Ömer Seyfettin

I never had the opportunity to go to Turkish primary school so I missed out on reading Ömer Seyfettin. Delving into Late Ottoman history, especially language reform, pretty much necessitates reading him and so I picked up a little reader which gives you the whole low-down. People in the office figured out I was reading him when my vocabulary made a sudden 100 year regression (mecmua söylersam, dergi yerine yani, ne fark eder ya. çok ehhemiyetsiz) and when I told another co-worker I was reading a collection of his works instead of the Oğuz Atay I had been recommended to read, I was told he was nothing but bare chauvinism and Jingoist dribble. Fair enough. Ideology is so much more cunning these days, a mirror house of irony and the unsaid, it's a nice nostalgic diversion to read someone so unabashedly politicizing in his short stories. An Example:

The main figure of the story ("Ilk Dusen Ak") is a Turkish architectural engineer trained in Paris. After returning to what was then the Ottoman empire, he is assigned to a very-well paid position. He has no monetary worries. Now that he is comfortably settled in Istanbul a professional and as an adjunct professor at the school of Engineering, he is suffering from an ailment which he himself cannot identify. He is losing weight, observes that he is neither happy nor sad. He seeks medical help. The physician, after examining him, diagnoses "sinecure" (in this context, loss of aim due to accomplishment, excessive comfort). The prescription: to struggle for an ideal. The engineer is still at a loss. The physician then poses a question to clarify his point: "Are you a patriot?" Not receiving an answer, a second one: "Are you an internationalist?" The engineer, again cannot respond. He has never thought about such concepts.

After all of earnest queries to everyone about which novels I should be reading as my time in Turkey draws to a close, it does seem a little bit of a scoff to be reading some foppish woman hating Ottoman, but when it comes to my interest in the specific morphological changes, neologisms, and ideological dimensions of the Dil Devrim, Seyfettin's work is an incredibly insightful example. The book even puts two of his poems side by side on basically the same theme, one so contrived with persian cliches that it's undecipherable, the other clear and simple Turkish.
The chapter on Language simplification was great, even having a numbered rule list for simplifying Turkish with fair and reasonable criteria for retaining foreign words. In an article in Genç Kalemler her writes:

1. All grammatical structures taken from Arabic and Farsi will be abandoned. There will be exceptions for certain cliches like: Fevkalade, hıfzıssıha, darb-ı messel, sevk-ı tabii.
2. Other than the Turkish structured for forming plurals no other foreign rules for plurals will be accepted. The plurals ihtimaller, mektepler, memurlar, hastalar will be used instead of ihtimâlât, mekatîp, memurîn, hastegân, etc.
3. Other Arabic and Farsi particles will be thrown out. for example, êya, ecil, ez, men, an, ender, bâ, berây, bî, nâ, ter, çi, çent, zihî, âlâ, fi, kâin, gâh, kâr, gîn, âsâ, veş, ver, nâk, yâr...However other partıcles that have become totally Turkified will remain such as ama, şâyet, lâkin, hemen, hem, can still be used. Let's not forget that even some of these particles have been completely assimilated into our everyday speech, like "Sanatkâr", and so can be written and said freely.

I think I have seen on the TDK website these same exact rules, and I have yet to map out for myself the relationship between the work started by the youngpens and the official Kemalist campaign but I'm sure there's a lot of overlap. We shall see.