Ottoman Turkish language

Ottoman Turkish
لسان عثمانى‎ lisân-ı Osmânî
Region Ottoman Empire
Era Reformed into Modern Turkish in 1928
Turkic
Early forms
Old Anatolian Turkish
  • Ottoman Turkish
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
Official status
Official language in
  Ottoman Empire
Turkish Provisional Government
Khedivate of Egypt
 Cretan State
Provisional National Government of the Southwestern Caucasus
Language codes
ISO 639-2 ota
ISO 639-3 ota
Linguist list
 ota
Glottolog None

Ottoman Turkish /ˈɒtəmən/, or the Ottoman language (لسان عثمانى‎‎ Lisân-ı Osmânî) (also known as تركچه‎ Türkçe or تركی‎ Türkî, "Turkish"), is the variety of the Turkish language that was used in the Ottoman Empire. It borrows extensively from Arabic and Persian, and was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. During the peak of Ottoman power, words of Arabic origins heavily outnumbered native Turkish words in the Ottoman language.[1] Consequently, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less-educated lower-class and rural Turks, who continued to use kaba Türkçe ("raw Turkish"), which used far fewer foreign loanwords and which is the basis of the modern Turkish language.[2] The Tanzimât era saw the application of the term "Ottoman" when referring to the language (لسان عثمانی‎ lisân-ı Osmânî or عثمانلوجه‎ Osmanlıca) and the same distinction is made in Modern Turkish (Osmanlıca and Osmanlı Türkçesi).

Grammar

Cases

Some words in Ottoman Turkish were spelled with the Arabic ك which is normally pronounced as /k/, but were pronounced as /ɡ/.

Verbs

The conjugation for the aorist tense is as follows:

Person Singular Plural
1 -irim -iriz
2 -irsiŋ -irsiŋiz
3 -ir -irler

Structure

As in most other Turkic and other foreign languages of Islamic communities, initially the Arabic borrowings were not the result of a direct exposure of Ottoman Turkish to Arabic, a fact that is evidenced by the typically Persian phonological mutation of the words of Arabic origin.[3][4][5] The conservation of archaic phonological features of the Arabic borrowings furthermore suggests that Arabic-incorporated Persian was absorbed into pre-Ottoman Turkic at an early stage, when the speakers were still located to the northeast of Persia, prior to the westward migration of the Islamic Turkic tribes. An additional argument for this is that Ottoman Turkish shares the Persian character of its Arabic borrowings with other Turkic languages that had even less interaction with Arabic, such as Tatar and Uygur. From the early ages of the Ottoman Empire, borrowings from Arabic and Persian were so abundant that original Turkish words may be hard to find. In Ottoman, one may find whole passages in Arabic incorporated into the text.

In a social and pragmatic sense, there were (at least) three variants of Ottoman Turkish:

A person would use each of the varieties above for different purposes. For example, a scribe would use the Arabic asel (عسل) to refer to honey when writing a document, but would use the native Turkish word bal when buying it.

History

Historically, Ottoman Turkish was transformed in three eras:

Language reform

For more details on this topic, see Turkish language.

In 1928, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the establishment of Republic of Turkey, widespread language reforms (a part in the greater framework of Atatürk's Reforms) instituted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk saw the replacement of many Persian and Arabic origin loanwords in the language with their Turkish equivalents. It also saw the replacement of the Perso-Arabic script with the extended Latin alphabet. The changes were meant to encourage the growth of a new variety of written Turkish that more closely reflected the spoken vernacular, as well as to foster a new variety of spoken Turkish that more explicitly reflected Turkey's new national identity as being a post-Ottoman state.

Please see the list of replaced loanwords in Turkish for more examples on Ottoman Turkish words and their modern Turkish counterparts. Two examples of Arabic and two of Persian loanwords are found below.

English Ottoman Modern Turkish
obligatory واجب vâcib zorunlu
hardship مشكل müşkül güçlük, zorluk
city شهر şehir kent/şehir
war جنك cenk savaş

Legacy

Historically speaking, Ottoman Turkish is not the predecessor of modern Turkish. Rather the standard Turkish of today is essentially Türkiye Türkçesi (Turkish of Turkey) as written in the Latin alphabet and with an abundance of neologisms added, which means there are now many fewer loan words from other languages. However, Ottoman was not transformed into the Turkish of today instantly. At first, it was only the script that was changed (many households however continued to use the Arabic system), then the loans taken out, then new words to fit the growing amount of technology. Up until the 60s Ottoman Turkish was at least partially intelligible with the Turkish of that day. One major difference between modern Turkish and Ottoman Turkish is the former's abandonment of compound word formation according to Arabic and Persian grammar rules. The usage of such phrases still exists in modern Turkish, but only to a very limited extent and usually in specialist contexts; for example, the Persian genitive construction takdîr-i ilâhî (which reads literally as "the preordaining of the divine", and translates as "divine dispensation" or "destiny") is used, as opposed to the normative modern Turkish construction, ilâhî takdîr (literally, "divine preordaining").

