Ottoman Turkish

The Turkish of medieval Anatolia and the early Ottoman state, written in the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Within this atlas’s window the language is what philology calls Old Anatolian Turkish, the Oghuz Turkish that became a written language in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anatolia, in Yunus Emre’s poems, Âşık Paşa’s Garibnâme, and Ahmedî’s İskendernâme with its appended chronicle of the House of Osman, the earliest Ottoman history; “Ottoman Turkish” names the same tradition as the Ottoman court carried it forward, and this file uses the familiar name for the stage the atlas actually touches, ending at 1453. Its speakers called the language Türkçe, and its literati apologized for writing it, Âşık Paşa complaining that no one cared for the Turkish tongue while Persian held the courts.

The script is the Arabic alphabet with the Persian additions, applied to a vowel-rich language it fit badly; Turkish’s eight vowels squeeze into the script’s few signs, so romanizations of early texts are partly reconstructive, and this atlas uses the conventional modern Turkish values (Anadolu, İznik, Edirne) beside the Arabic-script originals. Names taken from Arabic and Persian keep their learned spellings while their pronunciations turn Turkish, which is exactly the process several entries here document; the language enters the atlas late, but it is the one in which the atlas’s terminal date, 1453, was a beginning rather than an end.

@misc{onomastikon-ottoman-turkish,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Ottoman Turkish},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/ottoman-turkish}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}