OTTOMAN TURKISH LANGUAGE

Ottoman Turkish (Turkish: Osmanlıca or Osmanlı Türkçesi, Ottoman Turkish: لسان عثمانی - lisân-i Osmânî) is the variant of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire. It contains extensive borrowings from Persian, which itself has been permeated with Arabic borrowings; as a result of this process, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less educated members of society. Ultimately, however, spoken Turkish would come to be greatly influenced by Ottoman Turkish.

Structure

That Ottoman Turkish's Arabic borrowings were not the result of the direct exposure of the language to Arabic is evidenced by the typically Persian phonological mutation of the words of Arabic origin. In addition, the conservation of archaic phonological features of the Arabic borrowings suggests that the Arabic-enriched 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 Turkic tribes under Islam. An additional argument for this is that Ottoman Turkish shares the Persianate character of its Arabic borrowings with other Turkic languages that had even less interaction with Arabic, such as Tatar.

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

• Fasih Türkçe (Eloquent Turkish): Language of poetry and administration.
• Orta Türkçe (Mediocre Turkish): Language of higher classes and trade.
• Kaba Türkçe (Vulgar Turkish): Language of lower classes.

A person would use each of variants above for different purposes. For example, a scribe (kâtib) would use the word عسل - asel (Arabic loanword) for honey when drafting documents but name it as bal (Turkish word) when buying it.

History

Historically, Ottoman Turkish was transformed in three eras:

• Eski Osmanlıca (Old Ottoman Turkish): The version of Ottoman Turkish used until 16th century. It was almost identical with the Turkish used by Seljuks and Anatolian Turkish Beyliks, thus often regarded as part of Eski Anadolu Türkçesi (Ancient Anatolian Turkish).

• Orta Osmanlıca (Middle Ottoman Turkish) or Klasik Osmanlıca (Classical Ottoman Turkish): Language of poetry and administration from 16th century until Tanzimat. This is the version of Ottoman Turkish that comes to most people's minds.

• Yeni Osmanlıca (New Ottoman Turkish): Shaped from 1850s to 20th century under influence of journalism and Western-oriented literature.

Language reform

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 Arabic script with the 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 loan words in Turkish for more examples on Ottoman Turkish words and their modern Turkish counterparts. Three examples are found below.

Legacy

Historically speaking, Ottoman Turkish is not the predecessor of modern Turkish, but rather the standard Turkish of today is essentially Yeni Osmanlıca as written in the Latin alphabet and with an abundance of neologisms added. 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").

Ottoman Turkish is held by many to be a completely different language than the Turkish of today. Though this is to a great extent a politically motivated claim that does not hold up linguistically, it remains true that few people in modern-day Turkey are able to understand spoken Ottoman Turkish, let alone written.

Alphabet

Ottoman Turkish was primarily written in the Ottoman Turkish script (الفبا elifbâ), a heavily Persian-influenced variant of the Arabic script. It was not, however, unknown for Ottoman Turkish to also be written using the Armenian script: for instance, the first novel to be written in the Ottoman Empire was 1851's Akabi, written in the Armenian script by Hovsep Vartan. 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. 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.

¹A correct Ottoman variant of gef will have the "mini-kaf" of ﻙ and the doubled upper stroke of گ. This feature is surely rare in current fonts.

See also

• Culture of the Ottoman Empire
• Turkish language

Bibliography

• Lewis, Geoffrey. "The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success".

External links

Ottoman Turkish language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• http://www.osmanlimedeniyeti.com Has a great resource of Ottoman Turkish texts as well as Ottoman Divan Poetry
• Omniglot: Turkish (Also includes information on Ottoman Turkish)
• Ottoman Klavye, an Ottoman keyboard