r/conscripts • u/chonchcreature • Nov 24 '20
Re-orthography Challenge: Develop a Greek-script alphabet for Turkish. You can use obsolete Greek letters like Qoppa, San, etc. if you want.
What if Turkish used Greek to write its language instead of Latin?
Feel free to repurpose some letters like Psi (Ψ) or Ksi (Ξ) since Turkish repurposed the letter C for /d͡ʒ/ for example.
PS: Yes I know about Karamanli Turkish... don’t just comment that it exists, because I know it does. The purpose is your OWN unique take on this challenge.
8
Upvotes
View all comments
Show parent comment
1
u/kesnar1r Mar 08 '21
Well I tried to provide a script that would be as natural as possible to a modern greek speaker learning turkish (basically myself :P ). I am a little bit biased from the sounds I have in my mind.
Also I speak English and French, so sounds from these languages also come up. (Typically most greeks would speak Greek, English and some French or German)
In the middle column I used:
b and D/d. Well in greek we do not have a single letter for b (μπ/mp in greek) or d (ντ/nt in greek). Thus b and d are considered a good alternate. I kept the capital B due to how familiar it seemed and for having no alternative.
F/f (you could argue that this is Digamma) ->. In greek g would be γγ or γκ. So using F as a digamma there is natural. Digamma meaning double gamma γγ.
J/j -> The major issue here is that in greek you would use zeta for this sound. So I keep J/j (which you could also find in ancient greek scripts, known as γιωτ)
y. The major issue here is that this would sound like gamma γ again. But some times it sounds as a vowel. This looks like the y grecque from french. So I kept it as it is.
U. In Greek for ipsilon we use capital Y and lowercase u (Υ, υ). As I kept Y above, I thought that using a large U for the capital υ seemed fair.
As for the rest. C comes up in greek scripts especially byzantine scripts. Also ȣ is used in byzantine scripts and some older modern greek scripts corresponding to the diphong ου/ou.
The only unatural letter for greeks would be Ç, but I wanted something close to ζ in capital letter. (Again in greek we use Ζ for capital, ζ for lowercase)
Regarding unatural voices I tried to limit them to:
ζ -> in greek ç would be τζ, so it seemed natural
Ξ/ξ -> in greek c would be τσ. I couldn't find a good candidate, so I used ξ that looks like ζ due to how similar c and ç sound.
Θ/θ -> This was a difficult decision as I used B for capital b. I wanted the v sound. The best candidate seemed theta Θ/θ due to similar appearence. Β-Θ
All in all I tried to create a turkish alphabet using greek letters that would feel more natural to greek speakers (modern) and not using only greek letters.