Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric
Does this not, in effect, cut modern Turkish people off from everything written before 1928 (the year that our alphabet was introduced for Turkish with a few added diacritical marks), unless they have learnt to read the Arabic alphabet, or the books have been transliterated into the Roman alphabet? This surely means that a kind of filtering takes place, because not all books from before 1928 will automatically be transliterated and republished in the modern alphabet.
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Unfortunately, we are incapable of reading the 19th century works in its original form. And even worse, let alone transliteration, there began the tendency of translating some of these books to contemporary Turkish as they contain many loanwords from other language. There's an enormous gap between the old and the modern now. I guess the difference between modern Turkish and the great old Turkish (called Ottoman) can be compared to the difference between what they call "Simplified Englih" and "English" as we see at Wikipedia. Or Newspeak! Only those who cannot endure this mediocrity chase after old books and the old language.