YFred wrote:Oracle wrote:Omer Seyhan wrote:Oracle wrote:YFred wrote:Oracle wrote:Omer Seyhan wrote:I added Armenian too, although I can't find Cypriot Maronite Arabic anywhere online. Not even Syriac is available.
Not necessary my dear. There will always be some 'next' minority who you will have managed to leave out. See the headache it's causing you already? No communities! Be decisive like your paradigm, the French!
Unity is important and can only come about with ONE Official language!
Isn't that a bit like Terkey?
Not at all!
Turkey BANS other languages!
Everyone is free to speak what they like in Cyprus. We're talking about ONE OFFICIAL language, such as most countries have ... and certainly as does Omer's well chosen, brilliant example of France!
Cyprus is an officially bilingual country (Greek / Turkish), although I would prefer Cypriot-Greek and Cypriot-Turkish. Both are languages of the two main communities.
I would have thought that was very clear to all. Your "Greek only" idea is just a joke to wind me up. I didn't take it seriously that's why I never responded. Its not a relevant debate. Most people you say this to will laugh at you and dismiss you as mad. You're not are you?
I would consider putting minority languages, Maronite and Armenia, this is what the Swiss and Belgians do where you used to find in Belgium, French, Dutch and German on their banknotes, despite the fact that the German speaking community numbered only 100,000 out of 10,000 000.
In Switzerland, Rhaeto-Romansch is used on their banknotes.
You are dismissive of the fact this TWO "official" languages malarkey was imposed on us by Imperialists to divide us. Surely you can see the sense in not continuing with such a move?
Other countries have communities which have cohabited for thousands of years. Those languages are also compatible (common origins). Turkish and Greek are not lingusitically similar.
Greek has been the official language for thousands of years and there is no sensible reason for changing it.
"Turkish" was only invented in 1923 and Cyprus had no ties with Turkey then, and only has ties by virtue of enemy occupation now!
So what part of UNITY do you have a problem with?
Turkish was invented when? What did the Ottomans speak?
You really are stupid.
Sorry, it's not even as old as I thought!
Blah blah blahMy subject this evening is the Turkish language reform. I gave my book about it the subtitle ""A Catastrophic Success". Though the reform has not been so drastic in its effect on the spoken language, it has made everything written before the early 1930s, and much that has been written since, increasingly obscure to each new generation. It has undeniably been a success, in that the reformers succeeded in their purpose of ethnic cleansing; getting rid of the non-Turkish elements in their language, so that it has changed as much in the last century as in the preceding seven hundred. I hope to show you why I call that success catastrophic.
The Ottoman Empire came to an end in 1922, but its administrative and literary language, Ottoman Turkish, the only language that ever came close to English in the vastness of its vocabulary, did not become a dead language until the middle of the twentieth century. At heart it was Turkish; that is to say, its accidence and syntax were Turkish, yet Hagopian felt obliged to devote 40% of his Ottoman- Turkish Conversation-Grammar, published in 1907, to the grammar of Arabic and Persian. The reason was that the Ottomans had borrowed several features of those two languages. They borrowed Persian and Arabic plurals. From Arabic they borrowed the disease of language known as grammatical gender. Further, Turkish adjectives precede their nouns, but Arabic and Persian adjectives follow them. Persian interposes an i between noun and qualifier, and both conventions were adopted. The Ottoman name for the Sublime Porte, the central offices of the Sultan's government, was therefore Bâb -i- âlî, two Arabic words meaning gate and high, joined by a Persian i.
The Turks were a pastoral people in what is now Outer Mongolia. In the eighth century, defeated by their Mongol neighbours in the competition for pasturage, they left their home and began to migrate towards the south and west. By the beginning of the eleventh century most of them who had reached the Middle East became Muslim, and the literate among them adopted the Arabo-Persian alphabet. Their own language was rich in words necessary for nomadic life, but it was deficient in terms for philosophical, theological, and artistic concepts.
Source: Turkishlanguage.co