Comment by ayhanfuat
19 hours ago
Except for the a/e pair, front and back vowels have dotted and dotless versions in Turkish: ı and i, o and ö, u and ü.
19 hours ago
Except for the a/e pair, front and back vowels have dotted and dotless versions in Turkish: ı and i, o and ö, u and ü.
In that case they should've used ï for consistency.
That would be the opposite of consistency; i is the front vowel and ı is the back one.
Note that the vowel /i/ cannot umlaut, because it's already a front vowel. The ï you cite comes from French, where the two dots represent diaeresis rather than umlaut. When umlaut is a feature of your language, combining the notation like that isn't likely to be a good idea.
Makes sense enough, but why not use i and ï to be consistent?
Turkish i/İ sounds pretty similar to most of the European languages. Italian, French and German pronounce it pretty similar. Also removing umlauts from the other two vowels ö and ü to write o and u has the same effect as removing the dot from i. It is just consistent.
No, what I mean is, o and u get an umlaut (two dots) to become ö and ü, but i doesn't get an umlaut, it's just a single dot from ı to i. Why not make it i and ï? That would be more consistent, in my opinion.
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This was shortly after the Turkish War of Independence. Illiteracy was quite high (estimated at over 85%) and the country was still being rebuilt. My guess is they did their best to represent all the sounds while creating a one to one mapping between sounds and letters but also not deviating too much from familiar forms. There were probably conflicting goals so inconsistencies were bound to happen.