Ottoman Turkish ( ota, لِسانِ عُثمانى, Lisân-ı Osmânî, ; tr, Osmanlı Türkçesi) was the standardized
register
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts entertainment, and media Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), th ...
of the
Turkish language
Turkish ( , ), also referred to as Turkish of Turkey (''Türkiye Türkçesi''), is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 80 to 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Significant sma ...
used by the citizens of the
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
(14th to 20th centuries CE). It borrowed extensively, in all aspects, from
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
and
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
, and its speakers used the
Ottoman Turkish alphabet for written communication. During the peak of Ottoman power (), words of foreign origin in
Turkish literature
Turkish literature ( tr, Türk edebiyatı) comprises oral compositions and written texts in Turkic languages. The Ottoman and Azerbaijani forms of Turkish, which forms the basis of much of the written corpus, were highly influenced by Persian a ...
in the Ottoman Empire heavily outnumbered native Turkish words, with Arabic and Persian vocabulary accounting for up to 88% of the Ottoman vocabulary in some texts.
''Persian Historiography & Geography''
Pustaka Nasional Pte Ltd p 69
Consequently, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less-educated lower-class and to rural Turks, who continued to use ("raw/vulgar Turkish"; compare
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its literary counterpa ...
and
Demotic Greek), which used far fewer foreign
loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
s and is the basis of the modern standard. The
Tanzimât
The Tanzimat (; ota, تنظيمات, translit=Tanzimāt, lit=Reorganization, ''see'' wikt:نظام, nizām) was a period of reform in the Ottoman Empire that began with the Edict of Gülhane, Gülhane Hatt-ı Şerif in 1839 and ended with the F ...
era (1839–1876) saw the application of the term "Ottoman" when referring to the language ( or ); Modern Turkish uses the same terms when referring to the language of that era ( and ). More generically, the Turkish language was called or "Turkish".
Grammar
Cases
*
Nominative and
Indefinite accusative/objective: -
∅, no suffix. 'the lake' 'a lake', 'soup', 'night'; 'he/she brought a rabbit'.
*
Genitive: suffix . 'of the pasha'; 'of the book'.
*
Definite accusative
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘th ...
: suffix : 'he/she brought the rabbit'. The variant suffix does not occur in Ottoman Turkish orthography (unlike in Modern Turkish), although it's pronounced with the
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, mea ...
. Thus, 'the lake' ''vs.'' Modern Turkish .
*
Dative: suffix : 'to the house'.
*
Locative: suffix : 'at school', 'in (the/a) cage', 'at a/the start', 'in town'. The variant suffix used in Modern Turkish () does not occur.
*
Ablative: suffix : 'from the man'.
*
Instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to inst ...
: suffix or postposition . Generally not counted as a grammatical case in modern grammars.
Verbs
The conjugation for the aorist tense is as follows:
Structure
Ottoman Turkish was highly influenced by Arabic and Persian. Arabic and Persian words in the language accounted for up to 88% of its vocabulary.
As in most other Turkic and other foreign languages of Islamic communities, the Arabic
borrowings were borrowed through Persian, not through direct exposure of Ottoman Turkish to Arabic, a fact that is evidenced by the typically Persian
phonological
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
mutation of the words of Arabic origin.
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 north-east of
Persia
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
, 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
The Tatars ()[Tatar]
in the Collins English Dictionary is an umbrella term for different ,
Bashkir, and
Uyghur. From the early ages of the Ottoman Empire, borrowings from Arabic and Persian were so abundant that original Turkish words were hard to find.
[Korkut Bugday]
''An Introduction to Literary Ottoman''
Routledge, 5 dec. 2014 p XV. In Ottoman, one may find whole passages in Arabic and Persian incorporated into the text.
It was however not only extensive loaning of words, but along with them much of the grammatical systems of Persian and Arabic.
In a social and pragmatic sense, there were (at least) three variants of Ottoman Turkish:
* (Eloquent Turkish): the language of poetry and administration, Ottoman Turkish in its strict sense;
* (Middle Turkish): the language of higher classes and trade;
* (Rough Turkish): the language of lower classes.
