A Guide to Turkish Abbreviations and Acronyms 1928-2016

About the Book

As everybody knows, abbreviations and acronyms are short forms of a word or phrase, chiefly in writing, to represent the complete form. An abbreviation is pronounced one letter at a time. An acronym is a set of letters that can be pronounce as a single word as a brief form of a corporate name or term made up of a group of letters that are commonly written/or spoken as a word. It may consist of the initial letters of the full name the text. In Turkish, the word “kısaltma” is used for both. The idea for a reference book of abbreviations and acronyms came to me when I worked as a cataloger/librarian in American academic libraries such as: Butler Library at Columbia University, New York; Research Library in UCLA, California; Doe Library at UCB, California; and Firestone Library at Princeton University, New Jersey. Inquiries about the Turkish abbreviations made by readers and students in Turkish studies and researchers and people interested in life in Turkey and the Turkish language and literature at all levels, have led me to address this need. They were all looking for the right definition to the abbreviations they came across in their Turkish source material. I made a list of them, whenever I found them in Turkish books, periodicals, and mostly newspapers, where I discovered new ones daily. My book, A Guide to Turkish Abbreviations and Acronyms, is intended as a descriptive, updated work. I compiled them exactly as they appeared in the original Turkish texts only, and none of them are conversational. I would like to emphasize that this book does not attempt to establish any rules or dictate any single correct style for Turkish usage of abbreviations and acronyms. Users will find old and new terms as well as many odd, obsolete, and slang words, but it’s my responsibility to put every item I found in my research into the book. The abbreviations and acronyms in this book are reproduced exactly as they were seen in the original text, including the same spelling, case, and punctuation. Finally, the entries in this work are arranged in Turkish alphabetical order irrespective of spacing, punctuation, or capitalization, and alphanumeric sequences are listed in the alphabetical order of their respective letters in the following order: A, B, C, Ç, D, E, F, G, Ğ, H, I, İ, J, K, L, M, N, O, Ö, P, R, S, Ş, T, U, Ü, V, Y, Z.

About the Author

Suzan H. Akkan was born in 1920 in Kandilli, Istanbul, Turkey, and is a graduate of the Kandilli High School for Girls. She received an MA degree in Turkology at Turkish Language and Literature from the Istanbul University Faculty of Letters and from the Teachers College in 1943. She taught Turkish language and literature in Yozgat High School for six years from 1943–’49. In 1950, she began her new career as a head librarian at the Istanbul University School of Forestry. When the faculty accepted the new Oxford cataloging system, she was sent to Hamburg, Germany, in 1954 to study the new system and also worked there as a visiting librarian at Hamburgisches Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv for one year. She arrived in the United States in 1957 to work at Stanford University as a cataloger of their Turkish revolution collection but stayed in New York and worked in the Turkish information office for three years. In 1960, she accepted an offer to catalog the Turkish and Ottoman collection in Butler Library and as a lecturer in Turkish in the Near- and Middle-East department of Columbia University in New York. Beginning in 1966, she worked as a librarian/cataloger of the Turkish collection at the Research Library and as a teaching sssistant of Ottoman Turkish in the Near- and Middle-East languages department of UCLA until she finished cataloging 1,200 books and periodicals. She moved on to UC Berkeley, San Francisco, California Postgraduate Library in 1977, where she cataloged science books. Also in Doe Library Near- and Middle-East Department, she worked as a cataloger for one year. She returned to the East Coast to work at Princeton University’s Firestone Library in 1979 to catalog their Turkish collection until her retirement in 1982. She continued her career as a retired volunteer at the New York Public Library’s main branch in Manhattan, assisting with their Turkish collection for the next ten years. Her vast experience in the field and her broad knowledge of the Turkish language and literature make her uniquely qualified to compile and edit this book.