Romanticized Turks: Is it possible?

I just had an idea, of if its possible for the Turks to become romanticized, with Turkish being considered a romance language. What would need to happen for it to occur, and what would the effects be?
 
I just had an idea, of if its possible for the Turks to become romanticized, with Turkish being considered a romance language. What would need to happen for it to occur, and what would the effects be?

I can imagine with butterflies an hybridised turkish-romanian/valach/aroman(?) language growing, like some turkish minority turning to Christianism, north of that language line in the Balkans-Carpathes... The problem is, if you butterflies early enough, the crossovering-fusion-infliences will be with Greek instead more like itr, specially south of the line and beyond, like in a world with a surviving Byzantine empire...
 
I just had an idea, of if its possible for the Turks to become romanticized, with Turkish being considered a romance language. What would need to happen for it to occur, and what would the effects be?

I suppose if the Turks, in their migratory form during the Dark/early Middle Ages, managed to smash into Germany, they would have eventually become Romancized along with their language, as well as being absorbed by the Latin/Germanic culture.

The effects... well, I'm tempted to say it wouldn't be overly significant beyond the butterflies generated by the initial incursion. Like Hungary, the Turks would probably see their Central Asian traditions diluted by prolonged exposure to Europe, and become another 'standard' European nation. Of course, one could argue that if the situation lasts into the 19th Century there might well be a sort of 'pan-Turkic' movement, and thus an impetus of sorts to conquer Eastern Europe and reunite with their Turkish brethren.
 

Vitruvius

Donor
I guess it depends on what is meant by 'the Turks', ie which group of Turks/Turkic peoples? I suppose its possible some Turkic group settles amongst the Vlachs and is eventually absorbed by them in the same way the Bulgars eventually became Slavic. Candidates for that could be Pechenegs, Cumans and the Bulgarians themselves. But I don't think anyone would refer to them as Turkish or call 'turkish' a Romance language. It would be more likely the name of the particular Turkic peoples that is used to refer to OTL Romanians or a group there of. Again as how the Bulgarians refers to a Slavic people today. And culturally and probably ethnically the resulting people would probably be essentially Vlach/Romanian (different from OTL of course but not really Turkish) since such a scenario presumes a smaller ruling class that is absorbed by the native population. Would they really consider themselves any more Turkish than the Bulgarians do today? The Magyars kept a distinct identity (non-Turkic but the analogy is relevant) but they also retained their language. So a people who remained ethnically and culturally distinctly Turkic would probably not convert to speaking a Romance language.

And certainly its not likely to ever happen in Anatolia for the simple reason that there is no Romance people or language substrate there.
 
I thought of something that seems unlikely, but I figured I could share anyway. What if an Ottoman Sultan or prince of a smaller Ottoman Empire, feels as if he is shunned by Allah and converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. He travels around the Mediterranean and learns the languages. He wants to act like a western European nation, so he makes Latin the language of the court, and forces his lords to speak latin. Latin eventually merges with Turkish over the coming decades or potentially centuries if this policy is kept. Turkish, or at least a branch of it, becomes romance and is spoken in the smaller Ottoman Empire.

I'm no expert of Ottoman law, but I'm guessing they wouldn't let him either stay in or get power if he converted.
 
I thought of something that seems unlikely, but I figured I could share anyway. What if an Ottoman Sultan or prince of a smaller Ottoman Empire, feels as if he is shunned by Allah and converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. He travels around the Mediterranean and learns the languages. He wants to act like a western European nation, so he makes Latin the language of the court, and forces his lords to speak latin. Latin eventually merges with Turkish over the coming decades or potentially centuries if this policy is kept. Turkish, or at least a branch of it, becomes romance and is spoken in the smaller Ottoman Empire.

I'm no expert of Ottoman law, but I'm guessing they wouldn't let him either stay in or get power if he converted.

Emphasis mine; languages don't work that way. They don't just skip from one linguistic family to another, no matter how much influence they receive from an outside element; they can adopt the demonym of another people like French (a Gallo-Roman tongue named after a Germanic ruling class), but that doesn't change the mechanics or workings of that language. Even Maltese, which has a lexicon that is almost 60-70% Indo-European in some capacity or another, is still ultimately a Semitic language in all the ways that matter.

The most you could end up with is a Latinized dialect of Turkic (script and vocabulary beyond the basic/functional strata) that is still Turkic.
 
Emphasis mine; languages don't work that way. They don't just skip from one linguistic family to another, no matter how much influence they receive from an outside element; they can adopt the demonym of another people like French (a Gallo-Roman tongue named after a Germanic ruling class), but that doesn't change the mechanics or workings of that language. Even Maltese, which has a lexicon that is almost 60-70% Indo-European in some capacity or another, is still ultimately a Semitic language in all the ways that matter.

The most you could end up with is a Latinized dialect of Turkic (script and vocabulary beyond the basic/functional strata) that is still Turkic.

That makes sense.

I guess I should rephrase this then: Is it possible for Turkish to become heavily Romance influenced, to say the point English was?

Is that a better phrasing?
 

birdboy2000

Banned
I thought of something that seems unlikely, but I figured I could share anyway. What if an Ottoman Sultan or prince of a smaller Ottoman Empire, feels as if he is shunned by Allah and converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. He travels around the Mediterranean and learns the languages. He wants to act like a western European nation, so he makes Latin the language of the court, and forces his lords to speak latin. Latin eventually merges with Turkish over the coming decades or potentially centuries if this policy is kept. Turkish, or at least a branch of it, becomes romance and is spoken in the smaller Ottoman Empire.

I'm no expert of Ottoman law, but I'm guessing they wouldn't let him either stay in or get power if he converted.

Exactly. The Sultan's legitimacy came from Islamic Law, and if said sultan ceases to be a Muslim... well, Sultans have been deposed for a lot less. And such a language would be classified as Turkic anyway. Turkic with a lot of loanwords from Latin, but still Turkic, just like how English is Germanic and not Romance.

By the time you have Turks in Anatolia it's probably too late. Even the Mongols, the strongest steppe confederation in history, didn't take Italy or France - too many other strong states in the way, too far from the steppe before civil war set in, too many peoples who'd have their customs absorbed first even if the empire did get that far. Heck, by the time you have the ethnogenesis that leads to the modern Turkic subgroup called "Turks" it's probably too late - too many Muslims in the way.

The closest I can come is to get a Turkic group involved in the migrations period, become the ruling class, and eventually assimilate to the language of their subjects - like the Franks did in OTL France. And OTL, there may have been Turkic peoples involved. The Huns may or may not have been Turkic, and if they were (which is an if - we know very, very little of their language) then a bit more luck could see Atilla live longer and his heirs found some kind of lasting state on conquered Roman territory, albeit probably not holding onto all the lands of his short-lived empire.

The Eurasian Avars are securely Turkic, and although OTL their empire was largely Slavicized, not Romancized, before its fall, perhaps a bit more luck in war would see them actually take a significant chunk of Italy instead of trying and failing; if so, they might absorb Italian customs and language, and the name would survive as a region in Italy where many of them settled ala Lombardy (from the Lombards, a Germanic people) OTL.
 
That makes sense.

I guess I should rephrase this then: Is it possible for Turkish to become heavily Romance influenced, to say the point English was?

Is that a better phrasing?

As I said myself, considering the eastern areas where this may have happened more likely, it would be more greekified.. or perhaps slavified.
 
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