Origins
See also Turkish language#Vocabulary.
In the ninth century, Turks began to convert to Islam and to use the Arabic (or Arabo-Persian) alphabet. When the Seljuk Turks overran Persia, they adopted for official and literary use the Persian language—which meanwhile had borrowed many Arabic words. Thus educated Turks had available for their use the vocabularies of three languages: Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.
When the Ottoman Empire arose out of the remains of the Selcuk Empire in Anatolia, its official language, Osmanlıca or Ottoman Turkish, became the only language to approach English in the size of its vocabulary (according to #Lewis). However, common people continued to use kaba Türkçe or "rough Turkish" which was much purer and which is the basis of the modern Turkish language.
With the advent of the Turkish Republic in 1923 came the attempt to unify the languages of the people and the administration, and to westernize the country. The modern Turkish alphabet, based on the Latin script, was introduced. Also, Arabic and Persian words were replaced, as possible, by: Turkish words surviving in speech, obsolete Turkish words, new words formed regularly from the agglutinative resources of Turkish, thoroughly new words or formations. However, still a large portion of current Turkish words have Arabic or Persian origins. The Ottoman Empire having been the successor of the Byzantine Empire, Turkish has words borrowed from Greek. There are also borrowings from other European languages, or from the common technical vocabulary of Europe. In the latter case, the borrowings are usually taken in their French pronunciation.
Read more about this topic: Turkish Vocabulary
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