Turkey: Phoenix from the Ashes ••• 231
Turkish culture experienced an even more drastic change at this time.
Kemal announced that the Turkish language, hitherto written in an Arabic
script ill suited to its sounds and syntax, would thenceforth use a modified
Roman alphabet. Within three months all books, newspapers, street signs,
school papers, and public documents had to be written in the new letters.
Only a tenth of the people had been literate under the old system; now it
was their national duty to learn the new one and teach it to their children,
their neighbors, even to porters and boatmen (to use Kemal's own expres¬
sion). The new alphabet, which was easier to learn and more phonetic,
speeded up the education of the Turks. The number of school pupils dou¬
bled between 1923 and 1938. The literacy rate would reach 86.5 percent in
- It was now easier for Turks to learn English, French, or other Western
languages but harder to study Arabic or Persian, or even to read classics of
Ottoman Turkish prose and poetry. The new Turkish Language Academy
began replacing Arabic and Persian loanwords with neologisms based on
Turkish roots. As in other Middle Eastern countries, English and French
words entered the language, producing such new terms as dizel (diesel),
frak (frock coat), gol (goal, as in soccer), gazôz (soda, from the French
limonadegaseuse), kuvafur (coiffeur), kovboy (cowboy), and taksi (taxi).
Another westernizing step was the law passed by the Grand National As¬
sembly requiring all Turks to take family names. As society became more
mobile and the need grew for accurate record keeping, the customary use
of a person's given name—sometimes but not always combined with a
patronymic ("Mehmet son of Ali"), military title, physical features, occu¬
pation, or place of origin—caused widespread confusion. Under the new
law, Ismet, Kemal's representative at Lausanne, took the surname Inonu,
the site of two of his victories over the Greeks. Mustafa Kemal became
Ataturk (Father Turk). Old titles, such as pasha, bey, and efendi, were
dropped. Kemal Ataturk even gave up the title of ghazi used by Ottoman
sultans and given to him by a grateful Assembly following his victory over
the Greeks. Henceforth men had to prefix their names with Bay, compara¬
ble to Mr. Women were to use Bay an in place of the traditional hanum.
But old practices die hard, and it was years before the Istanbul telephone
directory came to be alphabetized by the new family names.
You would expect that Ataturk would have stressed economic develop¬
ment as part of his comprehensive westernization program. Actually, he
seems to have been less interested in economics than Mehmet Ali and
some of his successors in Egypt. But Turkey did move toward industrial¬
ization, as factories sprang up in the large cities and around the coal¬
mining region near where the Black Sea meets the Bosporus. Kemal was
