Wiktionary:About Ottoman Turkish
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Language
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Ottoman Turkish is the variety of the Turkish language as spoken or written around the Ottoman Empire from the 15th century until its dissolution. The precise cut-off date with modern Turkish is conveniently marked by 1929 Turkish alphabet reform, lagging behind for expatriates and in the French-controlled areas but nonetheless marked by the script. Whether Turkish of the occasional Latin publications in the twenty years before the reform should count as Turkish or added as quotes under Ottoman Turkish entries – at Arabic script page titles – may remain ambiguous for now.
The reason why Ottoman Turkish is distinguished at all as a language from Turkish and its spellings are not simply added as alternative spellings of Turkish entries, as Azerbaijani does, is that Ottoman linguistics is a distinct field of study. Unlike Azerbaijani in Arabic script which lives on in linguistic unity with Azerbaijani in Latin script, Turkish had a break.
Alphabet
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Ottoman Turkish entries are lemmatised in the Ottoman Turkish variant of the Perso-Arabic script, the predominant script of the empire. However, since there was no notable printing by the Arabic-writing world until the end of 18th century,[1][2] the Armenian alphabet for Turkish was heavily used in print centuries ahead. Entries in the Armenian alphabet should be handled as alternative forms merely.
Arabic script encoding
[edit]About the encoding of entries in the Arabic script the following cases should be noted:
- ه U+0647 ARABIC LETTER HEH should be used. Whenever it does not connect with the following letter, U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER should be employed, not ە U+06D5 ARABIC LETTER AE.
- ی U+06CC ARABIC LETTER FARSI YEH should be used, not ي U+064A ARABIC LETTER YEH or ى U+0649 ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA.
- ك U+0643 ARABIC LETTER KAF is used, for the dominating practice of writing and printing Ottoman Turkish resembled this shape, not ک U+06A9 ARABIC LETTER KEHEH. This differs from the practice for Azerbaijani. However the immediate ancestor of both Azerbaijani and Ottoman Turkish, Old Anatolian Turkish, uses U+0643 ARABIC LETTER KAF again.
- ه, ی, and ك should be exclusively entered, with no alternative forms just differing by encoding, since the software redirects if a user types in a Unicode variant. Likewise if an Ottoman text is typed out as quote then this encoding should be adhered to.
- The usage of گ U+06AF ARABIC LETTER GAF to represent /ɡ/ or /ɣ/ and of ڭ U+06AD ARABIC LETTER NG to represent /ŋ/ should be reserved to the
|head=parameter of the headword template whenever appropriate and of course in quotes if the quoted passage does contain such distinction. If گ and ڭ are not distinguished in quoted texts, then the distinction should not be introduced by the editor. Page titles should use ك U+0643 ARABIC LETTER KAF exclusively.
Romanisation
[edit]Our romanisation system is heavily based on the modern Turkish orthography. Note however some differences:
- Circumflex signs should not be used whenever used simply to infer the Arabic script spelling, as many scholarly works do, but here it is not needed since we have the the Arabic form right beside. They similarly should not be employed to tell vowel length, nor on final nisba î. They may however be used on top of a u whenever following k g l pronounced as /c ɟ l/.
- ك whenever inferring a pronunciation /ŋ/ should be romanised as ñ U+00F1 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE, unlike modern Turkish n.
- Devoicing, assimilation and word-final degemination should not be transcribed, e.g. بیچاقجی (bıçakcı) yet mod. bıçakçı, ولد (veled) yet mod. velet, شرانپول (şaranpol) yet şarampol, حل (hall) yet hal.
- Spaces of the original script should be preserved, e.g. فیل دیشی (fil dişi), yet mod. fildişi, etc.
- The glottal stop /ʔ/, originating from Arabic hamza and ʿayn, should be transcribed as ʼ U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, so اعتماد (iʼtimad) yet mod. itimat, فعل (fiʼl) yet mod. fiil.
- Capitalisation should not be employed.
The pronunciation section should be employed to give information that the romanisation cannot give, such as the distinction between /h/ and /x/, /ɛ/ and /e/, etc.
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Ian Dooley (2016) “Cotsen's Covert Collections: The First Illustrated Book Printed in Turkey”, in blogs.princeton.edu[1], archived from the original on 2021-07-28
- ^ Ekrem Buğra Ekinci (2015) “Myths and reality about the printing press in the Ottoman Empire”, in www.dailysabah.com[2], archived from the original on 2023-06-04