Foreign News: Dialect Alphabets

Buffalo, New York, helped Angora, Turkey, last week in spreading the new gospel of a 31-letter Latinized alphabet which dynamic President Mustafa Kemal Pasha has made obligatory throughout the Turkish Republic (TIME, Sept. 17). The trouble has been to keep the new, distinct, simple characters from being corrupted by the addition of old-style Turkish flourishes. Many a young Turk, once he has mastered the new letters at a Government school, goes home to his village and soon develops a “dialect alphabet” which only his closest intimates can read. How to wipe out this maddening balk of progress? Obviously, with typewriters!

Last week famed Remington Rand Inc., alert typewriter folk of Buffalo, shipped to far-away Angora 3,000 specially made, 31-key, 100% Turkish typewriters. “To build them we had to construct entirely new dies,” said Remington Rand’s foreign sales director John A. Zellers. “That was what sent the total cost of this shipment up to $400,000” ($133.33 per typewriter).

Total U. S. typewriter exports were $18,020,495 in 1925, have shown a steady increase to $21,010,890 last year. Great Britain took $3,250,018 worth, despite intensive propaganda that “British Machines are Best.” France came second with a purchase of $1,971,617, Argentina took $1,020,702, and Canada followed close with $1,000,944. Six other countries each took between $600,000 and $900,000 worth: Italy, Germany, British India, Brazil, Spain and Czechoslovakia.