TURKEY TROUBLED

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 655, 6 May 1929, Page 10

TURKEY TROUBLED

SPELLING DIFFICULTIES ALPHABETICAL CH^ I When the Turkish Governm*,,,, ; ered ail shop and office s-g,,, ** ' names to be changed to the ters of the Latin alphabet the o* 1 ' spelling dictionary had not y»t * published. The only principle the population could go upon f,*' the spelling was to be phonetic ' they said their own names and U nesses over to themselves tiously till they got what tS 0 ? 'teved to be the right sound and « • ing. and proceeded to make the ? j ations demanded by the authoring The consequence is that then now a chaos ot spelling all over 5 1 country. In Constantinople I been decided that municipal osj are to go round all the busineaaT! ters and order the inhabitants t 0 ! the official spellings. They will a ! the official spelling dictionary , ; when they see a mis-spelling wiling i the persons responsible ehaare i within a week, under pain of a L. The confusion at present extre even to persons' own names, tv : Abdoulla effendi has been ■ manded for giving himself three j ters too many and obviously k=in,, I der Arabic influence still. ' He i/ | be made to take out the o, one otn l’s, and one of the f's. Then he, ;be orthographically a true Turku | citizen called Abdula efendi. At Brent doctors call themselves "j? doru” or “doktor" on their apartment becomes "apai-tamani" , "apartman,” and everywhere there an a thousand and one divergences. The municipal spelling officers » put this right, but for a long time t«, population will find conformity to i : official spelling one of the hank, points in the new language. Wh.“club” can be indifferently written according to mere sound—as "kluk and “kulupu,” it will be hard to kee to the spelling alone approved of c-ially. There is also at present : lack of copies of the dictionary, „ that the population in its ordinsr writing has to follow its instincts u hearing. Meanwhile the Language Comnusion has fixed the spelling of tt. names of 64 provinces of the Repute The chief changes are that Statute —the Turkish name for Constant nople—is written Istanbul, Angora k comes Ankara, Brusa turns ini Bursa, Trebizond into Trabzon, Adi lia into Antalia, and Smyrna into Izmir. Foreign names are to be left in tlieir foreign spelling except whetf they contain letters not in the no Turkish alphabet. This is a grs simplification, because at flrsi; it va proposed to spell Prague (Praha), for instance, as “Pirag.” and to carry out other similar malformations oi forrip place-names.