Capítulo 3. La irrupción de redes sociales
3.1. El boom de Internet
Many have criticized the President's words on both ideological and logistical grounds. Eğitim-İş Union Secretary General Önder Yılmaz was reported to have said that Ottoman Turkish
49
would not be a practical subject for students of the science-focused high schools and thus the lan- guage should be demanded of them.16 Professor Mustafa Safran of Gazi University’s Education Faculty has said that there are not enough Ottoman-language specialists in Turkey's educational in- ventory to fulfill such an ambitious undertaking.17 Historian Professor İlber Ortaylı has echoed this concern for lack of supply. He has gone on to say that not even the graduates of the İmam-Hatip schools are able to learn Arabic, so “how could they go on to teach Ottoman in high school?”17 Nursuna Memecan, the Sivas deputy of AKP has voiced his opinion that Ottoman should be intro- duced, but only as an elective course. “I cannot understand how this course would contribute to our next generation’s race to keep up with the advancing technology in the world.”18
Those who criticize a more wide-spread re-introduction of Ottoman Turkish do not view the matter as a single, stand-alone phenomenon with the begin intention of preserving cultural heritage. They view is a wider-encompassing push to place more emphasis on religious teachings than what some might consider more practical subjects. Again, we see a “slippery slope” mindset that Otto- man Turkish would be the beginning of a less desirable educational policy.
As with other slippery slopes, the danger of a political momentum slippery slope creates a social inefficiency: the socially optimal outcome might be A, but it might be unattainable because some people who support A in principle might oppose it for fear that it will lead, through political momentum, to B.19
Ayşe Karvan is the mother of two students enrolled at the Behçet Kemal Çağlar High School in Istanbul. She is less than pleased with the president's push to insert Ottoman Turkish into their schools. “The education system is in shambles, but instead of introducing real reforms, the government is pushing through irrelevant backward subjects that do nothing more than brainwash children with their ideologies.”20 From her standpoint, the educational system in Turkey is in dire need of reform and efforts should not be wasted on foolhardy sentiments of religion or heritage.
50 3.2 Conclusion
From the linguistic lovers on Facebook to the distraught parents worried for their children's economic viability, Ottoman Turkish is a language that can fire up emotions quickly, both positive and negative. Sentiments regarding Ottoman Turkish fall all over the spectrum. One the one hand, it has no practical value in Turkish society today, especially for those who prefer the STEM subjects to social studies. One the other hand, it inspires feelings regarding Turkey's past that can either be seen as benign or malevolent. The following quote from Jale Parla's article, “The Wounded Tongue Turkish Language Reform and the Canonity of the Novel,” explains the dichotomy quite cleverly
with a linguistic pun.
A column devoted to language issues in the Radikal, a highbrow daily newspaper, has the title "Dil Yaresi," a play on the word dil, which means "heart" in Ottoman Turkish and "tongue" in modern, purified Turkish. The expression dil yaresi, therefore, means both "the wounded heart" and "the wounded tongue," pointing to the ongoing controversy around an unsettled language still vulnerable to disputes regarding its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. The controversy is rooted in the linguistic schism between the new Turkish, which was implemented as one of the major reforms in the early years of the Turkish republic, and Ottoman Turkish, with its vocabulary of Arabic and Persian origins.21
Ottoman Turkish was considered by many in the 19th century to be inauthentic by the enormous in- fluence of Arabic and Persian that had taken hold of the court language. Yet since the language reform's inception there are those who view the drastic, forcible “purification” process of the 1930s onwards as inauthentic in and of itself, creating an environment consumed by both passionate de- fense and passionate defamation of Ottoman Turkish.
51 End Notes
1.
Akdogan, Nuran Savaskan. “The Alphabet Reform and its Implementation on the Ways Towards Becoming a Modern Nation-State.” Todaie’s Review of Public Administration 4 no. 3, September 2010, p. 33-592.
Yazan, Bedrettin. "Adhering to the Language Roots: Ottoman Turkish." Language Policy 14 (January 23, 2015): 340.3.
Trachau, Frank. "Language and Politics." The Review of Politics 26, no. 2 (April 1964): 202.4.
Ibid.5.
Cüceloğlu, Doğan, and Dan I. Slobin. "Effects of Turkish Language Reform on Person Perception." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 11, no. 3 (September 1980): 298.6.
Ibid., 3247.
El-Attar , Jamal. "A Rich Concept of Arabic." Communicatie, Informatie, Educatie. 1992. Web.18 Sept. 2013. <http://www.cie.ugent.be/attar2.htm>.8.
Ibid9.
Edmonds, William A. "Language Reform in Turkey and Its Relavence to Other Areas." The Muslim World 45, no. 1 (January 1955): 58.10.
Parla, Jale. "The Wounded Tongue: Turkey's Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel." Modern Language Association 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 30.11.
Yazan, Bedrettin. "Adhering to the Language Roots: Ottoman Turkish." Language Policy 14 (January 23, 2015): 336.12.
Ibid., 34213.
Ibid., 35252
14.
Ibid., 34015.
Yengin Su, Ceylan. "Turks Feud Over Change in Education." The New York Times, December 8, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/world/europe/erdogan-pushes- ottoman-language-classes-as-part-of-tradtional-turkish-values.html?_r=0.16.
"Compulsory Ottoman Language Classes in High Schools Stirs Debate." Hurriet Daily News, December 5, 2014. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/compulsory-ottoman- language-classes-in-high-schools-stirs-debate.aspx?pageID=238&nid=75264.17.
Ibid.18.
Ibid.19.
Volokh, Eugene. “Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 116, February 2003: 102920.
"Compulsory Ottoman Language Classes in High Schools Stirs Debate." Hurriet Daily News, December 5, 2014. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/compulsory-ottoman- language-classes-in-high-schools-stirs-debate.aspx?pageID=238&nid=75264.21.
Yengin Su, Ceylan. "Turks Feud Over Change in Education." The New York Times, December 8, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/world/europe/erdogan-pushes- ottoman-language-classes-as-part-of-tradtional-turkish-values.html?_r=0.22.
Parla, Jale. "The Wounded Tongue: Turkey's Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel." Modern Language Association 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 27.Chapter Five
53
Since Ottoman Turkish maintains a controversial position to this day, the Arabic language suffers from the sane controversy, perhaps even to a greater degree as the language of the Holy Qur'an. Arabic carries a peculiar position in Turkey, along with other non-Arab, Muslim majority countries. It is without doubt a foreign import, but its relation to religion allows it to be accepted by its adopters and sometimes it was even given greater sociopolitical status because of it. Some have gone so far as to justify the linguistic superiority of Arabic through its sacredness. While that idea was mostly squashed in the Turkish context, thanks to the efforts of Atatürk to redefine Turkish na- tionalism via ethnic rather than religious identity, bringing Arabic back into more mainstream Turk- ish society has been met with raised eyebrows and questions about AKP's intent for the direction that they are taking Turkey.