Ya' see, there's this difficulty with displaying the Turkish alphabet in HTML (the text-based language of the WWW)...and so we made a compromise -- and we don't quite manage to represent it properly as follows:

Aa Bb Cc Çç Dd Ee Ff Gg Gg Hh II ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Öö Pp Rr Ss Ss Tt Uu Üü Vv Yy Zz (Go to the text-only Pronunciation Guide for help with the phonetics of these letters).

That's a total of 29 characters -- notice the addition of several characters not found in English and the missing Qq Ww Xx...

Those who already know something about Turkish can see that our rendering of the alphabet is a bit messy when we get to the "G" section and again in the "I" and the "S" sections. Here's how the upper and lower case characters ought to look...

We wouldn't have to compromise at all if most WWW browsers (or at least Netscape and Internet Explorer) would display the HTML Reference Entities as indicated in the HTML specs -- there are quite good renditions of the needed letters available in official HTML. They're known as ETH (eth), Icelandic, Y (y), acute accent, and THORN (thorn), Icelandic.

But most browsers (at least the two aforementioned) don't display those renditions by default. And until they do, we'll have to show the "compromise" alphabet as above -- or ask you gentle readers to adjust your browsers (and maybe your operating systems), especially -- just to view our Web site.

If we did that, some of you wouldn't stay around long enough to let the pixels on your screen blink twice!