emre şahin's digital garden 🍃 - Turkish

A Regular Conversion Algorithm Between Turkish and Ottoman

Emre Şahin — 2012-09-24T14:00:00+00:00

Modern Turkish spells all words of Turkish, Arabic, or Farsi origin according to their pronunciation. When it comes to converting from one system to another, this creates a problem that can be addressed with the aid of regular expressions.

For example, in Ottoman, a word is spelled as mnwr (mim-nun-vav-ra), following the Arabic orthography, but in Modern Turkish, the spelling reflects the pronunciation as münevver. Since a one-to-one mapping is not possible between these two writing systems, a set of possible Ottoman spellings must be produced using a regular expression.

When the parser sees münevver, it should convert this to a pattern like mv?nh?(a1)?ww?h?r. This pattern produces a set of strings, where mvnha1vvhr might be the longest and mnwr the shortest. By performing a dictionary search, the system can verify that there is a word in Ottoman spelled as mnwr, thus selecting it as the correct spelling.

The dictionary in our study consists of word labels. The system will look up a set of handwritten word images after this label lookup and search for these images in the document. It can also create a set of candidate images from the regular expression by rendering each candidate spelling.

Converting Latin-based Turkish spelling to Ottoman

Emre Şahin — 2012-09-23T14:00:00+00:00

I’m working on a system to search Ottoman document collections.

In order to query a large collection in Ottoman, the user needs to write the query in Ottoman, which uses an Arabic-based alphabet with a completely different set of spelling rules. This limits usability, since most users will not be familiar with the spelling. Experts are, but we can’t assume all users will be able to use it.

There are various methods of transcribing Ottoman to modern Turkish. Many of these use diacritics to denote different long vowels. When it comes to consonants that are spelled identically in Turkish but correspond to different letters in Ottoman, most of these transcription systems are silent. They don’t represent the difference between the letters tha and sin for example, although the first is used in Arabic words considerably. Turks pronounce these two letters identically since Ottoman times, so they are written identically as s in Turkish.

The information content of these two writing systems is different. One has three s letters, the other has a rich set of vowels etc. The Latin-based Turkish script looks more verbose, so I decided to reduce this verbosity to get a set of probable Ottoman spellings.