Seems like I'm getting back into the habit of reading. I finished a collection of stories by Ömer Seyfettin, and started reading a collection of stories by Salahattin Ali. Infact I was planning to finish Seyfettin's book during the weekend, but my flight from Istanbul to Antalya (where I am right now spending probably the last sea-side vacation of this summer) was delayed for 2 hours, and I finished the book during this delay.
Ömer Seyfettin is enjoyable and his language is quite easy -- it doesn't have too many Arabisms and Persianisms. Infact, considering that both him and Salahattin Ali, whose book I am reading now, wrote before the language reform, I wouldn't say that the reform changed that much. OK, they wouldn't use words like
okul 'school' or
uçak 'plane', both of which, as far as I know, were invented during the reform, preferring
mekteb and
tayyare instead, but words like these are not too many and the overall understanding does not suffer. (Besides, my knowledge of Arabic and Kurdish sometimes helps; Kurdish, in particular, helps me guess the meaning of Persian words*).
I wonder if the first editions of these books were published in the Ottoman script. They should have been, right? Because the Latin alphabet for Turkish wasn't invented yet...
*One particularly cute Persian word that I encountered in Seyfettin's book was
nadide 'unseen', which contains such a screamingly Indo-European prefix
na. In Kurdish, it's
nedîtî.