Languages of the Ottoman Empire
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
ΜΕΓΑΛΗ ΑΠΟΘΗΚΗ ΕΠΙΠΛΩΝ Κ. ΦΙΛΙΠΠΑΚΗΣ
GRAND DEPOT DE MEUBLES C. PHILIPPAKIS
Which translates in English as: Big furniture warehouse C. Filippakis (judging from the abbreviation's translation in French, C may stand for Constantinos).
ΞΕΝΟΔΟΧΕΙΟΝ ΕΣΚΗ ΣΕΙΡ ΓΚΤΑΒΤΖΙΑΝ
Which is: Eskişehir Hotel G. K. Tabtzian (it's unlikely the owner of the hotel was called Gktabtzian so the first two letters are probably his and his father's names' initials). It's interesting that the way the name of the hotel is written sounds as "Se-eer" in Greek, whereas in modern Greek Eskişehir is pronounced as "Eskee Seh-eer" with a strong "h". I'm guessing the correct Turkish pronounciation is the one on the 1901 sign.
Another sign on the right has the name "ΚΥΡ. ΒΟΣΝΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ" (Kyr. Vosnopoulos, Kyr. being probably short for Kyriakos, a common Greek name) and some other text that I can't read and that also seems to be in two languages.
There's a third sign on the same side I can't read and that also seems to be in Greek and another language.
Btw the street is Youksek-Kaldirim. You can find it on Google maps. I had a look on street view and there is something that looks a lot like the ironwork supports of the mashrabiya behind the Philippakis sign:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.024158,28.9750783,3a,75y,344...
(The mashrabyia is that thing that looks like a protruding window).
Perhaps all that's left now from the Tabtzian hotel.
It borrows extensively, in all aspects, from Arabic and Persian and its speakers used the (Perso-Arabic) Ottoman Turkish alphabet for written communications. During the peak of Ottoman power (c. 16th century CE), words of foreign origin in Turkish literature 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.
It's almost analogous to the story of English and words of Latin or Greek origin. Just as the Arabic words in Ottoman Turkish were originally adopted via Persian (and not directly from Arabic), most of the Latin-origin words in English were adopted via French, Italian, and other European languages.
As in most other Turkic and other foreign languages of Islamic communities, the Arabic borrowings were not originally 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.
Funnily enough, Ottoman Turkish was also written with an alphabet woefully unsuited to express its sounds and grammar, just like English.
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a Turkish form of the Perso-Arabic script. Well suited to writing Arabic and Persian borrowings, it was poorly suited to native Turkish words. When it came to consonants, Arabic has several consonants that do not exist in Turkish, making several Arabic letters superfluous except for Arabic loanwords; conversely, a few letters had to be invented to write letters in Persian and Turkish that Arabic did not have (such as g or p). In the case of vowels, Turkish contains eight different short vowels and no long ones, whereas Arabic (and Persian) have three short and three long vowels; further complicating matters was that in the Arabic script, only long vowels are usually expressed.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_language
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
Both the Farsi and Urdu alphabets have consonants for those particular sounds گ "gaf" and پ "peh". Given that a lot of Persian words were used, then it would stand to reason that they used the existing letters that were used in Persian.
Now, the alphabet of Turkish language is latin. This statement applies to Latin alphabet as well. Latin alphabet does not contain all the vowels and but Turkish version latin alphabet contains the necessary vowels. The problems are solved just as done in Arabic alphabet.
The thing is that assuming these adjustments as a conflict is meaningless. More, calling it funny is just an ignorance of linguistics. After reading this passage, I would think that Turkish people cant write in Turkish during Ottoman era because of the alphabet limitations. Then, millions of Ottoman manuscripts would deny me.
Wikipedia is a practical source of information, but not necessarily a trustful and truthful one. If anybody thinks that these are valid statements to achieve a success on a language, just consider applying same revolution on English language to achieve the same success. Catastrophic, right? What happened has just happened. Just don't polish this move.
No, that isn't what it implies at all and I think you are misunderstanding the concept of orthography. It implies that the Arabic alphabet didn't correlate precisely to the Ottoman Turkish language and thus exceptions and non-obvious rules had to be learned, rather than being plainly obvious.
As I mentioned, English is in a similar position in that its orthography is really not suited for the language.
> English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. However, because of their relatively recent modernizations when compared to English, the Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian and Polish orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
This would falsely imply that Turkish people in Ottoman era read/wrote millions of manuscripts (pages). The literacy level was very low indeed < 1%. The Ottoman's took over the palace staff initially from the Selchuks (Persian influence), then from Memluks (who also took Arab influence) and then from East Romans. Also a lot of dewsirhme's in Istanbul used the Persian/Arabic words as the written language of the state.
Interesting enough, During the westernization movements, sultan Abdulhamit was one of the earliest to think moving to latin alphabet to make it easy for the people to read and write [1] as written in his personal autobiography. His powerful Enver Pasha apparently opposed and prevented his reform movement.
The palace's Arab/Persian and the people's oral Turkish culture was in sharp contradiction. What's funny is it's very easy to read Yunus Emre (1238–1320) and many other's poems now in Turkish than late 19th century poetry.
[1] https://www.turktarihim.com/Abd%C3%BClhamit_Hanin_LatinAlfab...
christians west and muslims/christians in marmara and balkans have up to 30% literacy. also western missionary schools became abundant everywhere in the ottoman empire after 1800s. big city administrative staff (non-turkish muslims) also had higher than turks which were farmer.
Thy cwld wryt yn Twrkysh, bt thy had tw handl wrds wyth myssyng vwls, wr ryprsntyng mltypl dyffrnt vwls wyth th sym arabyc lttr, cwsyng ambygwyty. Rydbl, bt yt myns that wrytyng as yw spyk can prwdwc yncwmpryhnsybl txt. (Y avwydd wsyng vry shwrt wrds yn thys txt, bycws yt wld by hrd tw rcwgnyz thm.)
"Educated Ottoman Turks spoke Arabic and Persian, ...,with the former being used for science and the latter for literary affairs"
Completely irrelevant in the context here.