Comment by zettabomb
Makes sense enough, but why not use i and ï to be consistent?
Makes sense enough, but why not use i and ï to be consistent?
This was shortly after the Turkish War of Independence. Illiteracy was quite high (estimated at over 85%) and the country was still being rebuilt. My guess is they did their best to represent all the sounds while creating a one to one mapping between sounds and letters but also not deviating too much from familiar forms. There were probably conflicting goals so inconsistencies were bound to happen.
Turkish i/İ sounds pretty similar to most of the European languages. Italian, French and German pronounce it pretty similar. Also removing umlauts from the other two vowels ö and ü to write o and u has the same effect as removing the dot from i. It is just consistent.