Handling terms and concepts in the Language Reform

W ithin the Language Reform, technical and specialised terms have been treated in a substantially different way from ordinary vocabulary. The everyday language was to be purified gradually. The substitutes were chosen, as much as possible, among “living, obsolescent or obsolete speech-material” and “the creation o f entirely new words was kept to a minimum” (Heyd 1954:80). Even in the most fervent stages o f the language reform, there were no attempts to replace the completely assimilated Arabic and Persian words in everyday language (Heyd 1954:61-62). Similarly, the reformers did not try to oust the naturalised words which had been borrowed firom the languages o f non-Turkish citizens o f the Ottoman Empire and the neighbouring peoples (Heyd 1954:76). Instead, the main target o f the language reform became the influx o f Western terms in science, the humanities and the media. Purists were keen to find equivalents for foreign terms

before they could cross the borders. “Being ready and alert” against such “attacks” was regarded as crucial (Imer 1976:58). In order to be able to express the new concepts encountered through contact with other societies, or arising firom the indigenous technical and intellectual development, new terms were to be produced consciously and artificially by extending the resources o f Turkish (see Baçkan 1973-1974:173; Erdost 1984:88; Brendemoen 1990:466).

This quotation is taken from the standard preface placed at the beginning o f each terminology dictionary published by the Language Academy between the 1960s and 1980s. More about these dictionaries below.

Various methods were used by the Language Academy in order to find substitutes for words o f foreign origin, such as collecting words from popular vernacular and dialects, reviving obsolete ‘Ottoman’ words o f Turkish origin, borrowing from Turkic languages spoken outside Turkey, translating foreign terms literally into Turkish or phonetically turkicising them, and deriving neologisms’^® by using still productive or revivified derivative suffixes (see Heyd 1954:29-31; Anday 1975:69-70; Imer 1976:57; Brendemoen 1990:468-472). It is claimed that, as a result o f the reform, words o f Turkish origin in the written language increased from 35% in 1931 to 70% in 1970 (îm er 1976:114)'” .

Among the methods listed above, deriving neologisms was often regarded as the most fruitful one (Imer 1976:51). It is certainly the most frequently employed method in finding substitutes for technical and scientific terms - the fields where the Western impact was the strongest (Brendemoen 1990:477). Unlike the limited changes in the ordinary vocabulary, these terms had to be newly coined, since collection o f words from local dialects or old Turkish yielded little material which could be o f any use in describing the novelties coming along with Westernisation (Heyd 1954:82). Arabic, and to some extent Persian, had traditionally been the resource for terms in the Ottoman language, especially in the fields o f literature and philosophy (Gokberk 1973:74), but these languages had become anathema for the purists. In 1928, in accordance with the reform, the script o f the Turkish language was changed from Arabic to Latin. Soon afterwards the teaching o f Arabic and Persian in schools was abolished. As a result, the new generation could no longer read the material written just one or two decades ago. This led to a severe rupture in the Turkish intellectual life. The sources were reduced to whatever was written in Latin alphabet after the 1930s and to a flood o f translations coming from the West (Erdost 1984:14-15).

From the very beginning, then, Turkish Language Reform was bound up with translation. First, the Ottoman words borrowed from Persian and Arabic were ‘translated’ into Turkish, and then the European, mostly French ones: “Translation on word level for the creation o f a new vocabulary (and eventually for glossaries/ dictionaries) was just as important, if not more, than the ongoing translation o f texts, for which the vocabularies/ dictionaries would be used” (Paker 1995). Even if the

Throughout the thesis I locate the term ‘neologism’ in line with Emecan’s definition, as in the space between the initial emergence o f a new word until its widespread acceptance within the society (1998:30). For more information on the statistical success o f the Turkish Language Reform see Emecan 1998:40.

neologisms were Turkish derivations created out o f the language’s own agglutinative

resources, translation was the main medium used in their creation, as well as being the

main reason underlying their creation. Most o f the terminology dictionaries published

by the Language Academy between the 1960s and 1980s - and there are more than 65 o f them on a wide range o f fields such as psychology, ethnography, biology, medicine, philosophy, literature, sociology, cinema, linguistics, fine arts, theatre, etc. - were actually based on terminology lexicons in French, English or G e r m a n * A c c o r d i n g to the prefaces, the main goal o f these dictionaries was “to help future translators in their work” . The experts who prepared them had also become aware o f the ‘deficiencies’ o f their mother tongue while translating foreign texts into Turkish.