Ottoman Turkish alphabet
| Ottoman Turkish alphabet |
|
|---|---|
| Type | |
| Languages | Ottoman Turkish language |
|
Time period
|
1500–1928 |
|
Parent systems
|
Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| ISO 15924 | Arab, 160 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Arabic |
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet (Ottoman Turkish: الفبا elifbâ) is a version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet.
Though Ottoman Turkish was primarily written in this script, non-Muslim Ottoman subjects sometimes wrote it in other scripts, including the Armenian, Greek, Latin and Hebrew alphabets.
The earliest known Turkic alphabet is the Orkhon script. The various Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets, including Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and some other Asiatic writing systems.
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a Turkish form of the Perso-Arabic script. Well suited to writing Arabic and Persian borrowings, it was poorly suited to native Turkish words. When it came to consonants, Arabic has several consonants that do not exist in Turkish (or Persian), making several Arabic letters superfluous except for Arabic loanwords; conversely, a few letters had to be invented to write letters in Persian and Turkish that Arabic did not have (such as g or p). In the case of vowels, Turkish contains eight different short vowels and no long ones, whereas Arabic (and Persian) have three short and three long vowels; further complicating matters was that in the Arabic script, only long vowels are usually expressed, making the Arabic script poorly suited for writing Turkish. The Arabic script had been designed to write Arabic, and while it was serviceable for Persian, it is quite inadequate at representing Turkish phonemes, especially the vowels. Still, Turkic languages such as Azerbaijani and Uzbek continue to be written using Arabic script in Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
...
Wikipedia