TURKEY’S GRAMMAR

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1930, Page 7

TURKEY’S GRAMMAR

LANGUAGE DEFICIENCIES. MOVEMENT FOR A REVISION. The Turks are not satisfied with their language', which many of them consider difficult to use. In fact, in no other tongue spoken in Europe are grammatical relations so vague, with such a lack of terseness, quite apart from a great many Arabic locutions conveying ideas which a single word would have been quite sufficient to express.

A well-known Turkish 'grammarian lias been entrusted with the task of laying the foundations of a new grammar. He has completed his work, and claims to have based it on the general rules laid down by French and Swiss philologists. A congress of teachers has been held at Angora to consider important points of the question. The same movement also includes the rejection of words borrowed from Arabic and Persian. The place they have hitherto occupied in the Turkish language may be illustrated by the fact that "it is nearly impossible, even to a man if the lower class, to use a single phrase without introducing at least one or two Persian or Arabic words. On the other hand, the revival of old Turkish words has provoked disapproval in some quarters, where it is pointed out that the replacing of Arabic words, which everybody understands, by words which it is necessary to look up in the dictionaries, does not add to the of the language.