Turkish bath with relaxation in a room heated by a continuous flow of hot, dry air, allowing the bather to perspire freely. Bathers may then move to an even hotter room before they wash in cold water. After performing a full body wash and receiving a massage, bathers finally retire to the cooling-room for a period of relaxation. The difference between the Islamic hammam and the Victorian Turkish bath is the air. The hot air in the Victorian Turkish bath is dry; in the Islamic hammam the air is often steamy. The bather in a Victorian Turkish bath will often take a
Ottoman Turkish alphabet was that in the Arabic script, only long vowels are usually expressed, making the Arabic script poorly suited for writing Turkish. The Arabic script had been designed to write Arabic, and while it was serviceable for Persian, it is quite inadequate at representing Turkish phonemes, especially the vowels. Still, Turkic languages such as Azerbaijani and Uzbek continue to be written using Arabic script in Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The introduction of the telegraph and the printing press in the 19th century exposed further weaknesses in the Arabic script. Some Turkish reformers promoted the Latin script well before Atatürk's reforms. In