Turkish Poetry and Literature |
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WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE TURKISH LITERATURE (POETRY AND NOVEL) ?
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| 10. |
15 Feb 2007 Thu 01:32 am |
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Yes you are right, ramayan ...
I am studying engineering,
but my hobby is Turkish literature and world literature...
Everybody mostly is learning the Turkish literature detailed in the faculty of literature, university in Türkiye...You are right...
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| 11. |
15 Feb 2007 Thu 02:06 am |
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Quoting ramayan: Quoting niobe: Ramayan is right... |
its never taught now ottoman or old turkısh literature if you dnt choose to study turkish literature at university 
and we thınk turkısh literature is just formed after republic
iy got worse lately
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These are just personal opinions of Ramayan and not true. Turkish students start to study Turkish literature from beginning to recent examples in the schools. They study oldest literature texts like 'Oğuz Kağan Destanı' (Epos of Oguz Kagan) which belongs to oldest literary period, Orhun Yazıtları (Orkhun Monuments) which belong to 8th century, Divanü Lügati't-Türk, Kutadgu Bilig etc belong to 11th century and Classics like Fuzuli, Baki, Nefi and so on in the Ottoman Period and modern Turkish literature ofcourse.
But there is some truth in Ramayan's post: Turkish language
has changed so rapidly since the beginning of 20th century. The main reason was the dissolution of Ottoman Empire. After dissolution, a new and national state appeared in Turkey. Main and majority of the people was Turkish. In this new period, most of the writers and poets accepted a new way for writing: Now, since the people are Turkish, they should write in people's language. So they started to use a purer Turkish. This transition in language has been very rapidly and let me say a little artificial, especially between 1940- 1960. Therefore, somewhat Ramayan is right to say that today, Turkish people face some difficulties to understand the old literary texts.
Let me make another correction: In fact, today's English students also have some struggles to understand Shakespeare's language. That's why there are many interpretations and notes on Shakespeare's plays (not only their themes but on the language itself) . If you compare the language of original texts of Shakespeare's or Cristopher Marlowe's plays with today's English, you can see the differences.
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| 12. |
15 Feb 2007 Thu 02:34 am |
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1-Yes, as metehan2001 said, today's English students also have some struggles to understand Shakespeare's language. That's why there are many interpretations and notes on Shakespeare's plays..
2-Shakespeare had an old vocabulary of about 30,000 words.
3-Even today, few people have a vocabularly of more than 15,000.
4-In Shakespeare’s time, only six or seven million people spoke English.
5-Who really owns English Language today?
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| 13. |
15 Feb 2007 Thu 02:49 am |
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1- The first English dictionary appearedd in 1775.It contained more than 40,000 words (today, the Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million.
2-Between 1800 and 1900 Britain became the rishest country in the world.Britain kept its empire the middle of the 20th century.But at the same time, the USA was quickly growing richer and more powerful.Finally, by the 1950's, American English was quickly growing in the world.
3-Today thereare thousands of nineteenth-century century words in American English.
4-In fact, American English is growing faster now than before.
5-Where are the new words coming?
6-And who owns English?
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| 14. |
16 Feb 2007 Fri 12:22 am |
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I wonder what point you will in the end arrive at!
Anyway, this be my contribution to the thread, in other words what I think about the Turkish literature:
English has a great dictionary covering more than half a million words in total. I don't think, however, that even the fifth two of this amount is used by an English-speaking society, say Canadian or American, we can then say English used in any society is at most 200.000 word language, which is still great.
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| 15. |
16 Feb 2007 Fri 01:02 am |
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| 16. |
16 Feb 2007 Fri 01:15 am |
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Quoting niobe: 1- The first English dictionary appearedd in 1775.It contained more than 40,000 words (today, the Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million.
2-Between 1800 and 1900 Britain became the rishest country in the world.Britain kept its empire the middle of the 20th century.But at the same time, the USA was quickly growing richer and more powerful.Finally, by the 1950's, American English was quickly growing in the world.