Orthography

Calendar in Thessaloniki 1896, a cosmopolitic city with the first 3 lines in Ottoman script

Ottoman Turkish was primarily written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet (elifbâ الفبا), a variant of the Perso-Arabic script. It was not, however, unknown for Ottoman Turkish to also be written in Armenian script: for instance, the first novel to be written in the Ottoman Empire was 1851's Akabi, written in the Armenian script by Vartan Pasha. Similarly, when the Armenian Düzoğlu family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid, they kept records in Ottoman Turkish, but used the Armenian script.[6] Other scripts, too—such as the Greek alphabet and the Rashi script of Hebrew—were used by non-Muslim groups to write the language, since the Arabic alphabet was identified with Islam. On the other hand, for example, Greek-speaking Muslims would write Greek using the Ottoman Turkish script.

Numbers

[7]

1
بر
 bir
2
ایكی
 iki
3
اوچ
 üç
4
درت
 dört
5
بش
 beş
6
آلتی
 alti
7
یدی
 yedi
8
سكز
 sekiz
9
طقوز
 dokuz
10
اون
 on
11
اون بر
 on bir
12
اون ایکی
 on iki

Transliterations

The transliteration system of the İslâm Ansiklopedisi has become a de facto standard in Oriental studies for the transliteration of Ottoman Turkish texts.[8] Concerning transcription the New Redhouse, Karl Steuerwald and Ferit Develioğlu dictionaries have become standard.[9] Another transliteration system is that of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft(DMG). This provides a transliteration system for any Turkic language written in Arabic script.[10] There are not many differences between the İA and the DMG transliteration systems.

İA-Transliteration[11]
ا‎
 ب‎ پ‎ ت‎ ث‎ ج‎ چ‎ ح‎ خ‎ د‎ ذ‎ ر‎ ز‎ ژ‎ س‎ ش‎ ص‎ ض‎ ط‎ ظ‎ ع‎ غ‎ ف‎ ق‎
ك‎
 گ‎ ڭ‎ ل‎ م‎ ن‎ و‎ ه‎ ی‎
ʾ a b p t s̱ c ç ḥ ḫ d ẕ r z j s ş ṣ ż ṭ ẓ ʿ ġ f q k g ñ ğ g ñ l m n v h y

See also


References

  1. ↑ Ottomans
  2. ↑ Glenny, Misha. The Balkans - Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, Penguin, New York 2001. p. 99.
  3. ↑ Percy Ellen Frederick William Smythe Strangford, Percy Clinton Sydney Smythe Strangford, Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe Strangford, “Original Letters and Papers”, Published by Trübner, 1878. pg 46: “The Arabic words in Turkish have all decidedly come through a Persian channel. I can hardly think of an exception, except in quite late days, when Arabic words have been used in Turkish in a different sense from that borne by them in Persian.”
  4. ↑ M. Sukru Hanioglu, “A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire”, Published by Princeton University Press, 2008. pg 34: “It employed a predominant Turkish syntax, but was heavily influenced by Persian and (initially through Persian) Arabic.
  5. ↑ Pierre A. MacKay, "The Fountain at Hadji Mustapha," Hesperia, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1967), pp. 193-195. excerpt: "The immense Arabic contribution to the lexicon of Ottoman Turkish came rather through Persian than directly, and the sound of Arabic words in Persian syntax would be far more familiar to a Turkish ear than correct Arabic".
  6. ↑ Mansel, Philip (2011). Constantinople. Hachette UK. ISBN 1848546475.
  7. ↑ https://archive.org/stream/ottomanturkishco00hago#page/34/mode/2up/search/numerals
  8. ↑ Korkut Buğday Osmanisch, p. 2
  9. ↑ Korkut Buğday Osmanisch, p. 13
  10. ↑ Transkriptionskommission der DMG Die Transliteration der arabischen Schrift in ihrer Anwendung auf die Hauptliteratursprachen der islamischen Welt, p. 9
  11. ↑ Korkut Buğday Osmanisch, p. 2f.

Further reading

External links

Ottoman Turkish language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
Ottoman Turkish language test of Wiktionary at Wikimedia Incubator
Ottoman Turkish language repository of Wikisource, the free library
For a list of words relating to Ottoman Turkish language, see the Ottoman Turkish language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.