# Vowels in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet



## AndrasBP

Merhaba!

I am curious to know if there was a way of differentiating the many vowels of Turkish in the Arabic-based script. As far as I know, Arabic only uses three letters for vowels: a, i, and u. In foreign words, they often use "u" to transcribe "o", and "a" or "i" to represent "e". The usage is inconsistent, probably because Arabic focuses on the consonant roots (I have seen a "military chick point" in Egypt). 

In Turkish, however, the quality of vowels is much more important, after all, it has vowel harmony (just like my language, Hungarian). According to the Wikipedia page on the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, the vowels o, ö, u and ü were all written with the Arabic letter "waw". Were there perhaps any secondary signs added to this letter? 

Thank you.


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## Rallino

Merhaba!

It was no doubt a problem, but in many cases the context made it obvious. And the rare cases where there was a real ambiguity were mainly encountered in poetry, and there, I guess, the meaning was left to the readers' imagination and/or interpretation.

 Nevertheless, there were certain hints that would help figure out the vowel, or at least help reduce the possibilities so you could close in on the target:


Initial *A* sounds were marked with an alif bearing a wavy top: آ
         Ex: آڭلامق (anlamak)


Any other alifs you see within a word also denoted the sound *A*:
         Ex:  ماصا (masa), یاناشاماز (yanaşamaz)



Initial *E* sounds were marked with a bare alif: ا
         Ex: اكمك (ekmek) اللی (elli)



The *E* sounds in open syllables (except for the first one) were marked with a non-binding ه:
         Ex: دده (dede) تانه‌لر (taneler)



The consonants that came in pairs or even trios, i.e.; the letters that shared the same consonant sound, such as *س/ص/ث (s)*, *ت/ط/د (t/d)*, *ـک/ق (k)*, were helpful for when deciding which vowel should come next:
         Ex: دوز (düz) ↔ طوز (tuz/toz)*, كار (kâr) ↔ قار (kar), صور (sor) ↔ سور (sür)



For important words, unordinary spellings were adopted:
         Ex: او (expected spelling for _ev_) → ئو (preferred spelling for _ev_) ; اولمك (expected spelling for _ölmek_) → ئولمك (preferred spelling for _ölmek_).


*Obviously these rules could only help so much. Due to the lack of a proper vowelling system, the number of homographs (words having a different pronunciation but the same spelling) were quite high.

This writing system was no way perfect nor standardized, but perhaps the reason why the change in the writing system came so late is that the official businesses were conducted using a high amount of Arabic words whose spellings are fixed, with some Turkish suffixes, so it didn't cause much misunderstanding, and the common people did not know how to read or write anyway. It's just my own speculation; don't take it as gospel-truth.


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## AndrasBP

Thank you very much for your detailed and insightful post! 
(One of my friends who knows Arabic suggested that Persians and Pakistanis should also switch to the Latin alphabet, because their languages are unrelated to Arabic, and the writing system is basically "unsuitable" for Indo-Iranian languages.)


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## themadprogramer

There's also the ae sound present in some words, though I'm not so sure about all the rules for them. And if I'm not mistaken It's
اولمق
You see traditionally k and q were seperate sounds and letters in Turkish and today even if they're not represented with their respective letters their sound are usually pronounced differently. The most notable case for this is probably the -mak/-mek suffix which in reality is the -mak/-meq suffix. I honestly have no idea why we didn't adopt the q, because in reality we have more words with q's instead of k's than say English  Then there's the ğ alteration and consonant changes that were made to reflect pronunciations of words certain forms, but it's better if you study them because it's way too complicated to explain here 

As for your comments regarding Indo-Iranian languages vs. Arabic script I'd argue it makes writing far more efficient and uses less space. It also speeds up reading with only the drawback of it being more difficult for foreigners (whether, Arabic or European) to read the writing. This posses very few problems for people who know these languages for instance Iranians/Persians simply add the personal suffix to their root word to get the past tense. They have few exceptions and thus writing only the consonants and long vowels is enough (usually). ' sppos tht it wd be knd f lk ths fr 'nglsh. (I suppose that it would be kind of like this for English). The major drawback however is that some vowels need to be represented in the same form o/u/ü/ö for Turkish. But even this has some logic. Firstly even the oldest writings for Turkish used the same letter for o/u and ö/ü. And second in poetry this would be used in a beneficial way, by making words that could mean several different things. Kind of like homophones but the pronunciation also changed. I guess it's just a matter of what you prefer. I just felt the need to state all of this  Hope I've been of help.


