Script Reform in Turkey

When Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later known as Atatürk, abolished the caliphate and became President of the Turkish republic in 1923, he enforced a process of secularization and modernization, which assigned priority to the eradication of illiteracy and the minimization of the Muslim religious leaders' influence.
Turkey had already been open to European influence during the days of the Ottoman Empire. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, Turkish intellectuals called for simplification of the language and elimination of Arabic and Persian loanwords. The Young Turks, who came to power during the 1908 revolution, needed a writng system to reach the masses, and the same need had been felt in the Turkish army. The substitution of the Latin script for the Arabic script, considered unsuited for the Turkic languages, only seemed logical. In a situation of minimal literacy (10%), this was like the introduction of a new writing system, rather than replacement of one. The example of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the Soviet Union encouraged Atatürk, and in 1928 he introduced a new Turkish alphabet, based on a modified Latin alphabet. The alphabet was made compulsory by law, and teaching of the Arabic script was prohibited. Official documents, and later all publications, were written in the new script, and all Turks over sixteen and under forty years of age were required by law to attend school and learn to read and write. Script reform helped increase literacy to 50% by the 1970's, facilitated the separation of Turkey from the Middle East, and strengthened its socioeconomic linkage to Europe.
Below is the set of characters used in Turkish. How is this set different from the English alphabet?


The following Turkish words and their approximated pronunciation might help in figuring out some of these differences:
gül rose (the ü pronounced like in the French tu)
çay tea (pronounced chay, rhyming with "my")
dağ mountain (pronounced daa)
ırmak river (pronounced urmak, with the u as in Burma)
şey thing (pronounced shey, rhyming with "may")