A person would use each of the varieties above for different purposes, with the variant being the most heavily suffused with Arabic and Persian words and the least. For example, a scribe would use the Arabic () to refer to
honey
Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies. Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions of plants (primar ...
when writing a document but would use the native Turkish word when buying it.
History
Historically, Ottoman Turkish was transformed in three eras:
* (Old Ottoman Turkish): the version of Ottoman Turkish used until the 16th century. It was almost identical with the Turkish used by
Seljuk Seljuk or Saljuq (سلجوق) may refer to:
* Seljuk Empire (1051–1153), a medieval empire in the Middle East and central Asia
* Seljuk dynasty (c. 950–1307), the ruling dynasty of the Seljuk Empire and subsequent polities
* Seljuk (warlord) (di ...
empire and
Anatolian beyliks and was often regarded as part of (
Old Anatolian Turkish
Old Anatolian Turkish (OAT, tr, Eski Anadolu Türkçesi, ''EAT'') is the stage in the history of the Turkish language spoken in Anatolia from the 11th to 15th centuries. It developed into Early Ottoman Turkish. It was written in the Arabic sc ...
).
* (Middle Ottoman Turkish) or (
Classic
A classic is an outstanding example of a particular style; something of lasting worth or with a timeless quality; of the first or highest quality, class, or rank – something that exemplifies its class. The word can be an adjective (a ''c ...
al Ottoman Turkish): the language of poetry and administration from the 16th century until
Tanzimat.
* (New Ottoman Turkish): the version shaped from the 1850s to the 20th century under the influence of journalism and Western-oriented literature.
Language reform
In 1928, following the
fall of the Ottoman Empire
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1908–1922) began with the Young Turk Revolution which restored the constitution of 1876 and brought in multi-party politics with a two-stage electoral system for the Ottoman parliament. At the same ti ...
after
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
and the establishment of the
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. One of the main supporters of the reform was the Turkish nationalist
Ziya Gökalp
Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (23 March 1876 – 25 October 1924) was a Turkish sociologist, writer, poet, and politician. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that reinstated constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("ce ...
. It also saw the replacement of the
Perso-Arabic
The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran ( Western Persian) and Afghanistan (Dari Persian) since the 7th cen ...
script with the
extended Latin alphabet
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to repres ...
. The changes were meant to encourage the growth of a new variety of written Turkish that more closely reflected the spoken vernacular and to foster a new variety of spoken Turkish that reinforced Turkey's new
national identity
National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or to one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language". National identity ...
as being a post-Ottoman
state
State may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State
* ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States
* ''Our S ...
.
See the
list of replaced loanwords in Turkish for more examples of Ottoman Turkish words and their modern Turkish counterparts. Two examples of
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
and two of
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
loanwords are found below.
Legacy
Historically speaking, Ottoman Turkish is the predecessor of modern Turkish. However, the standard Turkish of today is essentially (Turkish of Turkey) as written in the Latin alphabet and with an abundance of
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
s added, which means there are now far fewer loan words from other languages, and Ottoman Turkish was not instantly transformed into the Turkish of today. At first, it was only the script that was changed, and while some households continued to use the Arabic system in private, most of the Turkish population was illiterate at the time, making the switch to the Latin alphabet much easier. Then, loan words were taken out, and new words fitting the growing amount of technology were introduced. Until the 1960s, Ottoman Turkish was at least partially intelligible with the Turkish of that day. One major difference between Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish is the latter's abandonment of
compound word
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when ...
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
In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another (e.g. "John's jacket"), or some other type of connection ( ...
(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, (literally, "divine preordaining").
In 2014, Turkey's Education Council decided that Ottoman Turkish should be taught in Islamic high schools and as an elective in other schools, a decision backed by President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who said the language should be taught in schools so younger generations do not lose touch with their cultural heritage.
Writing system
![Calendar Thessaloniki 1896](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Calendar_Thessaloniki_1896.jpg)
Most Ottoman Turkish was written in the
Ottoman Turkish alphabet ( ota, الفبا, elifbâ), a variant of the
Perso-Arabic script
The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran ( Western Persian) and Afghanistan (Dari Persian) since the 7th cen ...
