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Rating: 
Summary: 1984 actually happened!
Review: 1984, George Orwell's dark utopia, describes how a disrespectful political minority, such as Ingsoc, can change or shape a country, its culture and language in a way that causes nothing but degradation to the creativity of the society. They play with the dictionary, change the meanings of the words, reduce the number of words of a language, etc. for the tools of human thought are words and when they are shaky, so is the, what Orwell would have called, "thought threat" against the aweless political entity. If you are thinking, 1984 was "just a novel" and the events in that book will never happen in its totality as described, don't. Lewis' work, "The Turkish Language Reform", proves it. Every revolutionary is in a way cruel towards certain elements in their society, one can even naively say that that's their raison d'etre; but the cruelty of the Turkish nationalist (or should I say jingoist?) revolution against the language of Turkey, I believe, is unprecedented. Imagine the suffering of English language if the following words were purged: alteration, alternation, mutation, variation, permutation, vicissitudes, deviation, modification, transformation, metamorphosis; because some of them have Latin or Greek origin. Imagine the loss of finesse in the meaning if they were all replaced by the word "change" and consequently how the literature, science, and philosophy would diminish in value. Well, that did happen in Turkey. The aferomentioned words had their parallels in the pre Republic Turkish, such as: istihale, tahavvul, tebeddul, tebeddulat, tagayyur, takallup; and today they are all purged because the "proud nationalists" thought the presence of words of Arabopersian origin was a yoke for our beloved tongue. In the "New Turkish" they are all replaced by "degismek", or "to change". Pity the word "degismek" since it is trying to do 10 words' job. Oh, of course, pity the nation/people/culture, for their thought is violated! In this medium even the new fakeish (uydurmaca) words have shaky meanings. Whether the word "soylem" means "genre", "communication", "tone", or even "language" is anyone's guess! Barzun, in his "From Dawn to Decadence", complains about the shift of meaning of certain words in English language. He has no idea!
Rating:
Summary: excellent although more interesting if you know some Turkish
Review: Prof. Lewis' book gives the full account of the reengeneering of today's Turkish which was essentially for political reasons. The author, atrue erudite and scholar, in about 200 pages pens the process of the death of the ottoman Turkish and the birth of modern Turkish with sometimes bizarre and tragi-comic results. The book must certainly appeal to all Turkish intellectuals irrespective of their ideological position. But it is equally appealing to linguists and orientalists. I cannot praise this book high enough and recommend it strongly.
Rating:
Summary: excellent although more interesting if you know some Turkish
Review: The changes in the Turkish language over the past century are fascinating, and this book does a great job of explaining some of the political and social background. The author is an expert and extremely knowledgeable on this topic. To me the most telling summary was seeing a paragraph of one of Ataturk's most famous speeches presented in the original, then in a retranslation done later, then a re-retranslation done yet later! The first retranslation was necessary because the original could hardly be understood any more, with all the Arabic-derived words etc. The second retranslation was necessary because even the first retranslation could hardly be understood today! This book will be mostly interesting to those who know at least some Turkish already (and the more the better) or to those interested in linguistic change and social engineering. As the other reviews mention, the changes in Turkish are the result of deliberate re-engineering of the language, not of the more usual processes of linguistic evolution. Imagine taking English and trying to get rid of all the words derived from Latin or French and use only Anglo-Saxon words or words newly derived from other Germanic languages, and you will get a partial picture of what happened with Turkish. The author's views are probably summed up by the subtitle: a catastrophic success. The language reform was effective and some of it was valuable but it may have gone too far in destroying some useful distinctions and making Turkish a somewhat less effective and graceful means of expression.
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Summary: A scholarly approach to a highly politicized issue
Review: Turkish Language Reform, from its beginnings in the thirties to this day, has been a highly politicized issue in Turkey. Professor Lewis, a lover of "Beautiful Turkish", gives an excellent account of the historical development of this language engineering while successfully keeping his views out of the realm of language politics of Turkey. Any criticisms he has to make about the Turkish Language Association (Turk Dil Kurumu) come subtly and delicately through the carefully selected quotations from others. This book is a must for lovers of Turkish language, linguists, historians of language (and surely for the Turkish Language Association), and it can be a fun to read for a non-Turkish taxpayer whose tax money could not be reached to finance the whole project. For a better grasp of the book, some knowledge of Turkish language helps; the more the better to really get the beautiful "taste" of this excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: A scholarly approach to a highly politicized issue
Review: Turkish Language Reform, from its beginnings in the thirties to this day, has been a highly politicized issue in Turkey. Professor Lewis, a lover of "Beautiful Turkish", gives an excellent account of the historical development of this language engineering while successfully keeping his views out of the realm of language politics of Turkey. Any criticisms he has to make about the Turkish Language Association (Turk Dil Kurumu) come subtly and delicately through the carefully selected quotations from others. This book is a must for lovers of Turkish language, linguists, historians of language (and surely for the Turkish Language Association), and it can be a fun to read for a non-Turkish taxpayer whose tax money could not be reached to finance the whole project. For a better grasp of the book, some knowledge of Turkish language helps; the more the better to really get the beautiful "taste" of this excellent book.
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