TURKEY’S NEW ALPHABET

Taranaki Daily News, 10 July 1929, Page 9

TURKEY’S NEW ALPHABET

DRIVES PAPERS TO TUB WALL.

MAGAZINES GO OUT OF BUSINESS

The new Turkey is having a bad attack of mental indigestion. She has tried to swallow at one gulp the titanic mouthful of a brand new alphabet, and the result is nation-wide mental dyspepsia. 'Even spokesmen of the Government are admitting the crisis. Yacoub Cadri Bey, influential deputy and member of the Ghazi’s entourage, has thrown a bomb into the atmosphere of perfect praise which has until now officially marked the ABC reform with an editorial which has just appeared in the semi-official Press.

“Unless the Government immediately takes radical measures,” he writes, “the alphabet reform will fall and the Turkish nation’s intellect will go to the depths of an abyss deeper than it touched in even the darkest days of its history. We are approaching that black doom with the strides of a giant.” The deputy develops his gloomy thesis with some startling figures. The ten magazines published in Constantinople had circulations of 20,000 to 30,000 just prior to the lightning transformation from the old to the new ABC’s. Now, forced to appear entirely in the new letters, these magazines have seen their circulations drop to 2000, 1000, and even to 500 copies. The majority of them, thus ruined financially, have cjuit. The average circulation of daily newspapers has likewise fallen more than 50 per cent. The Government has spent vast sums in teaching a million and a half of its people the new ABC’s, but these kindergartens for adults have not tun ’ out a million and a half readers.