. The
Armenian
Armenian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent
** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...
,
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and
Rashi script
Rashi script or Sephardic script (), is a typeface for the Hebrew alphabet based on 15th-century Sephardic semi-cursive handwriting. It is named for the rabbinic commentator Rashi, whose works are customarily printed in the typeface (though Ra ...
of
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
were sometimes used by Armenians, Greeks and Jews. (See
Karamanli Turkish
Karamanlı Turkish ( tr, Karamanlı Türkçesi, el, Καραμανλήδικα, Karamanlídika) is a dialect of the Turkish language spoken by the Karamanlides. Although the official Ottoman Turkish was written in the Arabic script, the Karam ...
, a dialect of Ottoman written in the Greek script;
Armeno-Turkish alphabet)
Numbers
Transliterations
The transliteration system of the
İslâm Ansiklopedisi
The ''İslâm Ansiklopedisi'' (İA) () is a Turkish academic encyclopedia for Islamic studies published by ' ( eng, Turkish Religious Foundation).
Its most recent 44-volume edition, called ''Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi'' ( ...
has become a ''de facto'' standard in
Oriental studies for the transliteration of Ottoman Turkish texts. Concerning
transcription
Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including:
Genetics
* Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...
the New Redhouse, Karl Steuerwald and Ferit Develioğlu dictionaries have become standard. Another transliteration system is the
Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft
The Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (, ''German Oriental Society''), abbreviated DMG, is a scholarly organization dedicated to Oriental studies, that is, to the study of the languages and cultures of the Near East and the Far East, the broa ...
(DMG), which provides a transliteration system for any Turkic language written in Arabic script.
Transkriptionskommission der DMG ''Die Transliteration der arabischen Schrift in ihrer Anwendung auf die Hauptliteratursprachen der islamischen Welt'', p. 9
There are not many differences between the İA and the DMG transliteration systems.
See also
*Old Anatolian Turkish language
Old Anatolian Turkish (OAT, tr, Eski Anadolu Türkçesi, ''EAT'') is the stage in the history of the Turkish language spoken in Anatolia from the 11th to 15th centuries. It developed into Early Ottoman Turkish. It was written in the Arabic sc ...
*Culture of the Ottoman Empire
Ottomans culture evolved over several centuries as the ruling administration of the Turks absorbed, adapted and modified the various native cultures of conquered lands and their peoples. There was influence from the customs and languages of Islami ...
* List of Persian loanwords in Turkish
Notes
References
Further reading
; English
* Online copies
* Online copies from Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* Lewis, Geoffrey. The Jarring Lecture 2002.
The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success
.
; Other languages
* Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
Mehmet Hakkı Suçin (born 1970) is an author, literary translator and Arabist from Turkey.
Biography
Born in Tuzluca, (then part of Kars), he graduated from Ankara University, Faculty of Letters in 1993. He worked as a translator and interpre ...
. ''Qawâ'id al-Lugha al-Turkiyya li Ghair al-Natiqeen Biha'' (Turkish Grammar for Arabs; adapted from Mehmet Hengirmen's ''Yabancılara Türkçe Dilbilgisi''), Engin Yayınevi, 2003).
* Mehmet Hakkı Suçin. ''Atatürk'ün Okuduğu Kitaplar: Endülüs Tarihi'' (Books That Atatürk Read: History of Andalucia; purification from the Ottoman Turkish, published by Anıtkabir Vakfı, 2001).
*
*
External links
*
*
Ottoman Text Archive Project
* ttp://www.dilbilimi.net/osmanli_arastirmalari.htm#osmanli_turkcesi_metinleri Ottoman Turkish Language Textsbr>Ottoman-Turkish-English Open Dictionary
Ottoman<>Turkish Dictionary – University of Pamukkale
You can use ? character instead of an unknown letter. It provides results from Arabic and Persian dictionaries, too.
Ottoman<>Turkish Dictionary – ihya.org
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