[lbo-talk] Modernization, Not Westernization

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 4/23/07, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> "The correct path would have been to modernize without equating it with
> Westernization," says Yoshie, but I am not sure that the example she gives,
> adoption of the Latin alphabet is necessarily a wrong step. After all
> Hungarian, which is a turkish language survives quite happily with the latin
> alphabet, and arabic script is no less alien to the Turkish language. An
> Ethiopian friend explained to me (can this be right?) that Coptic is written
> right to left, having originally been the other way around, but influenced
> by Arab neighbours it was reversed. There is nothing wrong in changing your
> script if it helps.

The cost of change is clear in this case: estrangement from the
Ottoman Turkish literary and linguistic heritage, as well as
estrangement from the Arabs and the Persians, as Atatürk's language
reform purged a lot of Arabic and Persian loan words from Turkish,*
replacing them by European loan words, obsolete Turkish words that
were resurrected, loan words from other Turkic languages, and
neologisms.

What was the advantage?  It seems that there is none that couldn't
have been had by simply modifying the Ottoman Turkish script to better
signify the sounds of the Turkish language (especially of its plebeian
dialects), since Turkey couldn't even persuade the
Turkic-language-speaking ex-Soviet states to adopt the modern Turkish
alphabet (though they all have made efforts to switch out of the
Cyrillic), thus winning no pan-Turkic advantage even after the fall of
the USSR.

* Even the teaching of Arabic and Persian was removed from the
curriculum: "the study of Arabic and Persian as foreign languages was
removed from the standard curriculum for secondary-level education in
1929" (Suzanne Wertheim, Linguistic Purism, Language Shift, and
Contact-induced Change in Tatar, University of California, Berkeley,
2003,
<http://ling.northwestern.edu/~wertheim/Chapter%202-%20Part%202.pdf>).


> As to headscarves I am not sure what it means to dismiss modesty-enforcing
> dress codes as 'western; but not 'modern'. Are we really saying that
> equality between the sexes is a western, not a human value?

If no one is forced by the state to wear hijab, it is not a code in a
legal sense.  Hijab that is voluntarily worn is merely a symbolic
code, the same as any other gendered symbolic code of dress, behavior,
etc.

Besides, all clothes, male and female, gendered or ungendered, have a
function of enforcing modesty among other functions.  Unless you are a
nudist, what's the objection to that?  A socialist is in favor of
classless society, the withering away of the state, etc., but the
building of a society without clothes has not been on the socialist
agenda.
-- 
Yoshie