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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

The Turks would be very displeased with you calling it "their Arabic trademark".

The Ottoman Turkish alphabet (which I assume the logo in the linked article uses) uses the Arabic script, so the letters are the same. I don't think a British person would be offended to know that the English alphabet is based on the Latin script, even if they aren't Romans themselves.

Even still, I wasn't aware that Ottoman Turkish had its own alphabet, even if it still uses the Arabic script, so I don't mind the clarification.

The English alphabet was directly derived from the Roman alphabet, as were they direct descendants of the Romans. The Turkish alphabet on the other hand, was derived from the Persian alphabet, which used the Arabic script only after the cultural destruction and subjugation of Persia post the Islamic conquests. The Persian script has a number of letters and sounds commonly found in Indo-Aryan languages, but not in Semitic languages such as Arabic or Hebrew, one example being the P sound.

There's a good reason why Reza Pahlavi's move to rename Persia (itself a foreign-derived name) to the original name of Eran/Iran was extremely popular amongst the Iranians.

I know the usual Iranian nationalist narrative but it's weird to see it here.

Especially considering that the Ottoman Turkish alphabet based on the Persian variant of the Arabic script also didn't map all the sounds that are required in Turkish. They also probably didn't pick the arabo-persian script because of those commonly found sounds in Indo-Aryan(European?) languages considering that Turkish isn't an indo-european language and is in a family of its own... So there's a very loose link here.

And while I'm not sure about the circumstances of the adoption of the Arabic script in Iran, the Turks were conquerors basically from the beginning and chose the Arabic script entirely willingly. There's no colonial or imperialist implications to calling Turkish arabic script... arabic.

(Not that it wouldn't even really matter, the letters in question are unquestionably arabic script anyways. The Romans sure did subjugate Britain and france, and brutally repressed them, but that doesn't make the script they use any less Latin!)

English is not directly descended from Latin, nor are English people directly descended from ancient Romans. (You don't need a formal study to prove this -- just use your eyes. The typical English person and the typical Italian don't look the same.)

There are also lots of sounds in English that don't exist in Latin; for example, most of the vowels (English has roughly 15-20 vowel sounds; Latin has 5 or 6).

Two modern groups of people looking different does not necessarily prove a lack of common ancestry. The people of the past in a certain place did not necessarily look like the people of the present in that same place.

In particular, the reason why modern English are not really descended from ancient Romans is because the people who were (at least partially; they were known as Romano-British) got displaced by larger numbers of other people, principally Norse and Germanic peoples from the continent (especially Anglo-Saxons and Normans).

Moreover, the history of Italy is quite different in the specifics but actually has some similarities in the broad strokes. Germanic peoples from the north, Norse peoples from the sea, and (more uniquely) North African peoples from the south, have all through migration, displacement, and interrelations shaped the ancestry of modern Italians.

English is directly descended from German AND Latin. There is more German, but Latin (via French) has had enough influence that you can argue that English is also descended from Latin.

You mean proto-Germanic (from which German also descends), not German. Saying English descends from German is sort of like saying French descends from Italian.

As for the main point: no serious historical linguist argues that English is descended from Latin. Yes, English superficially has lots of Latin vocabulary, but the phonology, syntax, basic words, etc. are still thoroughly Germanic. Phonology being particularly relevant since this thread is about how well an alphabet matches a language's sound inventory.

Linguistically English works nothing like Latin

The English alphabet uses the Latin script, not that the language itself is based on Latin.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

The comment you responded to was just saying that the alphabet was inherited from Rome, not the language

Are you sure gp meant Arabic the script, but not the language? If latter, it would be completely wrong (because it is Ottoman Turkish), if former, it would be slightly inaccurate.

I think so! Since they are referring to the characters in their old logo, which is (to my eyes) Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which is perso-arabic script. Did I get it wrong?

Hm yes, they probably meant script then. Fwiw, It reads "Avedis Zilciyan şirketi - Avedis Zilciyan company" of course the funny thing about Ottoman Turkish is that it is heavily influenced by Arabic, persian and later French, so the the sentence has a persian root (Zil) an arabic root (Şirket) 2 Turkish suffixes, -ci and -i , an armenian suffix and an Armenian proper name.

The Armenian Zildjians might be displeased to be called Turks.

Yeah, something about 1915 or such.

Considering they received their start through the patronage of the Ottoman Emperor, I doubt that, else that element would have been erased from their history. Turks, maybe not, but Ottomans they were.

They moved the business to the US before the genocide though (and in good time too!), so not sure how they would have been affected.

But after the Hamidian Massacres and the generally bloody 1890s.

Their ancestors were citizens of Ottoman empire and their business exits because of Sultans patronage. Who knows how they feel about the connection, yours is only speculation.

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