The New Orthography in Turkey

THE new Turkish alphabet in Latin characters consists of twenty-eight letters. It differs from the English alphabet in omitting q, w, x and in adding the consonants c, s and the vowels i (without a dot), o, ii. In addition the forms g, d, i, u are employed but are not considered to be separate letters of the alphabet. Taking the consonants first, we soon come to the letter which will cause the greatest confusion and dismay to all foreigners. In no other language does c have the sound of j (English). In Teutonic and Romance languages it has the sounds of k, s, or ch (as in church), and in Slavonic (also in Magyar and Albanian) that of ts. It is clear that the framers of the new alphabet wished to avoid the use of more than one letter to express a single sound, and that they looked about for a pair of symbols to represent the Arabic -. and ~, which had the cognate sounds of j and ch (English). The use of c with a diacritical mark to represent ch is reasonable ; but it is to be regretted that the choice did not fall upon the now fairly familiar Slavonic c instead of upon c with its well-established French and Portuguese value of s (even though this letter has been chosen by the Albanians to represent the sound of ch). Apparently the selection off for ch led the Turks to the choice of plain c for j (English). The letter j might have been used in the new alphabet with its English sound; but actually it has been given the French sound and represents the comparatively rare Persian letter j=zh, practically non-existent in Turkish place-names and employed only in a few imported Persian and French words: e.g. ejderha for ^j^?ezhderha (dragon), jandarma for \*j?>\j=zhandarma (gendarme). As the French spellings are not adopted bodily, some other letter would have done as well as j to represent this rare sound of zh, the obvious solution being z or z (with a cedilla), as that would bear the same relation to z (j) as s (J^) does to s (,j-). However, it is no use now suggesting improvements in this alphabet. The damage has been done, and we must accustom ourselves to spellings like Catalca for *?^, trying to remember that this is to be pronounced not Satalka but Chatalja. The next letter in the new alphabet that calls for comment is g. This represents both ?=gh and d==g (hard): e.g. Yozgat for ^zjy = Yozghad, Gerze for sj^. Sometimes these Arabic letters lose their consonantal value

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