Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

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This is a common opinion even amongst language specialists. So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it', alongside its conversion to Latin alphabet.

The good thing is that it's truly a structural, mathematical language now, though still hard to learn, and it can avoid the whole his / her awkwardness for people whose gender is unknown to the writer. The gaps left by the Arabic words dropped from common use was filled by French (11% of its corpus is 1:1 to French) and if you know a Romance language, you can make pretty decent guesses.

The bad thing, on the other hand, is that Turkey is full of ancient history, and so much of that history is adorned in Imperial Turkish, using Arabic alphabet that no one can read. Even if they did, they wouldn't understand, since Imperial and Modern Turkish has diverged so much they are no longer mutually intelligible, not even the slightest clue.

It makes you feel like a foreigner in one's own country, in a way. Always found it funny that I can understand Middle English from 1300s, and I can read inscribed colonnades in Rome from 500 BC – but I can neither read nor understand Turkish from 1922.

Turkish from 1922 is Ottoman Turkish. Most Words are from arabic.You should work on a Ottoman dictionary and to understand Arabic Words is easy because The Root/Pattern System of arabic Words. To read arabic Letters in turkish is a bit difficult than Latin Letters but not very difficult after learning words.

> So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it'

Do you have a source for that at all? Lack of grammatical gender is a feature of the entire family so I would be surprised if there were somehow "remnants" of it that were present as recently as Ataturk's reforms. Removing loans that happen to be gendered in their source language don't really count.

Turkish grammar never had gender, but Arabic loanwords it had did. They tried to remove those from mass circulation.

I don't believe changing Turkish to latin alphabets was about process of modernising Turkish but because of making distance to Islamic roots here, any thing has relation to Islam was removed like Arabic alphabets, changing the capital to Ankara, Changing Mosques to museum.

It's really sad that a language has more than 700 years was changed because of man ego and hate to a religion. even if you agree with the guy, killing a language because of hate it's really a shame.

That is a little bit of a revisionist history, curiously perpetrated both by Turkish conservatives and liberals. For the liberals, it’s the case of, ’look how backwards the country was in the Empire, and Mustafa Kemal saved it from certain oblivion, vote for us’. For conservatives, it’s more ’Mustafa Kemal destroyed our glorious Islamic past by making Turkey into an European nation state, and suppressed all dissent for the contrary, vote for us’

The reality is, Turks historically had a distant relationship to Islam, being the last major adopter of the religion, and Turkey’s Empire has kept and retained, in some cases proudly, many traditions that were openly in violation of quite a few tenets of the Muslim religion, traditions coming from Turks’ pagan past, from Europeans, and from everywhere else.

Ataturk’s ‘revolution’ was much more incremental than most people realise. Just like you cannot plant a parliament in a country that was previously governed by tribesmen, you cannot come up with the idea of ‘secularism’ in a country who was ruthlessly monocultural before and have it survive past your death. For better or worse, the laws Ataturk enacted had its roots in the culture of the land, and that’s the only reason he could, and that’s the only reason they survived past his death.

Muslims were a minority in the Ottoman Empire until the last 50 years of its 600+ year existence. Laicite is just a natural extension of the culture of tolerance that allowed the OE to even exist in the first place, and the extinguishment of which ultimately led to its downfall.

>.. like you cannot plant a parliament in a country that was previously governed by tribesmen. I don't know which is your country. But you dont know anything from history. Ottoman is one of the greatest country in his ages. like suleiman the magnificent and the Mehmed II the Conqueror. He conquered Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) It is widely quoted as the event that marked the end of the European Middle Ages.

Selim the Grim was known for being a fully-observant Sunni and mass murdering Shiite and non-Muslim population.

One area where lack of gendered nouns is valuable is for non-binary people (those who are neither men or women). In languages like Arabic or Hebrew, this gets very difficult as a binary gender generally must be assigned to first-person pronouns to be grammatically correct!

In those cases, you assign to default (non-inflected) gender of the language (in case of Arabic, singulars default to masculine and plurals default to feminine).

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