The Armenian Who Helped Create Today’s Turkish Language

Uzay Bulut

 

“Turkey’s president wants to purge Western words from its language,” reported The Economist on June 15.

[Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s] latest purge has a more abstract target. Mr. Erdoğan wants to rid Turkish of unsightly Western loan-words. Turkey faces a mortal threat from foreign “affectations”, Mr. Erdoğan declared on May 23rd. “Where do attacks against cultures and civilisations begin? With language.” Mr. Erdoğan started by ordering the word “arena”, which reminded him of ancient Roman depravity, removed from sports venues across the country.

The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora

Jennifer Manoukian

There we sat, the proverbial Turk and Armenian, at neighboring tables in a university student center in New Jersey. My back to his, I drew my eyes out of the book I was reading to concentrate on the voice behind me. The gliding vowels of Turkish always sound familiar in the split second it takes for my brain to mark the language as unknown. As the man shouted into his cellphone, unaware of the aspiring eavesdropper nearby, a surge of recognition startled me each time I managed to catch a hiç or a hemen. These words were, after all, part of my language too.

In Ignorance We Trust

Vartan Matiossian

 

A participant of the Diaspora conference held on April 27 at the University of Southern California shared a savory yet bitter bite with us:

"The 'best' suggestion from the diaspora conference in LA, from an audience member: since western Armenian spelling is difficult, and the Armenian alphabet is not being used on line, why don't we abolish the Armenian alphabet and start using the Latin script, as our neighbor has done... And he was serious....."

We had read a "serious" suggestion along these lines some twenty years ago. To put it mildly, the "suggestion" reeks of lack of seriousness.