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## AndrasBP

Thank you Ahmet, you've got a point there. The note on the Indo-Iranian languages is not my opinion, though, it's just a comment from someone else. I don't speak any of these languages, but I can now imagine that native speakers of, say, Persian don't feel the need to add the short vowels, it's just something that Europeans feel should be part of the writing system. One could also argue that the Japanese writing system is overly complicated and inefficient, extremely hard to learn with thousands of characters, yet Japan has one of the lowest illiteracy rates in the world.  
Are there any people in Turkey who suggest you should switch back to the Arabic script? Or would that be considered a "betrayal" of Atatürk's modernising efforts?


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## Euphoria.

I do not think there are people who would want to switch back to the Arabic script. Or are there?


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## themadprogramer

Probably not, besides Arabic descendants and or immigrants 
I suppose even if it would be to some degree more efficient, it would have the previously mentioned disadvantages.

Although personally I find the Latin-script we use to be quite problematic as well. Not because of the limitations of Latin but because of the way we chose to implement it. (Eg. 3h's being assimilated to 1, Some vowels being ignored in writing, consonants that have 2 readings but are never explicitly stated etc.)


If I ever had the ability to do so, I would either revamp the latin-variant we use or make a whole new alphabet . Though I wouldn't mind switching back to Arabic, I also think that if it were to be used we could handle vowels similar to how the Uyghurs do (To any Uyghurs reading this post kudos for solving the blasted o/u/ö/ü ambiguity )


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## Rallino

> I do not think there are people who would want to switch back to the Arabic script. Or are there?


Quite many, I believe.



> Probably not, besides Arabic descendants and or immigrants
> I suppose even if it would be to some degree more efficient, it would have the previously mentioned disadvantages.



Not to mention that changing the alphabet now would be a hundred times harder than it was a century ago.
You don't just change the alphabet; literally *all *the books, we're talking about thousands of written material, that have been published so far will have to be rewritten in the new alphabet. Teachers would need to undergo a training period and get _distributed_ to the country to teach it. School books, newspapers… all that would need to be rewritten.

All of this would cost _sh*t loads_ of money (pardon my French), and take at least ten years to establish.
It's just not worth it.

Let's be utopic a little bit, and imagine that we're changing the alphabet. We can't use the original Ottoman alphabet: we would need some diacritics and a stable spelling. 
The Ottoman era was rich with poetry, and in a poem, double-entendres or slight ambiguities could be considered OK, and left to the individuals' interpretation. But that's not acceptable in a book. You can't leave something to the readers' personal understanding and expect them to 100% follow the story-line. At one point or another, the reader would go _'Wait… what?'

_I don't believe that the Persian and Turkish can be compared at all. Turkish has more vowels, first of all, and less Arabic words and a higher amount of suffixes. That the Persian language copes well with the Arabic script does not automatically mean that any other language can cope with it to the same extent.

And an unfortunately source-less comment from my side:
Even though, the people who are pro-Arabic script claim that 'If Ottomans used it for 800 years, then it works,' I remember reading about an attempt to change the alphabet during the Ottoman era, but it was either unsuccessful or just left aside. Sadly, I can't remember where I read this. But I remember finding it quite interesting. I'll write the source if I can find it.


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## themadprogramer

Rallino said:


> I don't believe that the Persian and Turkish can be comparable at all. Turkish has more vowels, first of all, and less Arabic words and a higher amount of suffixes. That the Persian language copes well with the Arabic script does not automatically mean that any other language can cope with it to the same extent.



