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The current 29-letter Turkish alphabet, used for the Turkish language, was established by law in Turkey on November 1, 1928 (Yazım Kılavuzu). Replacing the earlier Arabic alphabet, it was created from Latin characters at the initiative of Kemal Atatürk.
The letter Ö was taken from the Swedish alphabet because the Swedish interpreter from the Dragoman House (ambassador house) was assigned to the committee creating the new writing language. Ç was taken from the Albanian alphabet, Ş was from the S-comma of the Romanian alphabet, and Ü is from the German alphabet.
The earliest known Turkish alphabet is the Orkhon script. Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets including Cyrillic, Arabic, Latin and some other Asiatic writing systems.
Letters
In their standard order, the letters of the Turkish alphabet are:
Note that dotted and dotless I are separate letters, each with its own uppercase and lowercase form. I is the capital form of ı, and İ is the capital form of i. (In the original law establishing the alphabet, the dotted İ came before the undotted I; now their places are reversed Kılavuzu.) The letter J, however, uses a tittle in the same way English does, with a dotted lowercase version, and a dottless uppercase version. The Turkish alphabet has no q, w or x. Instead, those characters are transliterated into Turkish as k, v and ks.
Optional circumflex accents can be used with "â", "î" and "û" to disambiguate words with different meanings but otherwise the same spelling (for example, while "kar" means "snow", "kâr" means "profit"), or to indicate palatalization of a preceding consonant, or long vowels in loanwords, particularly from Arabic. These are seen as variants of "a", "i", and "u" and are becoming quite rare in modern usage.
See also
Reference
- Yazım Kılavuzu, Dil Derneği, 2002 (the Writing Guide of the * Language Association)
External links
Turkish language | Latin-derived alphabets | Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Neues türkisches Alphabet | Alfabeto turco | Турецкий алфавит | Turkiska alfabetet | Törek älifbası | Türk Alfabesi | 土耳其语字母
"Turkish alphabet"