A DIFFERENT VIEW ON THE NATURAL DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING ON THE BASIS OF INFORMATION THEORY (IN THE CASE OF TURKISH)


Yilmaz C., Sancar Y.

SELCUK UNIVERSITESI TURKIYAT ARASTIRMALARI DERGISI-SELCUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF STUDIES IN TURCOLOGY, sa.48, ss.65-82, 2020 (ESCI) identifier

Özet

The information theory, which associates the functions of the characters (letters or numbers) in the messages in the writing system with their frequency of use and accordingly with the information values, provides the opportunity to make predictions on the development of the writing system on the one hand. However, this requires data that shows how often characters in a standard alphabet are used in messages. For this reason, the frequency of use of characters and character permutations (2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s and 8s permutations) in the standard Turkish alphabet (with "w", "x", "q" and the space character (-)) in the compilation created by passages selected from 100 texts published in the last 10 years have been determined. Then, the information values of each character and character block used in the messages have been calculated over these frequency values. With the data obtained from the information values, it has been tried to explain the stages of the character and character blocks in question. The results reached have been associated with the use of Turkish words in today's spoken and written language and their shapes in historical texts.