Language WI - Liguistic Purification

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

I did not realize that Ottoman was so distinct from Turkish. If the Turks had not gotten involved in WWI, they might have been able to reestablish control over the gulf Arab states, occupied Russian Turkestan during the civil war, annexed Iran or at least the oil and arab areas, and then used the oil to pay for industrialization. Instead of having three languages, they could just have taught everyone the three vocabularies in school.
If you used Turkish words with Arab grammar, does it make sense? Can you understand the sentence? What about Persian? The three languages are Turkic, Aryan, and Semitic. They are completely different in structure. Can you use them?.

Some Turkish words did find their way into Arabic, especially vocabulary related to governance, military terminology, and cuisine. An Arab could probably make sense of Ottoman sort of like you can sort of figure out what something wirtten in French or German is about. Most educated Arabs and Ottomans could speak all three languages, and a large percentage of Arabs and Anatolians were bi-lingual. But for the most part, words in Ottoman were created by using Arab roots. For instance, the word used in Arabic for 'airplane' is tayyare, which was an Ottoman creation, although the Turks have abandoned their own word and adopted the neologism "uchak". Tayyare is now translated "aeroplane".

 

[Leo Caesius]

Some Turkish words did find their way into Arabic, especially vocabulary related to governance, military terminology, and cuisine. For instance, the word used in Arabic for 'airplane' is tayyare, which was an Ottoman creation, although the Turks have abandoned their own word and adopted the neologism "uchak". Tayyare is now translated "aeroplane".

That's rather cute, I hadn't realized that.

Tayyaare is the more common word in spoken Arabic, but (wouldn't you know it) some linguistic engineering has occured in the Arab world as well. In al-3arabiyya an-naHawiyya (proper written Arabic), the proper word is Taa'ira (although I couldn't tell you why).

There was a 16th century sect in Iran, called the Hurufis ("Alphabetists" or "Literalists"), the leader of which invented a kind of secret Esperanto for the members of his sect, which he called Bala-i balan ("the language of the Reviver") - combining a posteriori vocabulary (inspired by the three languages), Turkish grammar, and Arabic syntax. The French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy published some excerpts from Mohyeddin's Kitaab al-Huruuf dealing with this language. It appears to have disappeared with the sect.

One of the most prolific of journalists during the late Ottoman period, Ahmet Midhat, made a big point of the fact that proper Ottoman (as it stood) was equally unintelligible to Arabs, Persians, and even most Turks; while he didn't necessarily advocate giving Ottoman the boot, he took to dropping the "Persian" izafet, Arabic gender agreement, and extraneous Persian and Arabic vocabulary, and the result is comprehensible yet still elegant. I'd imagine that his writing was probably similar to what John's mother speaks, and what is today spoken in places like Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia. I speak Arabic and some Persian, and before I learned Turkish, I found Ottoman to be somewhat familiar - like John says, I can sort-of make things out.