A NATION AT SCHOOL

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 11 October 1928, Page 4

A NATION AT SCHOOL

OUR readers will have noticed recent cablegrams referring to the new Turkish alphabet and members of tho Government and deputies of the National Assembly learning to read. The question Will probably be asked, Why does the Turkish Dictator decide to abolish the Arabic characters and adopt the Latin? Tho reason is evident and convincing. The Turkish language as written heretofore contained 482 characters, and the pcw alphabet 29. Written in Arabic characters the language was so complicated that it was not uncommon for a compositor in a Turkish newspaper ofTico to serve a 12 years' apprenticeship before he was considered to be proficient in his work ! For there was no fixed and accepted Turkish language, but a number of dialects drawn from a conglomeration of the Arabic, Persian and original Turkish languages. Mustapha Kemal lias decided that the dialect spoken commonly at Constantinople shall in future be the official Turkish language, and he has ordered his people to learn to read and write it in the Latin script. When tho Arabic letters were used, about 90 per cent, of the people were illiterate. Now at a stroke of the pen 'the whole nation has been rendered illiterate, but the Ghazi Pasha has decreed that all and sundry shall learn the new Turkish language written in Latin characters, which, with a few slight variations, are indistinguishable from our own as seen in copy books supplied to schools. Mustapha Keinal did not make this sweeping literary change on his own judgment, but set up a Commission, consisting of the Minister of Education and several members of the National Assembly, and alter much deliberation and research they recommended the changes which have been adopted. From top to bottom tiie whole nation has gone again to school, and in a recently-published photograph a number of Deputies are seen sitting in front of a blackboard, in Mustapha Kemal's palace, learning their a b c!