Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: How many characters are in the Turkish alphabet?
The Turkish alphabet (Turkish: Türk alfabesi) is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ş, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. It is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet ( "") is a version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet.
Most Turkish names can easily be differentiated from others, except those of other Turkic nations, particularly Azerbaijan (see Azerbaijani name), especially if they are of pure Turkic origin. The "Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet" of 1928, in force as decreed by article 174 of the Constitution of Turkey, prescribes that only letters in the Turkish alphabet may be used on birth certificates. As the Turkish alphabet has no Q, W, X, or other symbols, names including those be cannot be officially given unless they are transliterated into Turkish.
When alphabetic writing began in Greece, the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to the consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. The Ionic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant into the Latin alphabet, which accounts for many of the differences between the two. Occasionally, Phoenician used a short stroke or dot symbol as a word separator.
A (or ) clause is a string of characters, each of which represents a portion of the data item and what it may contain. Some picture characters specify the type of the item and how many characters or digits it occupies in memory. For example, a indicates a decimal digit, and an indicates that the item is signed. Other picture characters (called ' and ' characters) specify how an item should be formatted. For example, a series of characters define character positions as well as how a leading sign character is to be positioned within the final character data; the rightmost non-numeric character will contain the item's sign, while other character positions corresponding to a to the left of this position will contain a space. Repeated characters can be specified more concisely by specifying a number in parentheses after a picture character; for example, is equivalent to . Picture specifications containing only digit () and sign () characters define purely ' data items, while picture specifications containing alphabetic () or alphanumeric () characters define ' data items. The presence of other formatting characters define ' or ' data items.
The country saw a steady process of secular Westernization which included the unification of education; the discontinuation of religious and other titles; the closure of Islamic courts and the replacement of Islamic canon law with a secular civil code modeled after Switzerland's and a penal code modeled after the Italian Penal Code; recognition of the equality between the sexes and the granting of full political rights to women on 5 December 1934; the language reform initiated by the newly founded Turkish Language Association; replacement of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet with the new Turkish alphabet derived from the Latin alphabet; the dress law (the wearing of a fez was outlawed); the law on family names; and many other reforms.
For about the next 10 years, the country saw a steady process of secular Westernization through Atatürk's Reforms, which included the unification of education; the discontinuation of religious and other titles; the closure of Islamic courts and the replacement of Islamic canon law with a secular civil code modeled after Switzerland's and a penal code modeled after the Italian Penal Code; recognition of the equality between the sexes and the granting of full political rights to women on 5 December 1934; the language reform initiated by the newly founded Turkish Language Association; replacement of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet with the new Turkish alphabet derived from the Latin alphabet; the dress law (the wearing of a fez, is outlawed); the law on family names; and many others.
The standard Windows keyboard layout used for Cyrillic Kazakh in Kazakhstan is a modification of the standard Russian keyboard, with characters found in Kazakh but not in Russian located on the number keys.
A number of Latin alphabets are in use to write the Kazakh language. A variant based on the Turkish alphabet is unofficially used by the Kazakh diaspora in Turkey and in Western countries and Kazakhstan. As with other Central Asian Turkic languages, a Latin alphabet was introduced by the Soviets and used from 1927 to 1940 when it was replaced with Cyrillic.
Turkish-speaking Armenians used the Mesrobian script to write Holy Bibles and other books in Turkish for centuries. Many Armenian linguists, including Agop Dilâçar comprised the linguistic team which invented the modern Turkish alphabet, using and modifying Latin script.
Over the next several months, Atatürk pressed for the introduction of the new Turkish alphabet as well as made public announcements to the upcoming overhaul of the new alphabet. On 1 November 1928 he introduced the new Turkish alphabet and abolished the use of Arabic script. At the time, literate citizens of the country comprised as little as 10% of the population. Dewey told Atatürk that learning how to read and write in Turkish with the Arabic script took roughly three years with rather strenuous methods at the elementary level. They used the Ottoman Language written in the Arabic script with Arabic and Persian loan vocabulary. The creation of the new Turkish alphabet as a variant of the Latin alphabet was undertaken by the "Language Commission" () with the initiative of Atatürk. The tutelage was received from an Ottoman-Armenian scientist Hagop Dilaçar. The first Turkish newspaper using the new alphabet was published on 15 December 1928. Atatürk himself travelled the countryside in order to teach citizens the new alphabet. After vigorous campaigns, the literacy rate increased from 10.6% in 1927 to 22.4% in 1940. A number of congresses were organized on scientific issues, education, history, economics, arts and language. Libraries were systematically developed, mobile libraries and book transport systems were set up to serve districts and remote places. Literacy reform was also supported by strengthening the private publishing sector with a new law on copyrights.