I have to disagree. Even on Turkish forums we shorten words (usually unintentionally) to their Ottoman equivalent's (although we still write them in Latin)
For instance:
slm (selam, though verb form is slm and name form is slam)
bn (ben)

And further more most letters in our suffixes are short vowels. I believe this complements vowel-harmony rather than making more difficult. People can predict the vowel to come and thus don't need to write it.
To indicate past tense just write "د" and the reader can predict if it'd "-dı or -di"

As for some of your remarks Andras first and foremost I congratulate you for having probably one of the best romanized languages as your native one  Seriously I like it how there are so many consonants but there's a different way to represent all of them. Speaking of Japanese, fun fact during the middle ages some Turks used Chinese character as well


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## Rallino

> I have to disagree. Even on Turkish forums we shorten words (usually unintentionally) to their Ottoman equivalent's (although we still write them in Latin)
> For instance:
> slm (selam, though verb form is slm and name form is slam)
> bn (ben)



You are right, of course.
Guessing the pronunciations of _slm, nbr, bgn, İstnbl_ are dead simple.

But slightly longer words, like: چوجقسك which when, transliterated, gives:
*ç - v/o/ö/u/ü - c - k - s - k/g/n

*Could you easily guess that it's supposed to be pronounced _çocuksun_? Perhaps you could, but it's hardly an _easy_ job.
This was an example for the difficulty in reading. There are ambiguities as well:

كولی كوردكمی
can be read: _Golü/Gülü/Gölü/Külü gördün mü? 
_
Usually the context helps, but is it really healthy to rely on context _that _much? Do we even have enough context all the time? Imagine this were a Twitter comment. How would you know how to read it?

This is just a simple example out of many.
All I'm saying is that the original Ottoman alphabet needed some extra letters, as you said.


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## Euphoria.

I do not think it is ever possible to create a new alphabet that corresponds with every sound we produce. Even if it were, why should we? Also I would not call it as a disadvantage if we do not have a letter for every sound that we produce.


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## themadprogramer

O RLY?

Remember that the next time someone asks "Hala var mı?" or "Ekmek yasak mı?"

(For those who don't get it, these are sentences that can mean two different things when written in Latin letters. But the meaning is clear in Ottoman writing.)

Rallino: 
I thank you for your comments. But I do believe I already stated earlier that if it would ever be re-implemented in the future (good luck ) then we should take care of the o/u/ö/ü ambiguity. And yes diacritics would also be quite useful. Though it's noteworthy Ottoman Turkish didn't distinguish between the 2 l's either. All I'm saying it wasn't perfect but it was more efficient space and time wise.

But seriously it's not happening so let's try to speak a bit more theoretically.


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## Rallino

> Remember that the next time someone asks "Hala var mı?" or "Ekmek yasak mı?"


Technically speaking _Hâlâ var mı?_ would have accents on A's. TDK still writes it that way. Many people don't use it, but it's another matter.

And, I don't want to sound like a smart-ass, but how does the Ottoman differentiate the two _Ekmek_s? Aren't they both اكمك ?

That being said, I know what you mean.  There are, indeed, some cases where the Ottoman spelling is more detailed:
كلدیگڭی كوردم - geldiğini gördüm (Senin)
كلدیگنی كوردم - geldiğini gördüm (Onun)

or

یاپمه - yapma (isim hâli: yapma işi)
یاپما - yapma (emir kipi)

Hats off for that. Though, all things considered, Latin scripts is still much more effective. It's less concise perhaps, but is that a serious problem? 

Anyway, I don't really care too much about what alphabet we should use. I'd be OK with anything that helps me communicate my thoughts without a problem. The Ottoman alphabet without diacritics was not good enough for that purpose. But then you and I have both agreed on that.


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## themadprogramer

1. Hala's also have a different h  And the l. SO that means that neither have a single letter in common pronunciation wise.

2. I do believe you are not an intelligent donkey 
اكمك and اكمق
seem somewhat diffrent if you ask me. (Though I'm not sure if I spelled them correctly, I'm almost sure they're spelt differently)

As a side note I pardoned your old-English not French. (See Above if you don't recall)


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## Black4blue

Rallino said:


> That being said, I know what you mean.  There are, indeed, some cases where the Ottoman spelling is more detailed:
> كلدیگڭی كوردم - geldiğini gördüm (Senin)
> كلدیگنی كوردم - geldiğini gördüm (Onun)
> 
> or
> 
> یاپمه - yapma (isim hâli: yapma işi)
> یاپما - yapma (emir kipi)



How come are they different in Arabic? Are they pronounced differently or just spelt in different ways? Or maybe the stress changes? Because we use different stress in the "yapma" case, but I don't see any differences in both "geldiğini gördüm"s even in their pronunciations.

