The Impact Of The Ottoman Script And The Alphabet Reform On Spatiotemporal Conceptualization

This study tries to corroborate that the 1928 Alphabet Revolution, a shift in writingdirection, affected the cognition of the intellectuals and readers of that period,particularly their temporal and spatial conception. As the first example of theemerging field of cognitive history in the context of Ottoman and Turkish studies,this endeavor hypothesizes that the script change can transform individuals’ conceptualizationof time. It combines the experimental naturalist method with the interpretivehistorical approach to corroborate historical and contemporary hypotheses,namely the spatiotemporal conception of those past intellectuals and the contemporarybiscriptual conception. The experimental method investigates whether beingbiscriptual—reading one language through different writing systems, particularlywith different writing directions—can reshape individuals’ mental timelines. Thearchival method—reading Çocuk Dünyası comic strips—is used to understand earlyRepublican intellectual and reader spatiotemporal conception. Turkish speakersperformed spatial-temporal congruity tasks with the stimuli consisting of temporalexpressions depicted in the Latin alphabet for only Latin alphabet readers and in theOttoman alphabet for Latin-Ottoman biscriptual readers. Biscriptuals were challengedless while completing incongruent tasks, and monoscriptuals were challengedmuch more. The intellectuals involved in Çocuk Dünyası depicted the comic stripnarrative sequences in a leftward spatiotemporal way in both 1914 and 1926 due tothe script effect despite Westernized adoption and translations in this journal.