doubt about that. But this Ottoman-English dictionary gave me this feeling that the Ottoman language was no less rich than English. English is a living language, and Ottoman was killed a long time ago, but still there was no discrepancy in size between these two languages. This at least was my impression. My confrontation with this very thick dictionary was one of such illumination that I seriously questioned the meaning of Turkish modernization.Today we cannot read anything that was written 70-80 years ago in Turkey. And even if we could, we would not understand its meaning. In 1928 the Ottoman alphabet was replaced by the Latin alphabet. And in 1932 the so-called “language revolution” was launched with the establishment of the Turkish Language Association (TDK). Since then, the Turkish language has been systematically cleansed of Ottoman words, and the modern Turk is today proud of himself because the Ottoman language is no different for him than Chinese! What a tragedy. A nation proud of itself because it changed its language so much that it can no longer understand anything!
During out entire primary and secondary school education, we, Turks, are taught that the Ottoman language was full of Arabic, Farsi, French and many other words from many other languages, so Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's revolution put an end to this mess and saved our language from the invasion of foreign languages. It was that easy! An alphabet and a language used for more than 600 years was simply changed because it was full of foreign words. Ordinary people in Turkey could not understand it, and Atatürk decided to change it!
After high school, I enrolled in law school. Reading legal books was extremely difficult for me and for many other students because law is an area in Turkey in which Ottoman vocabulary is used most frequently. I then realized that the “language revolution” was quite selective and that it had left the area of law untouched. Most of my friends were extremely angry with this added burden because law is a difficult discipline on its own. We all confronted yet another difficulty and were almost forced to learn another “language” during our legal training. After a while, most of us realized that without this “special language,” it was not possible to understand or express legal concepts. This is so because they either had no Turkish equivalent or some “created” Turkish words did not seem to fit appropriately. We all got accustomed to this legal jargon after some time and our initial anger dissipated.
Today, thanks to Ottoman vocabulary, we have no difficulty producing, understanding and relating legal concepts. What about literature? What about philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology and other social sciences? Is there a link between our poor intellectual life and this “language cleansing”? As far as I know, law is the only field in Turkey in which Ottoman terminology is still alive. But this is not true of other areas. I can guarantee you that no one who read Hegel or Kant in Turkish has ever understood anything. These kinds of “heavy books” are translated into Turkish with such unusual terminology that it is almost impossible to understand anything. Is this a gift to us from this so-called “language revolution”? The Ottoman language had developed over centuries and actually received many different words from many different languages -- just as English has. Take words with foreign roots out of English and see what is left. The Ottoman language received words from other languages not out of pleasure but out of necessity. It was this very rich language that enabled the Ottomans to use their language in such a sophisticated way.
If people are killed in large numbers systematically, we call it genocide. What should we call the systematic and total killing of a language over such a long period of time? Can we call it “cultural genocide”? In my opinion they have similar effects. If you commit genocide against a group of people within a society, you are not only exterminating them, you are also depriving the society and humanity at large of the culture and folklore of this people. Today we cannot understand the Ottoman alphabet or language. Turks are today suffering from this deprivation so much that they are no longer aware that they are suffering. Our loss is so large and so valuable, yet we have not even started our mourning yet. We've also not begun to grieve for our other losses such as for people we lived with side by side for centuries!
