An Experimental Turkish Alpabet

After I wrote the blog about the Turkish I problem, I thought about the Turkish Alphabet. In addition to the regular ASCII letters, it contains the letters çğıöşü and âîû. These letters contain a variety of diacritics (cedilla, umlaut, breve, circumflex) and are chosen from multiple alphabets. As an experiment I came up with a new alphabet with minimal modifications from the current one.

Goals

• Unicode compatible. No exceptions or special case mentioned in the Unicode Standard for Turkish.
• A superset of ASCII. Include qwx in the alphabet to write foreign names, words, or quotes. Any ASCII text becomes Turkish compatiple.
• A subset of Latin charset. Use existing Unicode characters. Do not mix other character set. No Cyrilic or Greek.
• Simple, regular, reversible case operations. No Turkish-I problem. No language specific case conversions.
• Simple sorting rules. Do not change the order of ASCII characters.
• Minimal differences from current alphabet.
• Accomodate çğıöşü and âîû into the alphabet.

The Spring Alphabet

The new alphabet is composed of the following 35 letters.

aàbcćdefgǵhiíìjklmnoópqrsśtuúùvwxyz
AÀBCĆDEFGǴHIÍÌJKLMNOÓPQRSŚTUÚÙVWXYZ

I named it the Spring Alphabet because of the heavy use of the acute diacritic which looks like a leaf on top of the letter. çğıöşü âîû are replaced with ćǵíóśú àìù.

Sample text

Karín sessizliǵi, diye dúśúnúyordu otobúste śofórún hemen arkasínda oturan adam. Bu bir śiirin baślangící olsaydí ićinde hissettiǵi śeye karín sessizliǵi derdi.

Onu Erzurum'dan Kars'a gótúrecek otobúse son anda yetiśmiśti, Istanbul'dan iki gún súren karlí fírtínalí bir otobús yolculuǵundan sonra Erzurum garajína varmíś, kirli ve soǵuk koridorlarda elinde ćantasí, kendisini Kars'a gótúrecek otobúslerin nereden kalktíǵíní óǵrenmeye ćalíśírken biri, bir otobúsún hemen kalkmakta olduǵunu sóylemiśti.

Yetiśtiǵi Magirus marka eski otobúsún muavini, kapattíǵí bagají yeniden aćmak istemediǵi ićin "Acelemiz var," demiśti. Bu yúzden śimdi bacaklarínín arasínda duran koyu viśne rengi Bally marka búyúk el ćantasíní yanína almíśtí. Pencere kenarínda oturan yolcunun úzerinde beś yíl ónce Frankfurt'ta bir Kaufhof'tan aldíǵí kúl rengi kalín bir palto vardí. Kars'ta gećireceǵi gúnlerde bu yumuśacík túylú, gúzel paltonun kendisi ićin hem utanć ve huzursuzluk, hem de gúven kaynaǵí olacaǵíní śimdiden sóyleyelim.

Snow/Kar by Orhan Pamuk