3-Today thereare thousands of nineteenth-century century words in American English.
4-In fact, American English is growing faster now than before.
5-Where are the new words coming?
6-And who owns English? |
u replied urself...i was complaining about that..by omitting the persian verbs or arabic verbs from turkısh we cant make turkısh rich ...we just cut and limit it..and now we complain why turkısh has less word than many language and why we hav too much foreıgn word in turkısh.. and when we thınk why englısh is so rıch ın word we will see they get every new word they dont have or even ıf they have the same word they got new ones for aesthetic reasons and they enriched their vocabulary but they assimilated the word they borrowed ...and im not complaining only for the difference in language after republic but also complaining for the less chance of studyıng ottomans literature...although i like pliterature i hardly know few poets of old turkısh literature and few of their works...ehh i thınk while they are making us a westernised country they also wanted to forget us our past...thats why
whatever..maybe im the only one who thınks thıs...
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| 17. |
16 Feb 2007 Fri 01:37 am |
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| 18. |
16 Feb 2007 Fri 01:56 am |
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Quote: Turkish went through a similar process too. Being nomadic tribes in ancient times, Turks were raiders and they were a very restless race. Because the nomadic life was the norm for large numbers of Turkic tribesmen, they were not used to settled life. As a result, their vocabulary centered around natural objects and phonemena. Interestingly, Turkish is very rich in terms of vocabulary defining different types of precipitation etc. (like English) and very poor in terms of scientific vocabulary.
It is quite interesting that the current military division names like tümen, tugay etc are Mongolic by origin.
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The above statement needs some corrections:
1. Most of the military divisions' names in Turkish army are pure Turkish (takım, bölük, kolordu, ordu; onbaşı, yüzbaşı, binbaşı vs). In fact, Turkish army introduced this kind of divisions system to the world. All the Moghol and Turkish historians know that Cenghiz Khan used Turkish army traditions (rules) in his army too.
2. In history, Turkish language has never been poor or weak in terms of vocabulary of different subjects when we compare it with other languages during the same period.
3. When you read the below passages about Turkish language you will see statement of wineyard is not true too: "Because the nomadic life was the norm for large numbers of Turkic tribesmen, they were not used to settled life. As a result, their vocabulary centered around natural objects and phonemena."
TURKISH LANGUAGE
(http://www.orgs.ttu.edu/turkishsa/old/turkish1.htm)
The Turkish language is spread over a large geographical area in Europe and Asia; recent studies show that this language goes back 5500 years,and perhaps even 8500. At the same time, it is one of the most widely spoken tongues in the world - the sixth most widely spoken , to be precise. It is spoken in the Azeri, the Türkmen, the Tartar, the Uzbek, the Baskurti, the Nogay, the Kyrgyz, the Kazakh, the Yakuti, the Cuvas and other dialects. Turkish belongs to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages, and thus is closely related to Mongolian, Manchu-Tungus, Korean, and perhaps Japanese. Some scholars have maintained that these resemblances are not fundamental, but rather the result of borrowings, however comparative Altaistic studies in recent years demonstrate that the languages we have listed all go back to a common Ur-Altaic.
Turkish is a very ancient language, with a flawless phonetic, morphological and syntactic structure, and at the same time possesses a wealth of vocabulary. The fundamental features which distinguish the Ural-Altaic languages from the Indo-European are as follows:
Vowel harmony, a feature of all Ural-Altaic tongues.
The absence of gender.
Agglutination
Adjectives precede nouns.