Sorry if this should be a seperated thread. If so, don't seperate it please, just nevermind my question.


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## Rallino

Black4blue said:


> How come are they different in Arabic? Are they pronounced differently or just spelt in different ways? Or maybe the stress changes? Because we use different stress in the "yapma" case, but I don't see any differences in both "geldiğini gördüm"s even in their pronunciations.
> 
> Sorry if this should be a seperated thread. If so, don't seperate it please, just nevermind my question.



In the Mid-Ottoman Era, the second person (singular and plural) suffixes were pronounced with a nasal n (ŋ)

'Seni*ŋ* geldiği*ŋ*i gördüm' ↔ 'Onun geldiği*n*i gördüm'. 

Although this difference in pronunciation was long lost in the late-Ottoman Period, the spelling was preserved.

-------

As for the _yápma/yapmá_ difference: 
All the *A*'s were spelt with an Elif (ا), except for nouns that end in _e_ or _a, _in which case a letter called _güzel h_ (ه) was used.

'Yápma', as an order, is an inflected verb, so it was spelt like: یاپما  - i.e.; with an Elif in the end.
'Yapmá', as in the act of doing, is a noun; thus the spelling altered accordingly: یاپمه  - i.e.; with a _güzel h _in the end.

Of course this was only visible in verbs that ended in _-a_. 
You couldn't achieve the same distinction in a verb/noun pair such as: _gélme/gelmé, _since both would be spelt with a _güzel h_ (كلمه).


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## themadprogramer

By the way if I'm not mistaken the different spelling for a was due to the original pronunciation of several suffixes being different.

Another thing to mention:
Arabic has 3 short and 3 long vowels:
Short a, i, u and their long variants (Colloquially the short ones were pronounced differently from their lengthened equivalents)
Arabic also doesn't have g or ng.
So some things are more "predictable" in Arabic. (Unless the case is verbs. Oh how I fear the vowels that even various regions of the Arab World can't agree on.)


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## drcureklibatur

some meanings form in the context. if you talk to someone and say "geldiğini gördüm", the other one in the context can figure out the meaning implied. if we're talking about the written context, a book or novel or text, we can solve this ambiugity by using "onun geldiğini gördüm" or "senin geldiğini gördüm". we can also put persons into brackets like "(senin) geldiğini gördüm" or "(onun) geldiğini gördüm".

we have many devices in modern turkish to clearly express ourselves. the problem is whether we see using these devices a boredom or not.


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## themadprogramer

Hear comes a long forgotten *BUMP*

There are more vowels than any of us pointed out. (Kind of embarrassed as it's been over a year)
Alright these are all the ones you're friendly literature teacher would know:

: represents long vowels

"A, A:, E, E:, İ, İ:, I, O, Ö, U, Ü, O:, Ö:, U:, Ü:"

And now for the more controversial entries that they won't mention, either because they're so rare they're negligible or because they're foreign (or mistaken as such).

-(W)u, (Whether you consider this to be a vowel or consonant is up to you. This is found in the word vurmak. And written as a  او ) 
- é: , Found in old Persian. Almost never pronounced. (Read as an e instead). Kurds however still maintain this vowel. Appears in words such as memur. May also be mispronounced as a short schwa, but I'm getting there....
- I: , I believe it exists, but I unfortunately lack conclusive proof.
- a in Ball, almost always in final syllables of French words. It's pronounced as such and written as a و despite always being being a short vowel. Still exists in modern Turkish as an unofficial vowel that casually murders vowel harmony.
- a in schwa (not schwa itself), appears as both a long and short vowel. There is no obvious way to tell whether or not this is a normal "a" like in "father".
- schwa (debated)
- lower ö, long and short from French yet again. Though usually only used when faking a French accent. Some speakers, or as we call them in Turkish "Laventines" may replace all ö's and some e's with this instead.

And now behold. The most underrated and misunderstood of all the vowels in Turkish.
-â, long or short. This letter represents collectively at least 2 syllables and multiple consonant+syllable combinations.
These were never imported into Turkish properly despite some appearing in native words.
As such authors adopted this character from the French (bet you didn't see that coming ).

