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Revisiting Multilingualism in the Ottoman Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2022

Sooyong Kim Open the ORCID record for Sooyong Kim [Opens in a new window]  and
Orit Bashkin
Sooyong Kim*
Affiliation:
Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
Orit Bashkin*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, IL, USA
*
Email: skim@ku.edu.tr and oritb@uchicago.edu
Email: skim@ku.edu.tr and oritb@uchicago.edu
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Extract

Evliya Çelebi (d. after 1685), in his Seyahatname, Book of Travels, completed circa 1683, records a host of languages and dialects spoken within the Ottoman Empire at the time and provides practical word lists in transcription, especially for those less familiar to his Turkophone audience, such as Hungarian in the western borderlands and varieties of Kurdish in the eastern regions. Evliya also remarks of places where he met bilingual speakers. For instance, about the city of Ohrid in the central province of Rumelia, he informs us that, though its people mainly speak Greek or Bulgarian, they could converse in “elegant Turkish,” some in a “very urbane and witty” manner typical of Ottoman literati. Yet curiously, about the capital of Istanbul, his hometown, Evliya says nothing specific about any interaction, besides that he had learned “fluent Greek and Latin” from a Christian goldsmith, to be able to read certain chronicles, and in exchange instructed Persian to the craftsman.

Type
Critical Essay
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , June 2021 , pp. 130 - 145
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc.

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References

1 Evliya provides word lists for nearly thirty non-Turkish languages and dialects, including some spoken outside the imperial borders. Robert Dankoff, “The Languages of the World According to Evliya Çelebi,” in From Mahmud Kaşgari to Evliya Çelebi: Studies in Middle Turkic and Ottoman Literatures (Istanbul: ISIS), 277–90. On Evliya's list for Hungarian, see Tibor Halasi-Kun, “Evliya Çelebi as Linguist,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies ¾ (1979–80): 376–82; for his list of the Kurdish dialects, see Bruinessen, Martin van, “Les Kurdes et leur langue au XVIIIème siècle: Notes d'Evliya Çelebi sur dialectes kurdes,” Studia Kurdica 1–5 (1988): 13–34Google Scholar.

2 Robert Dankoff and Robert Elsie, eds. and trans., Evliya Çelebi in Albania and Adjacent Regions (Kosovo, Montenegro, Ohrid): The Relevant Sections of the Seyahatname (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 216–17.

3 Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 27. By “Latin” (lisān-ı Lātīnī), Evliya probably meant Italian.

4 Christine Woodhead, “Ottoman Languages,” in The Ottoman World, eds. Christine Woodhead (London: Routledge, 2012), 146–47.

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13 For a succinct overview of the broader issue of the “Persianate,” see Sunil Sharma, Review of The Persianate World, ed. Nile Green (2019); The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Space, eds. Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2019): 454–58; Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Green, ed., Introduction to The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 1–71.

14 Johann Strauss, “Language and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Imperial Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean: Recording the Imprint of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Rule, ed. Rhoads Murphey (London: Routledge, 2017), 115–42.

15 Peter Cowe, “Stampōloy patmut‘iwn,” in Christian-Muslim Relations 1500–1900, ed. David Thomas, accessed Feb. 10, 2021, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2451-9537_cmrii_COM_27324.

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18 Michael Winter, “Cultural Ties between Istanbul and Ottoman Egypt,” in Frontiers of Ottoman Studies, vol. 1: State, Province and the West, eds. Colin Imber and Keiko Kiyatoki (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 187–202.

19 Dana Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 128–30.

20 Ibid., 78.

21 Abdulrazzak Patel, The Arab Nahda: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 36.

22 Jacobs, Martin, “An Ex-Sabbatean's Remorse? Sambari's Polemics against Islam,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 347–78Google Scholar.

23 Joseph Yahalom, “Hebrew Poetry and Its Turkish Background,” in Ottoman Melodies, Hebrew Hymns: A Sixteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Encounter, with Andreas Tietze, (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1995), 11–37.

24 Dvora Bregman, The Golden Way: The Hebrew Sonnet during the Renaissance and the Baroque, trans. Ann Brener (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006).

25 Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

26 Simon Gershon Bernstein, ed., Divan: le-Rabi ʿImanuʾel ben David Franses (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1932), 183.

