Turkish cannot go back to Arabic script

“We had a language which was very suitable for science; yet we slept over it one night and the next morning it was gone. Now we have been dragged down to the level of a country which learns and teaches science in foreign languages. Thousands of words and languages are forgotten. The structure of the language, which used to be suitable for deriving new words and expressions, was curbed.”

These sentences belong to Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan. He was delivering a speech on Dec. 24 in the award ceremony of Turkey’s Scientific and Technological Research Board (TÜBİTAK).

It was not the first time Erdoğan has mentioned this subject, though not as clearly as this time. It is important, since the remark was made in the wake of the debate to make the Ottoman language a compulsory course in the Turkish curriculum by the National Education Ministry.

Yet Erdoğan was not specific about whether he meant to bring the Arabic script back for Turkish, or whether he meant to take back the policy of “purification of Turkish.”

Both were moves by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, following a War of Independence against invading armies and a civil war against the Ottoman Sultan.

Up until Nov. 1, 1928 Turkish used to be written in the Arabic alphabet.

It was Atatürk who lead one of most radical social reforms in modern history to change it to the Latin alphabet.

It was actually part of a move to shift Turkish intellect from being an Eastern/Islamic-oriented system to a Western/secular-oriented system. In 1925, the Turkish calendar was changed from Islamic to Gregorian. In May 1928, Western numbers began to be used instead of Arabic ones. After adopting the Latin script...