Brought to you by the letters Q and W
No, the trip to Virginia didn't go on that long. But your host got sick and was in no position to write coherently over the last few days, unless he wanted to engage in a little Andrew Sullivan-style flublogging. He is, however, quite glad that he didn't follow through on a thought he had on Saturday to offer Mark Liberman a little blog wager over this event.
However, now that SC's better, it's back to seeing just how sick the rest of the world can be when playing language politics. The producers of Sesame Street better be real careful if they ever think about doing a Turkish-language version of their show (not wholly unimaginable; versions have been produced for Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority):
A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said.
The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira ($75.53) for holding up the placards, written in Kurdish, at the event last year. The letters Q and W do not exist in the Turkish alphabet.
Not having been previously familiar with Turkish beyond some phonological exercises involving vowel harmony, your host went to look up the alphabet. Indeed, the letters aren't in there. They are, however, in the ISO character set for Turkish -- oh cruel International Organization for Standardization, why do you tempt the Kurds so?
But something still felt a little off in this story; did the Kurds carry around signs with just the letters Q and W on them, to communicate a sentiment not unlike carrying around pictures of a raised middle finger in the U.S.? Or were they actually part of Kurdish words? A little Google work revealed that the Kurdish name for their new year celebration is...well, some caution is in order here. Knowing nothing whatever about this issue other than what can be gleaned from Google, it's entirely possible I'm about to be unintentionally provocative towards either Turks or Kurds.
It seems to be relatively uncontroversial that whatever the Kurdish new year is called, its celebration in Turkey was outlawed until fairly recently. Within the first three pages of Google results for the phrase "Kurdish new year", the name is offered as "Newroz", "Nowruz", "Navroz", "Nawroz", "Nowrouz" and "Nowrooz" (links are to the first instance of each form to show up in the Google summaries, at least as of SC's search). So the "w" looks pretty common as a choice for transcribing this word into English. And it would seem they've got the same bilabial glide that English uses that "w" for. /v/ is called out as a separate phoneme, so it wouldn't appear to be the case that given a choice of "v" or "w" to represent the same sound, the "w" is being chosen for political effect. In other words, the banning of letters not in the Turkish alphabet isn't really about keeping Turkish standardized.
Language purity concerns in Turkey date back to Ataturk, and the link here boasts of the Turkish government's achievements like so:
The most important result of the work carried out to date is that while before 1932 Turkish words represented only 35-40 percent of the lexicon, that figure has today reached 75-80 percent. This fact is the greatest proof of the value to the Turkish people of Ataturk's Language Revolution.
Shades of the Academie Francaise! However, the story here isn't really about eliminating foreign loan words, but about outlawing the use of other languages. Language issues are often proxies for other quarrels -- Quebec's Bill 101 was as much about Quebec separatism as anything to do with standardizing signage -- and the ban on non-Turkish characters is as much part of the ongoing Kurdish/Turkish fight as any military skirmish.
So the placard breaks the rule that all signs must use the official Turkish alphabet. But it seems it's that the signs were written in Kurdish that is offensive, yes?
Would a placard written in English with "Newroz" written on it be fineworthy? I guess by the letter of the law, it would be...
Since the AP has recently changed its spelling of "Koran" to "Quran", it would seem they haven't gotten this memo.
Ooh... I just reread this comment and saw that I said "letter of the law". Ha!
Posted by: eric morse | October 26, 2005 at 03:11 AM
"[Q and W] are, however, in the ISO character set for Turkish [...]"
I'm not sure if you already realize this and are simply being facetious, but the ISO-8859-x character sets are all, by design, supersets of ASCII. The ISO character sets for Hebrew and Arabic also contain the entire Latin alphabet.
Posted by: Ran | October 26, 2005 at 07:47 AM
Yes, I was being facetious. Sorry if that didn't come through clearly.
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