27 Ueno, Masayuki, “One Script, Two languages: Garabed Panosian and His Armeno-Turkish Newspapers in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 52 (2016): 605–22Google Scholar; Janet Klein, “Journalism Beyond Borders: The Bedirkhans and the First Kurdish Gazette, 1898–1902,” in The Kurdish Question Revisited, eds. Gareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef (London: Hurst, 2017), 173–86; Orit Bashkin, “Why Did Baghdadi Jews Stop Writing to Their Brethren in Mainz?—Some Comments about the Reading Practices of Iraqi Jews in the Nineteenth Century,” in History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East, ed. Philip Sadgrove (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 95–110.

28 Fatma Müge Göçek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 125.

29 Naures Atto, Hostages in the Homeland, Orphans in the Diaspora: Identity Discourses Among the Assyrian/Syriac Elites in the European Diaspora (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2011). Prior to his move to New Jersey in 1912, Faʾiq published a similarly trilingual journal entitled Kawkab Madenho or “Star of the East” (1910–1912) in his hometown of Diyarbakır. On his role in the Syriac literary revival, see Robert Isaf, “Awakening, or Watchfulness: Naum Faiq and Syriac Language Poetry at the Fall of the Ottoman Empire,” in Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities and their Languages in the Emerging Nation States of the Middle East (1920–1950), eds. Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Karène Sanchez-Summerer, and Tijmen C. Baarda (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 171–200.

30 Al-Khalidi's work was published in 1904 with the title Tarikh ʿilm al-adab ʿinda al-Ifranj wa-al-ʿArab wa-Victor Hugo.

31 Reyhan Tutumlu and Ali Sedar, “A Distant Reading of the Ottoman/Turkish Serial Novel Tradition (1831–1908),” in Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830–1860s: Popular Culture–Serial Culture, eds. Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 95–114; Samah Selim, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

32 Marilyn Booth, ed., Introduction to Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 43–44.

33 Monica Ringer and Etienne Charrière, eds., Introduction to Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity: Reform and Translation in the Tanzimat Novel (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020), 6–7. For another assessment of Ottoman literary modernity, and in relation to translation, see Mehmet Fatih Uslu and Fatih Altuğ, eds., Introduction to Tanzimat ve Edebiyat: Osmanlı İstanbul'da Modern Edebî Kültür (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2014), vii–xvi.

34 Zeynep Seviner, “Thinking in French, Writing in Persian: Aesthetics, Intelligibility and the Literary Turkish of the 1890s,” in Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity: Reform and Translation in the Tanzimat Novel, eds. Monica M. Ringer and Etienne Charrière, 19–36 (London: I.B. Tauris), 19.

35 ʿÖmer Seyfeddin's article was published in Genç Kalemler, the first major nationalist journal, which was established in Salonica in 1910.

36 Gawrych, George W., “Şemseddin Sami, Women, and Social Consciousness in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 46 (2010): 97–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 In the introduction to best-known work, his two-volume Kamus-ı Türki, published separately in 1899 and 1901, Sami speaks of belonging to both communities, linguistically to Turkish and ethnically to Albanian. George W. Gawrych, The Crescent and the Eagle: Ottoman Rule, Islam and the Albanians, 1874–1913 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

38 Jonathan Marc Gribetz, “‘Their Blood is Eastern’: Shahin Makaryus and Fin de Siècle Arab Pride in the Jewish ‘Race,’” Middle Eastern Studies 49 (2013): 143–61.

39 Issa, Rana, “Arabic Language and Syro-Lebanese National Identity: Searching in Buṭrus al-Bustānī's Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ,” Journal of Semitic Studies 62 (2017): 465–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Annie Leah Greene, “Provincial, Not Peripheral: Ottoman–Iraqi Intellectuals and Cultural Networks, 1863–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2018).

41 Levy, Lital, “The Nahḍa and the Haskala: A Comparative Reading of ‘Revival’ and ‘Reform,’” Middle Eastern Literatures (2013): 307Google Scholar.

42 Bashkin, Orit and Kim, Sooyong, “An Ottoman Holy Land: Two Early Modern Travel Accounts and Imperial Subjectivity,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 39.2 (2021): 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Lehmann, Matthias B., “‘Levantinos’ and Other Jews: Reading H. Y. D. Azulai's Travel Diary,” Jewish Social Studies 13.3 (2007): 1–34.Google Scholar