Testing the waters

Abstract A well-known Turkish saying states that “Turkish is written the way it is read and it is read the way it is written”; however, not many investigations have been completed to test this assumption. The current study aims to question the transparency of Turkish orthography with two measures. Firstly, a word-initial entropy analysis is carried out. Then secondly, the ratio of transparent words among the most frequently occurring words in children- and adult-oriented written texts is investigated. The results indicate that Turkish is quite transparent word-initially, but when the whole words are considered, its transparency decreases. Only about 75 to 81% of the most frequently used words in written texts are transparent. This demonstrates that Turkish orthography, while still highly transparent, might not be as transparent as previously assumed.