The 4 pronunciations I am familiar with are:
- short a like in Shayne
- long a like in bar (Here it's used more so for distinguishing synonyms, long a's don't need to be written like this )
- If preceded by a K (or L): K+y+ long a/ short a (The Y acts like To- K(y)o or M(j)olnir )
- A lone â may rarely be an arabic  ع + a (usually short) (Though this spelling is because that consonant is rejected in Turkish.)



Furthermore a book titled: "Trübner's Collection of Simplified Grammars of the Prinicipal Asiatic and European languages: IX. OTTOMAN TURKISH"  claims that that there are a couple more vowels. Though I'm not so certain about those.


Oh and on top of that, these are all of the ones you'd have heard in daily life. (Perhaps there were even more). The TDK however refuses to accept even some of the later ones I listed despite appearing in native words. 

And now for the trick of locating these non-standart vowels. The French ones are written as long ones despite being pronounced as short ones. This is not only the case for these vowels though. French, Italian, Venetian, Spanish and other such Romance languages are written like this as well. French however seems to be the most prominent for preserving pronunciation rather than being Ottomanized. Chances are if you know how to say it in French you'll figure it out eventually.

(W)u and the a' s are predictable. If you know the word is Turkish but it sounds wrong try substituting one of these until you get a match.

And finally for the Persian derived ones, take note that Persian only marks the 3 long vowels and final short vowels (occasionally mid-sentence). These however are as unprominent in modern Persian as they are in Turkish. Several accents preserve these, but if you're translating a document you may assume these to be read as you would have read them had you not known about their existence. (Then why'd I tell you? Because unlike other letters exclusive to accents these were once living thriving letters used to develop new words. It just might come in handy to know these existed if you're working with a person rather than a document)


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## Mina mina

Rallino said:


> دوز (düz) ↔ طوز (tuz/toz)*


I couldn't get that. So it was written with د but pronounced as ط .?
Another question: does Turkish have ث as with Arabic.i.e. with tongue out, if yes then how is it represented in Latin alphabet now., if no does it mean that it replaced س freely?

Thanks


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## Torontal

Mina mina said:


> Another question: does Turkish have ث as with Arabic.i.e. with tongue out, if yes then how is it represented in Latin alphabet now., if no does it mean that it replaced س freely?
> 
> Thanks



I hope Rallino hoca will expand it, but ث was only used in Arabic loanwords in writing. Ottoman Turkish largely preserved the spelling of Arabic and Persian loanwords (minimal orthographic changes happened, mostly under Persian influence), but it was pronounced as "_s" _(maybe some very educated or snobish bi- or trilingual Ottoman intellectuals took care to preserve the original Arabic difference in pronounciation too, but it was not colloquial), and it is transliterated with "s" in Latin script: for example مثلا _mesela_. There is no "th" sound in Turkish. It is pronounced like Arabic س in speech, but you couldn't replace the letter in writing in Arabic loanwords.

In Turkish origin words  ث was not used at all. The "s" sound was represented with س if it preceded a front vowel or ص if it preceded a back vowel. They are all transliterated with "s" in Latin script Turkish (except in some very scholarly transcriptions of Ottoman texts) and they are all pronounced the same.


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## Mina mina

Torontal said:


> In Turkish origin words ث was not used at all


Did it happen -by mistake for example- that a Turkish scriber wrote a Turkish word using the letter ث instead of س to indicate the sound س.?


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## Torontal

Mina mina said:


> Did it happen -by mistake for example- that a Turkish scriber wrote a Turkish word using the letter ث instead of س to indicate the sound س.?



I don't kow any example of it, in a Turkish origin word i don't think it could happen, since ث was simply not used in them.
I can imagine that a less educated scribe misspelled an Arabic loanword and replace ث with س by accident, not knowing the corrent writing of it, but to use ث in a Turkish word could only happen if the scribe didn't recognize its Turkish origin and thought it is an Arabic loan. But I find it unlikely, IMO it is fairly easy to recognize if a word is a foreign loan in Turkish, especially Arabic words with their regular derived forms.


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