One famous example was محمد پاشا اولدو, which can mean either “Muhammad became a Pasha” (“Mehmet Paşa oldu” in modern Turkish), or “Muhammad Pasha died” (“Mehmet Paşa öldü”). I read that Ottoman writers tended to use a lot of Perso-Arabic circumlocutions to avoid such ambiguities.

The Bosnian Muslims managed to make a true alphabet based on Arabic script (although it later fell out of use), so why did the Turks struggle on with their dysfunctional script until Ataturk came along and junked it in favour of the Latin alphabet.

Why oh why couldn’t the Tanzimat reformers have insisted that from then forward that written Turkish be fully vocalized? (They’d probably need to invent more markers as Turkish has eight vowels to Arabic’s three…)