[OT] Re: Final version of dlang-fr released

[Ali Çehreli]

On 03/06/2014 01:44 PM, Meta wrote:

 > On Thursday, 6 March 2014 at 21:40:30 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:

 >> Arabic 6467
 >> French 5253

 > Wow, second only to Arabic. Do you know why that is?

This is getting beyond my googling powers ;) but it is ossibly mostly 
because of the following two:

Franco-Ottoman alliance:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Ottoman_alliance

France–Turkey relations:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France%E2%80%93Turkey_relations

Quote: "[...] Turkish literature overwhelmingly had the French language 
as their primary western reference. Its preponderance as the first 
foreign language acquired by members of Turkey's educated classes lasted 
well into the Republican era, in fact until quite recently."

French words are easier than e.g. English to pronounce in Turkish 
(except of course the famously difficult r): otomasyon, televizyon, etc. 
as opposed to the non-existent English pronunciations otomeyşın, 
telivijın, etc.

 > It's not something
 > that I would expect at all. Even stranger is the fact that there are so
 > few loanwords from the Eastern European countries that actually border
 > Turkey.

That reminds me of the cold war era: Turkish population favored the 
Americans to the neighboring Soviets to the extent that "rus salatası" 
(a mayonnaise-based salad) has started to be called "amerikan salatası" 
by the public. :)

Ali