[delidumrul]

> 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;

Now, the alphabet of Turkish language is latin. This statement applies to Latin alphabet as well. Latin alphabet does not contain all the vowels and but Turkish version latin alphabet contains the necessary vowels. The problems are solved just as done in Arabic alphabet.

The thing is that assuming these adjustments as a conflict is meaningless. More, calling it funny is just an ignorance of linguistics. After reading this passage, I would think that Turkish people cant write in Turkish during Ottoman era because of the alphabet limitations. Then, millions of Ottoman manuscripts would deny me.

Wikipedia is a practical source of information, but not necessarily a trustful and truthful one. If anybody thinks that these are valid statements to achieve a success on a language, just consider applying same revolution on English language to achieve the same success. Catastrophic, right? What happened has just happened. Just don't polish this move.

[keiferski]

> After reading this passage, I would think that Turkish people cant write in Turkish during Ottoman era because of the alphabet limitations.

No, that isn't what it implies at all and I think you are misunderstanding the concept of orthography. It implies that the Arabic alphabet didn't correlate precisely to the Ottoman Turkish language and thus exceptions and non-obvious rules had to be learned, rather than being plainly obvious.

As I mentioned, English is in a similar position in that its orthography is really not suited for the language.

> English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. However, because of their relatively recent modernizations when compared to English, the Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian and Polish orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography

[yorwba]

> After reading this passage, I would think that Turkish people cant write in Turkish during Ottoman era because of the alphabet limitations.

Thy cwld wryt yn Twrkysh, bt thy had tw handl wrds wyth myssyng vwls, wr ryprsntyng mltypl dyffrnt vwls wyth th sym arabyc lttr, cwsyng ambygwyty. Rydbl, bt yt myns that wrytyng as yw spyk can prwdwc yncwmpryhnsybl txt. (Y avwydd wsyng vry shwrt wrds yn thys txt, bycws yt wld by hrd tw rcwgnyz thm.)

[lynguist]

Excellent analogy.

[diminish]

> Turkish people cant write in Turkish during Ottoman era because of the alphabet limitations. Then, millions of Ottoman manuscripts would deny

This would falsely imply that Turkish people in Ottoman era read/wrote millions of manuscripts (pages). The literacy level was very low indeed < 1%. The Ottoman's took over the palace staff initially from the Selchuks (Persian influence), then from Memluks (who also took Arab influence) and then from East Romans. Also a lot of dewsirhme's in Istanbul used the Persian/Arabic words as the written language of the state.

Interesting enough, During the westernization movements, sultan Abdulhamit was one of the earliest to think moving to latin alphabet to make it easy for the people to read and write [1] as written in his personal autobiography. His powerful Enver Pasha apparently opposed and prevented his reform movement.

The palace's Arab/Persian and the people's oral Turkish culture was in sharp contradiction. What's funny is it's very easy to read Yunus Emre (1238–1320) and many other's poems now in Turkish than late 19th century poetry.

[1] https://www.turktarihim.com/Abd%C3%BClhamit_Hanin_LatinAlfab...

[mda]

Where did you get that <1% number? It was low but I think you are 1 order of magnitude off.

[bluesign]

for literacy you are right, should be around 10%, for Turkish literacy I think OP is closer, around 1%

[diminish]

totally 1% for turkish from 1400-1800s, it increased a lot from 1800 to 1915.

christians west and muslims/christians in marmara and balkans have up to 30% literacy. also western missionary schools became abundant everywhere in the ottoman empire after 1800s. big city administrative staff (non-turkish muslims) also had higher than turks which were farmer.