Verbs come at the end of the sentence. The name of the script of the language spoken in Turkey proper, the dialect falls into the southwestern dialects of the Western Turkish language family and also into the dialects of the Oguz Türkmen language group. When the Turkish spoken in Turkey is considered in a historical context, it can be classified according to three separate periods because of the inherent characteristics of each of the periods:
Old Anatolian Turkish (old Ottoman - between the 13th and the 15th centuries)
Ottoman Turkish (from the 16th to the 19th century)
20th century Turkish
Written Turkish
The oldest written records are found upon stone monuments in Central Asia, in the Orhon, Yenisey and Talas regions within the boundaries of present-day Mongolia. These were erected to Bilge Kaghan (735), Kültigin (732), and the vizier Tonyukuk (724-726). Apart from these, there are some one hundred inscriptions of various sizes mentioned by the Swedish army officer Johan von Strahlenberg. The first to read them and publish his results was the Danish Turcologist Wilhelm Thomsen, while the Russian Turcologist (of Prussian extraction) Wilhelm Radloff contributed in a major way to the deciphering of the script. The perfection of the language used in these records, which document the social and political life of the Gokturk Dynasty, proves that Turkish, as a language of letters, has been in use from very ancient times.
In later periods many forms of writing would appear: Nestorian writing in the northeast, Sogd, Uighur, and Pali writings in the southeast, Manichaean texts. In Brahman writing, and from the 11th centuary onward, Arabic script for Islamic texts. In addition, depending on the region in which they lived, the Turks have employed Suryani, Armenian, Georgian and ancient Greek alphabeths, producing literary works which have transmitted the Turkish culture up to the present day.
After the waning of the Gokturk state, the Uighurs produced many written texts that are among the most important source works for the Turkish language. The Uighurs produced many written texts that are among the most important source works for the Turkish language. The Uighurs abondened shamanism(the original Turkish religion) in favor of Buddhism, Manichaeanism and Brahminism, and translated the pious and philosophical works of all of them into Turkish. Examples are Altun Yaruk, Mautrisimit, Sekiz Yükmek, Huastunift, etc. These were collected by european turcologists in Turkische Turfan-Texte.
The Kokturk (Gokturk) inscriptions, together with Uighur writings, are in a language called by scholars Old Turkish. This term refers to the Turkish spoken, prior to the conversion to Islam, on the steppes of Mongolia and Tarim basin.
With the emergence of the Cagatay Dynasty, which came about when the Empire of Genghis Khan was divided among his sons, a new wave of Turkish literature was born and flowered under the influence of Persian literature. It reached its pinnacle with the works of Ali Sir Navai in the 15th century.
The Turkish of Turkey that developed in Anatolia and across the Bosphorus in the times of the Seljuks and Ottomans was used in several valuable literary works prior to the 13th century. The men of letters of the time were, notably, Sultan Veled, the son of Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi, Ahmed Fakih, Seyyad Hamza, Yunus Emre, a prominent thinker of the time, and the famed poet, Gulsehri.
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| 19. |
16 Feb 2007 Fri 11:53 am |
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| 20. |
17 Feb 2007 Sat 02:17 am |
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Dear vineyeard, I am an academician on Turkish language and literature. Therefore when I express my view on Turkish language or literature, I always try to be objective and scientific. When I criticized your previously post, I was objective too. It is an easy way to blame someone for being patriotic, nationalist and so on and try to show his opinions as worthless. Please, let's avoid from this kind of attitude.
A national attitude towards Turkish language has been started since the beginning of 20th century. As you must know about 'Yeni Lisan Hareketi' (The Movement of New language whose leaders were Ziya Gökalp, Ömer Seyfettin and Ali Canip Yöntem. The leaders blamed the old literary men for using a highly refined and artificial language in their works and suggested some rules to contemporary writers for making the language close to peoples' language. Many other authors and poets participated in this movement soon and the language started to change rapidly in a natural way. And during the time of Ataturk who wanted to build a national state the mentioned movement went on.
But when I come to your evaluations about recent stuation of Turkish language, I can say that I agree with you. As I said in one of my previous post, 'between 1940 and 1960 there has been a movement of purification and selection in Turkish language and this movement produced some kind of artificiality in Turkish. And as you said, one of it's result was vocabulary of Turkish language became poor.
Sevgi ve selamlarımla.
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