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The letter Q was illegal in Turkey from 1928 until last month

lrb.co.uk

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Re: The letter Q was illegal in Turkey from 1928 until last month

#6
post #2

The first comment has a link to this article: http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two... Wow.

Yup, accents can be pretty critical. In Finnish, näin means "I saw", but nain means "I had sex with". This put a bit of a twist on a friend trying to tell me "I saw the rapist in the park!" when the umlaut dropped off...

Re: The letter Q was illegal in Turkey from 1928 until last month

#7
I think this is part of a general de-arabization trend which followed the crumbling of the Ottoman empire, as many words would naturally have been transliterated with a q (which would be ق in the Arabic script, which was used in Ottoman Turkish). I have heard that for many years it was illegal to name a son Muhammad in Turkey - you could only use the "Turkified" version Mehmed or Mehmet.

Re: The letter Q was illegal in Turkey from 1928 until last month

#8
post #7

I think this is part of a general de-arabization trend which followed the crumbling of the Ottoman empire, as many words would naturally have been transliterated with a q (which would be ق in the Arabic script, which was used in Ottoman Turkish). I have heard that for many years it was illegal to name a son Muhammad in Turkey - you could only use the "Turkified" version Mehmed or Mehmet.

Nope, you can still name it as "Muhammet", which is the turkish version of "Muhammad".
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