İkameci
An İkameci ("substitute") was a person in newspaper offices and authorities in the Republic of Turkey in the early 1930s . The job of an İkameci was to replace words of Arabic or Persian origin with Turkish words or neologisms . His activity was related to the active language control policy to create a pure form of Turkish . For this he made use of the Tarama Dergisi . This was a multi-volume work published by the state and contained word lists of the Ottoman language with its Turkish equivalents. The linguist Agop Dilâçar related the following episode:
“One day, in 1934, I went to see the editor-in-chief of Akşam newspaper , Necmeddin Sadak. He had an editorial written in the ancient script he was used to and in Ottoman. After he finished the article, he rang the doorbell, gave it to the clerk rushing over and said, " Take this to the ikameci ['substitute maker ']!" The ikameci , who was in another room, opened the Tarama Dergisi and sat down Without paying the slightest attention to the syntax of the article, from this Dergi, instead of the Ottoman words, Turkish words that pleased him. "
Even Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is to due to the editing of his speech text have worked through a İkameci like an awkward schoolboy at a reception of the Swedish royal couple 1934th
These episodes are also on the Turcologists reported Geoffrey Lewis, who notes that, for example, for the word hikâye (narrative) the Tarama Dergisi offered 22 choices, but not the next day hikâye used neologism öykü . Lewis further reports that until his time (1984) it happened that for example emeritus Turkish professors had their prepared speech manuscripts “substituted”, which was sometimes quite tedious.
The word ikameci is made up of ikame and the word suffix -ci , which indicates an activity or a profession. İkame itself comes from the Arabic wordإقامة / iqāma and here means substitution.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jens Peter Laut: Turkish as an original language. Linguistic Theories in the Age of Awakening Turkish Nationalism. Wiesbaden 2000, p. 291.
- ↑ Nergis Erturk: Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. New York 2011, p. 97.
- ↑ Geoffrey L. Lewis: The Turkish language reform. A Catastrophic Success. Oxford University Press, Oxford [u. a.] 1999, ISBN 0198238568 , pp. 50-56.