Orhan Pamuk describes the same assumption that anything in Arabic script was holy in his ‘The White Castle’, as a motivation for the survival of the manuscript that the book is theoretically based on.
Can you see the full contents of Redhouse? I can’t, maybe it’s my German IP :-/ .
Posted by Aidan Kehoe at April 30, 2007 06:01 PMYes, I have the full view (well, except for the bits Google didn't copy).
Posted by language hat at April 30, 2007 07:00 PMGoogle books has a number of older books for learning Ottoman Turkish (or simply Turkish, as it was written and used when these books were written). Unfortunately, most are evidently not available to users outside the US, do to copyright concerns. Some I found are:
Ottoman-Turkish Conversation-grammar: A Practical Method of Learning the Ottoman-Turkish Language By V. H. Hagopian (published in Heidelberg in 1907)
492 pages long, it’s actually a textbook to learn Turkish, which at the time was written in the Arabic script, but it has lots of short lessons, clear explanations, etc., and takes the reader all the way into the Arabic and Persian grammar and vocabulary used in Ottoman as well as the Turkish part of the language. You can download the text in PDF format at:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=0P4_Xsth1C75_V7YoVUqrB&id= j0u9Mw-TsyIC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=hagopian+turkish&as_brr=1#PPR 2,M1
(Should this URL be too long, just go to the Google books page and search for “Hagopian Turkish”, and it’s the first item that comes up.
There was a separate key published to the book, but that’s evidently not available on-line. Even so, this is the most user-friendly way I know to get a feel for Ottoman Turkish, even if you don’t know modern Turkish ahead of time.
There’s also another old English book for Ottoman available on-line; it’s
A Practical Grammar of the Turkish Language (as Spoken and Written), by Charles Wells, published in London in 1880. It’s not nearly as easy to learn from, but does have some interesting reading samples, as well as useful comments on style and usage, for after you’ve progressed a way in the language. It’s available at:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=05l_bbqqqcrRAAgI6sz4Ba&id= bYqvxt5wQrcC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=wells+turkish&as_brr=1#PPP4,M 1
or if that doesn’t work, go to the Google books page and search for “Wells Turkish” (which will also turn up a book of readings that Wells wrote:
The Literature of the Turks: A Turkish Chrestomathy ... with ... Translations in English (London, 1891)
Which starts out with proverbs and the like and then gradually works into more sophisticated texts.
Also, there are:
Grammatik der Türkisch-osmanischen Umgangssprache By P J. Piqueré, (Vienna, 1870)
Türkische Grammatik mit Paradigmen, Litteratur, Christomathie und Glossar By August Müller (Berlin, 1889)
Allgemeine Grammatik der türkisch-tatarischen Sprache, by Aleksandr Kazem-Bek (Leipzig, 1848)
Materialien zur Kenntnis des rumelischen Türkisch...: Türkische volksmärchen aus Adakale ... By Ignácz Kúnos (Leipzig, 1907)
Materialien zur Kenntnis des anatolischen Türkisch By Friedrich Giese (Halle, 1907)
(These last two are not Ottoman Turkish per se, but rather transcribed folklore texts.)
A small correction, though: The "big" Redhouse Turkish-English Lexicon of 1890 is not available on Google Books; the version available is the much smaller and earlier edition. The "big" one (over 2,200 pages from just Turkish to English) has been reprinted in both Turkey and Lebanon, though, and so reprint copies are usually not too hard to find in Turkey.
Posted by Forrest at April 30, 2007 08:26 PMI had a friend fluent in modern Persian, Arabic and Turkish (and Koranic Arabic) who tried to learn Ottoman literary Turkish. He may have quit too soon but he found it fearsomely difficult and never succeeded. I think that it's the same reason that contemporary Chinese scholars who are not specialists have trouble with pre-1911 classical Chinese -- both, I think, have highly artificial, intricated-crafted ways of saying even quite ordinary things.
Posted by John Emerson at April 30, 2007 10:04 PMThanks very much, Forrest!
Posted by language hat at April 30, 2007 10:29 PMThis reminds me of the time when, as a 16-year-old in Guayaquil, Ecuador, I decided to work on my Spanish by reading the school library's translation of Ivanhoe. My father had been trained in the immersion methods of the Foreign Service and was appalled, so I stopped. (It could be that would-be students of Ottoman Turkish would make better progress if they could track down a copy of The Queen's Necklace.)
Posted by Helen DeWitt at May 1, 2007 04:52 PM