"New 'Islamist' Turkey same as old Turkey" let’s all learn Ottoman Turkish.

"New 'Islamist' Turkey same as old Turkey" let’s all learn Ottoman Turkish. (HD).

In the 2013-14 academic year, we had almost 3 million high school students and just over 2.5 million vocational and technical high school students. Every year, almost 800,000 students graduate from high schools and vocational/technical high schools. In the coming years, this figure will exceed 1 million.

In the 2013 nationwide university entrance and placement exam, the number of students who took the 80-question English language test was 26,662. These students are the ones who have the highest confidence in themselves about the foreign language they have been educated in for at least eight years. The average number of correct answers, among these 26,622 students in the 80-question test, was only 28.08.

In other words, we expose millions of our students to foreign language education for eight years and a portion of them consider themselves successful in this area; so they take the test, and this is the result.

Now, a commission of the National Education Council in Antalya has reached an advisory decision that the Ottoman language should be a compulsory course in high schools.

Ottoman Turkish is, in fact, a foreign language for us. Moreover, it is a foreign language written with a foreign alphabet. So students will have to learn this new alphabet if they want to learn the language.

Also, the Ottoman language, which is a mixture of Turkish, Arabic and Persian, was only spoken by the Ottoman ruling elite.

Our chances of success in this new attempt can be estimated by looking at the results of the English exam.

With the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decreed an alphabetic revolution. The Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish was banned.

And a new Turkish alphabet was invented based on Latin letters. Turkey’s population was mostly illiterate, and the story goes that Ataturk traveled the countryside with a chalkboard teaching villages to read this new Turkish.

The new alphabet is so phonetically correct that, “If it is written properly there is no where you can go wrong when reading a Turkish word,” Eldem said.

Literacy skyrocketted. But Ataturk’s alphabet revolution brought on a symbolic shift.

“Arabic is the East and the Latin script is the West,” Eldem said. “It is artificial, but ... people believe in it.”

Eldem says while his rational side supports the Latin script, he also feels the cultural loss. Hmmm....Just another example how the Islamists want to eradicate everything Ataturk accomplished. Another stone in the rebuilding of the Ottoman Empire the language will be probably enforced in their coming Islamist University.Read the full story here.