WI: Ottoman Empire thinks of itself as Roman?

"Rumeli" means "land of the Romans" in Turkish. "-stan" is Persian for "land of". Rumelistan would be "land of land of the Romans".

So it should have been Rumestan if we're using the -stan prefix. Come to think of it, Srbistan is the Turkish name for Serbia, so wouldn't the -stan prefix be a Turkish word as well?
 
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So it should have been Rumestan if we're using the -stan prefix. Come to think of it, Srbistan is the Turkish name for Serbia, so wouldn't the -stan prefix be a Turkish word as well?

You're overthinking this. The -stan prefix is a loan word from the Persian (which is why you see it present in Hindi/Urdu as well). Which form is used in which situation is probably down to chance and various other historical factors.

An example in English would be to ask why Germany, derived from Latin Germania, is the word of the country of the Germans in English and not something more French influenced like Allemany- purely because during the period where French was the main language of the English elite Germany wasn't a consolidated polity and when it was referred to as a unit the Latin name would be used.
 
An Ottoman Sultan who regard himself as a Roman and to speak Greek is like a Philipp II of Spain who speaks Arabic and declares a Jihad against Christianity... Byzantophilia has its limits...

Not really, it's more like a Turkish khan who eventually comes to regard himself as a shah and speaks Persian. Greek is a prestige language even in this era and the Sultan running a Greek court as a way of appearing more cultured is entirely plausible long term as long as the administration can be brought along with it. It's not like there aren't a huge number of Muslim Greeks in Anatolia who OTL where Turkified for the most part.
 
An Ottoman Sultan who regard himself as a Roman and to speak Greek is like a Philipp II of Spain who speaks Arabic and declares a Jihad against Christianity... Byzantophilia has its limits...

I think that, back then, Greek was a prestige language, together with Arabic, Persian, Latin, Ottoman Turkish (obviously) and Hebrew, too, I think.

Also, Philip II saw himself as a defensor of Catholicism against Barbary pirates, while Mehmet II surely saw himself as the conqueror of Costantinople ("Fatih") and as a defenser of Islam, but also as the legitimate ruler of the "Romans" (I mean Greeks). In order to be the legitimate ruler of a nation, you must also know its language.
 

Kosta

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I am not a cultural historian, but I understand that there might be a (tenuous) basis in fact for the idea that Rome is connected to the inhabitants of Troy.

There is some evidence that the Etruscans actually were descended (in part) from a group of people who migrated from western Anatolia. The similarities in the written languages, particularly the small connecting words, of Etruscan and Luwian are apparently fairly significant. I don't have the book in front of me, but I saw several side-by-side Etruscan/Luwian word lists that were remarkably similar (by 'similar', I mean that over half the words were identical, and most of the rest had minor but regular pronunciation changes). Plus the Lemnos stele indicates a connection between the two.

It seems entirely plausible to me that a group of Luwian-speakers may have migrated in the late Bronze or very early Iron Age from the Troy area of western Anatolia to Etruria, forming the core of the future Etruscan culture, and that legends of this event were passed through the Etruscans to the Latin-speaking Romans (who were culturally dominated by the Etruscans for centuries). Livy would presumably have taken these legends and shaped (parts of) them into the Rome-centric version we know of today.

That's not what I'm arguing. Sure, pre-Greek Anatolian peoples could have made their way through the known world, but can we in the year 2013 really be absolutely sure that one man who seems to have mythological baggage attached to him actually existed? That is what I am arguing.

Of course I do not claim to believe that the myths are historical facts, just that the myths were used in such a way.

The Turkish government did not have any interaction with the long vanished Trojans either, so that is the same relation as Rome's.

What would an Ottoman regime with a Trojan identity look like?

I don't know what an Ottoman regime with a Trojan identity would look like, but I would surely like to find out.

Perhaps, though, this identity might try to breathe Islam into such old myths. After all, in Islam, it is believed that the Qu'ran is the composite list of the words of God and that the Prophet Muhammad was not the first Prophet to bring the words of God to the people. What with the Sultan being the Caliph and all, perhaps then Paris might be a light in the darkness of Greek idolatry?

Or at least, that's what I'd do if I ever wrote such a tale...
 
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