Turkey's proverbial problem
Unsurprisingly in a country where men still very much have the upper hand, a fair few phrases are set for the chop. There's "long hair, short on brains", for instance, or "a father who doesn't beat his daughter will beat his knees". Perhaps, at a time when the Turkish media is heavily involved in campaigns to reduce domestic violence and increase school attendance rates for girls, Akalin was expecting a sympathetic hearing for his plans. He didn't get it.
Above all, the scheme is characteristic of a body that played a central role in arguably the most sweeping changes in Turkey's history - the language reforms of the 1920s and 30s. When Turkey was founded in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman empire, the language spoken by the urban elites was a sophisticated mishmash of Turkish, Persian and Arabic.
It wasn't to the liking of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, nation-builder and nationalist, and he set about purging it radically. For years after the 1928 imposition of a Roman alphabet, experts from the institute scoured rural Turkey to find examples of pure Turkish on which to base the new language. "It was an ironic thing, really," says historian Aykut Kansu. "A top-down imposition of a language of the people." (Akalin's predecessors did their job well. Thanks to the changes they instituted, even Ataturk's great speeches are sometimes not easily comprehensible to modern Turks.)
Elif Safak, perhaps the best-known of Turkey's younger generation of novelists, sees the language reforms as a catastrophe. "We are a people who cannot read our own tombstones," she says. Yet while she thinks there is no turning back to the linguistic riches of Ottoman times, she also thinks the heyday of the Language Institute is over. "You can control written language via school textbooks and the like," she says. "But proverbs are a part of oral tradition, and oral tradition resists, always" *