Some people coming from a Balkan Albanian speaking or cultural space and often belonging to the urban elite in Macedonia that migrated to Anatolia did not always identify with a concept of "Albanianess". Instead they adopted an Ottoman Turkish outlook and came to refer to themselves as "Turks" or Ottoman Turkish speaking citizens. Due to the effects of socio-linguistic assimilation, promoters of Albanian nationalism became concerned about migration to Anatolia and degraded Albanians from the lower classes who undertook the journey. In 1908, an alphabet congress in Bitola with Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox delegates in attendance agreed to adopt a Latin character-based Albanian alphabet and the move was considered an important step for Albanian unification. Some conservative Albanian Muslims and clerics along with the Ottoman government opposed the Latin alphabet and preferred an Arabic-based Albanian alphabet due to concerns that a Latin alphabet undermined ties with the Muslim world. The Ottoman state organised a congress in Debar (1909) with the intention that Albanians there declare themselves as Ottomans, promise to defend its territorial sovereignty and adopt an Albanian Arabic character alphabet. Due to the alphabet matter and other Young Turk policies, relations between Albanian elites and nationalists, many Muslim and Ottoman authorities broke down. The Ottoman Young Turk government was concerned that Albanian nationalism might inspire other Muslim nationalities in the direction of nationalism and separatism and threaten the Islam-based unity of the empire. 
Turkish is written using a Latin alphabet introduced in 1928 by Atatürk to replace the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, a version of Perso-Arabic alphabet. The Ottoman alphabet marked only three different vowels—long "ā, ū" and "ī"—and included several redundant consonants, such as variants of "z" (which were distinguished in Arabic but not in Turkish). The omission of short vowels in the Arabic script was claimed to make it particularly unsuitable for Turkish, which has eight vowels.
Turkish Braille Turkish phonology Uniform Turkic Alphabet
The Latin script was introduced after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in order to facilitate an increase in literacy and distance the language from Islamic influence. Only lowercase letters were found in the first versions of the Latin variant, between 1926-9. A slightly different version used by Jews speaking the Bukhori dialect, who included three extra characters for phonemes not found in the other dialects: , , and . (Note that and are switched relative to their usage in the Turkish alphabet, which has formed the basis for other Latin scripts in the former Soviet Union.)
The unusual character is called "Gha" and represents the phoneme . The character is found in the Common Turkic Alphabet in which most non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union were written until the late 1930s. The Latin alphabet is not used today, although its adoption is advocated by certain groups.
Others opposed Romanization on practical grounds, as was no suitable adaptation of the Latin script that could be used for Turkish phonemes. Some suggested that a better alternative might be to modify the Arabic script to introduce extra characters for better representing Turkish vowels.
The Armenian alphabet was also used alongside the Arabic alphabet on official documents of the Ottoman Empire, written in Ottoman Turkish. For example, the Aleppo edition of the official gazette of the Ottoman Empire, called "Frat" (Turkish and Arabic for the Euphrates) contained a Turkish section of laws printed in Armenian alphabet.
The vowels of the Turkish language are, in their alphabetical order, , , , , , , , . The Turkish vowel system can be considered as being three-dimensional, where vowels are characterised by how and where they are articulated focusing on three key features: front and back, rounded and unrounded and vowel height. Vowels are classified [±back], [±round] and [±high].
In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk's reforms, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing the Arabic alphabet. Most of Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s. In the 1940s all those alphabets were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics adopted the Latin alphabet, replacing Cyrillic. Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, and Turkmen, respectively. In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China developed an official transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin, used to aid children and foreigners in learning the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Aside from that, Chinese characters are used for reading and writing.
Turkish orthography is highly regular and a word's pronunciation is usually identified by its spelling. The following table presents the Turkish letters, the sounds they correspond to in International Phonetic Alphabet and how these can be approximated more or less by an English speaker.
Ottoman Turkish script was replaced by the Latin-based new Turkish alphabet. Its use became compulsory in all public communications in 1929. The change was formalized by the "Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet", passed on November 1, 1928, and effective on January 1, 1929.
The Ottoman Empire, like many Islamic countries, used the Arabic alphabet, even though it was not able to reproduce certain Turkish vowels. Because the alphabet stemmed from the Quran, it was considered unalterable. After the collapse of the Empire, the leader of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, adopted the Latin alphabet in 1928, adjusting it to suit the Turkish language: omitting "Q", "W" and "X", and adding diacritical marks to create umlaut versions of "O", "U" and "I", and the accented letters "Ç", "Ş" and "Ğ".
Armeno-Turkish was not used just by Armenians, but also many non-Armenian elite (including the Ottoman Turkish intellectuals) could actually read the Armenian-alphabet Turkish language texts.
For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian alphabet. Not only did Armenians read this Turkish in Armenian script, so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 calls the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish. This Armenian script was used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 "Akabi Hikayesi", written in the Armenian script. When the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script but in the Turkish language. From the middle of the 19th century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.
In Korea, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great. Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).
In the spring of 1928, Atatürk met in Ankara with several linguists and professors from all over Turkey where he unveiled to them a plan of his to implement a new alphabet for the written Turkish language based on a modified Latin alphabet. The new Turkish alphabet would serve as a replacement for the old Arabic script and as a solution to the literacy problem in Turkey, as the Arabic script does not feature any vowels while the Turkish language has eight. When he asked them at how long it would take, in their professional opinion, to implement the new alphabet into the Turkish language, most of the professors and linguists said between three and five years. Atatürk was said to have scoffed and openly stated, "We shall do it in three to five months".