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The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success by Geoffrey Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp.x + 168, bibliography, indices. 35.00/$60.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-823856-8.
The subject of the `language revolution' (dil devrimi) in Turkey is both highly contentious and little understood. Easily one of the most controversial efforts at centralized, nationalistic, and government-led meddling in linguistic history, the campaign to rid the Turkish language of its Arabo-Persian script, vocabulary and constructions waged in the Turkish Republic is an issue about which almost every Turk and not a few foreigners have strong opinions. The resulting changes were so radical that it has subsequently been considered necessary to provide 'translations' not only of works written in the preceding Ottoman period but also of the words spoken by the reform's chief advocate, Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk), within a few decades of his having spoken them. Indeed, this reviewer was first introduced to the subject by listening to a particularly zealous visiting professor of Turkish linguistics expound on the necessity of change by writing a few lines of the old language on the blackboard and then ridiculing them as being unintelligible to a contemporary audience. This is the `catastrophic success' alluded to in the subtitle.
This subject has long awaited a full-length treatment in English and it would be hard to imagine anyone better able to provide it than Geoffrey Lewis. Known to students of Turkish mainly through his indispensable Turkish Grammar (1967), Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Turkish at the University of Oxford, draws on the experience of a distinguished career to provide both a wealth of anecdotal material and the advantages of long-term perspective.
Lewis states modestly at the outset that his book has two principle aims, namely, to `acquaint the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragicomic, but never dull story of the...