20 fined for using letters W and Q

[muriel_volestrangler]

A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said.

The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira ($75.53) for holding up the placards, written in Kurdish, at the event last year. The letters Q and W do not exist in the Turkish alphabet.

Under pressure from the European Union, Turkey has improved language and human rights for its Kurdish minority, but the EU says implementation has been patchy and loopholes remain.

The 1928 Law on the Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters changed the Turkish alphabet from the Arabic script to a modified Latin script and required all signs, advertising, newspapers and official documents to only use Turkish letters.

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/25/turk.letters.reut/index.html

Bizarre. How do they use the World Wide Web? They must have a computer key for typing addresses with, surely. Can anyone Turkish explain what the situation is?

[jody]

1. Should we ban 'W"? n/t

[Mnemosyne]

4. Immediately!! n/t

:evilgrin:

[Spinzonner]

2. Enforcing the letters of the law

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

3. I understand W. But Q?

[HeeBGBz]

10. Q!

There, I said it.

[AndyTiedye]

22. Maybe They Are Afraid He Will Show Up

[HeeBGBz]

27. I wish he would

Smart ass omnipotent beings are hot.

[The Roux Comes First]

35. Q&A

That's just a formalization of the standard bush press conference policy - "no questions please"

And certainly no "A's"!

[merci_me]

5. LOL, I'm sitting here with

Sesame Street playing in the background and thought..................

[quaoar]

6. This is typical

of Turkish efforts to suppress Kurdish language.

Despicable.

[soothsayer]

8. Best way to destroy a culture---forbid the native tongue. Like

the poor Welsh....

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

25. Franco tried to do the same with Basque

The attempt has been less than successful, though.

[eissa]

31. Just for the record

it's not just Kurdish language, but Syriac as well -- the language spoken by Assyrians who are native to the region and, along with Armenians and Pontic Greeks, victims of genocide committed by the Turks.

[Orrin_73]

33. How many syriac speakers are there in Turkey????

probably less then 5000. Pontic Greeks??? what do you mean with that lie. What about the hundreds of thousands Turks killed by the Greeks in Northern-Greece isn't that a genocide too. Please stop with that nonsense you are making yourself ridiculous.

[eissa]

36. Well, you're right about one thing

There are currently not many Syriac speaking people left in Turkey thanks to the genocide and a campaign to rid the region of non-Turks. Prior to WWI, however, they numbered in the tens of thousands. I'm sorry if you consider ethnic cleansing to be "nonsense" but to the victims, it is anything but that.

[TygrBright]

7. Shades of Thurber!

His book "The Wonderful O" was a brilliant satire on authoritarian attempts to control language.

But I bet it's not published in Turkish!

cynically,
Bright

[Angry Girl]

15. I lved that stry!

[LiberalEsto]

9. Imagine what they would do

with that bizarre symbol that the Artist Formerly and Currently Known as Prince adopted for a while!

[yurbud]

11. they use the Dracula keyboard and type "Vorld Vide Veb"

[WhiteTara]

20. LOL thanks for the smile

:)

[Igel]

12. Read closely.

"all signs, advertising, newspapers and official documents". WWW and personal documents aren't any of those things, so they've not covered.

This is reminiscent of Lukashenko's closing of some opposition Belorusian newspapers in the '90s. Part of the anti-Soviet backlash was wanting to restore the older Belorusian orthography, with or without modification. But a 1930s-era Stalin-imposed law mandated the spelling system for Belorusian (and Russian, as well). Lukashenko found a nice confluence of beefing up his Stalinist credentials and using a non-political law to squash the opposition press, while claiming freedom of the press.

On edit: Kurdish apparently uses 'q' and 'w' regularly, and to alter them to a symbol already used would violate a very nice orthographic principle.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. And yet official Turkish government webpages use it

both in the address, eg http://www.kultur.gov.tr , and in the word 'web'. It seems that it means that Turkish and Kurdish words have to be spelled in the approved way.

[Igel]

24. You're right.

And if they're serious about enforcing the rule, I'd expect that little embarrassment to be changed.

[Javaman]

13. "Okay Lenny, explain to me why you should keep your job....

without using the letter E".
-Montgomery Burns.

I maintain, Turkey is one evil country. The have been committing genocide for years, yet the world community looks the other way.

[ozarkvet]

14. Turkey

Is really about 3-4 countries cobbelled together for no good reason except historical chance.

I was stationed in Norther Iraq -- Kurdish area, which extends into Turkey (and Iran). They were really decent folks and very cooperative and (all things considered) pretty happy to see us --- more so with me because I was not of european decent.

They were a working and selling people. The only really ugly times we had were when --- on patrol --- we had to refuse to look in shops because some snipers had moved in.

When the reasoning for our "rudeness" was finally explained, the town fathers got off their butts and captured the snipers --- not to save us, mind you, but so that we could take our time looking in their shops and buying crap.

(As an aside, they did call me "Niger " all the time --- that's nigh-jer, not something I will beat you for calling me --- a reference to Nigeria that I had to get used to as allegedly being non-descriminatory. They didn't sound like a Southern Sheriff saying it. Whites were called GI )

[Javaman]

17. Check out the documentary "Good Kurd, Bad Kurd"...

It was made about 6 years ago. Ahead of it's time. More timely now.

My beef is with the Turkish gov't not the people.

[bos1]

21. really cool story.

you should write a book.

[Orrin_73]

34. And I maintain you are an idiot

Im Turkish.

[Spider Jerusalem]

38. Congratulations.

So, you're Turkish. So what? Does that mean that you suffer from a blind attachment to your native or ancestral country that doesn't allow you to accept certain unpleasant truths? The Ottomans slaughtered at least hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of people during WWI (1915-1916), mostly Armenians but not all. It's reasonably well-documented and accepted as fact by most serious historians I'm aware of. Saying it didn't happen doesn't make it go away. Your attitude is somewhat reminiscent of that of the Japanese concerning Nanking.

[Orrin_73]

39. You seem to forget that

millions of Turks were massacred too, that probably is not important to you. I did not deny what happened to others. There seems to be other rules when it concerns Turkish dead.

[electron_blue]

16. There are Turkish keyboards, of course.

I'm sure they're just trying to preserve their language, which is a laudable goal. But I swear this headline just makes me thinkg of one of the darker episodes of Sesame Street.

[GregW]

19. Remember, you can't spell COWARD without a 'W'

[Name removed]

23. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Taxloss]

26. The Turks are NOT "barbarians"!

Sure, the Armenian genocide was awful, but blaming the present Turkish government for it is like blaming the USA for something King George did in 1760. And the Kurdish question is, slowly, creeping towards something like a settlement. So please don't run around calling democratic, secular and generally responsible nations "barbarians".

[the_spectator]

28. Whoa! Do they have to jam TV satelliite transmissions too?

When "Sesame Street" is on? Or at least those episodes that are
"Brought to you by the letters Q and W, and by the number 6" - that kind of episode?

[Megahurtz]

29. That is truely bizarre. n/t

[JVS]

30. This sounds similar to laws in Quebec, and some Baltic countries.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

32. Sesame Street's evil twin -nt

[Jose Diablo]

37. Just think, if we had done the same thing

There wouldn't have been a hurricane Wilma. All that destruction could have been avoided.

Those Turks sure are smart.