This represents the first modern introduction to literary Ottoman available in English. The author has devised this textbook to provide a course of lessons, readings and exercises to take the student from beginner to intermediate level. The book features numerous readings taken from historiography, historical, literary, journalistic and legal sources from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This will be an essential tool for Ottomanists and other scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines that include Ottoman history and literature, language, art, music and architecture of the former empire.
This represents the first modern introduction to literary Ottoman available in English. The author has devised this textbook to provide a course of lessons, readings and exercises to take the student from beginner to intermediate level. The book features numerous readings taken from historiography, historical, literary, journalistic and legal sources from the 16th to the 20th century. This will be an essential tool for Ottomanists and other scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines that include Ottoman history and literature, language, art, music and architecture of the former empire.
The Ottoman empire as a political entity comprised most of the present Middle East (with the principal exception of Iran), north Africa and south-eastern Europe. For over 500 years, until its disintegration during World War I, it encompassed a diverse range of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities with varying political and cultural backgrounds. Yet, was there such a thing as an ‘Ottoman world’ beyond the principle of sultanic rule from Istanbul? Ottoman authority might have been established largely by military conquest, but how was it maintained for so long, over such distances and so many disparate societies? How did provincial regions relate to the imperial centre and what role was played in this by local elites? What did it mean in practice, for ordinary people, to be part of an ‘Ottoman world’? Arranged in five thematic sections, with contributions from thirty specialist historians, The Ottoman World addresses these questions, examining aspects of the social and socio-ideological composition of this major pre-modern empire, and offers a combination of broad synthesis and detailed investigation that is both informative and intended to raise points for future debate. The Ottoman World provides a unique coverage of the Ottoman empire, widening its scope beyond Istanbul to the edges of the empire, and offers key coverage for students and scholars alike.
Traces the history of the concepts of civility and civilization in nineteenth-century Europe and Asia and explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups.
The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from southern Iran to the Arctic Ocean and from the Balkans to the great wall of China. There are currently 20 literary languages in the group, the most important among them being Turkish with over 70 million speakers; other major languages covered include Azeri, Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Noghay, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, Yakut, Yellow Uyghur and languages of Iran and South Siberia. The Turkic Languages is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family. Seen from a linguistic typology point of view, Turkic languages are particularly interesting because of their astonishing morphosyntactic regularity, their vast geographical distribution, and their great stability over time. This volume builds upon a work which has already become a defining classic of Turkic language study. The present, thoroughly revised edition updates and augments those authoritative accounts and reflects recent and ongoing developments in the languages themselves, as well as our further enhanced understanding of the relations and patterns of influence between them. The result is the fruit of decades-long experience in the teaching of the Turkic languages, their philology and literature, and also of a wealth of new insights into the linguistic phenomena and cultural interactions defining their development and use, both historically and in the present day. Each chapter combines modern linguistic analysis with traditional historical linguistics; a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. Written by an international team of experts, The Turkic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, Turcology, and Near Eastern and Oriental Studies.
International politics often requires two or more languages. The resulting interlingual relations mean translation, either by interpreters who are quite literally in the middle of conversations, or by bilingual statesmen who negotiate internationally in one language and then legitimize domestically in another. Since no two languages are the same, what can be argued in one language may be impossible in another. Political concepts can thus be significantly reformulated in the translation process. State of Translation examines this phenomenon using the case of how 19th-century Ottoman and later Turkish statesmen struggled to reconcile their arguments in external languages (French, then English) with those in their internal language (Ottoman, later Turkish), and in the process further entangled them. Einar Wigen shows how this process structured social relations between the Ottoman state and its interlocutors, both domestically and internationally, and shaped the dynamics of Turkish relations with Europe.
The purpose of the present work is twofold. Its primary aim is to study the language, composition, structure and orthographical features of civil status documents issued in Harar during the Egyptian administration in order to facilitate research of these documents, which include records of marriage con- tracts, divorces and manumissions. Secondarily, a preliminary presentation of the documents’ contents is also the objective of this study, appreciating their value as a historical source meriting a future edition and translation.
The volume brings together contributions by scholars working in different theoretical frameworks interested in systematic explanation of language change and the interrelation between current linguistic theories and modern analytical tools and methodology. Τhe integrative basis of all work is the special focus on phenomena at the interface of semantics and syntax and the implications of corpus-based, quantitative analyses for researching diachrony.
The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world’s languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term ‘binominal lexeme’ is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon.
The period between the 1880s and the 1920s was a time of momentous changes in the Ottoman Empire. It was also an age of literary experiments, of which autobiography forms a part. This book analyses Turkish autobiographical narratives describing the part of their authors’ lives that was spent while the Ottoman Empire still existed. The texts studied in this book were written in the cultural context of the Turkish Republic, which went to great lengths to disassociate itself from the empire and its legacy. This process has only been criticised and partially reversed in very recent times, the resurging interest in autobiographical texts dealing with the "old days" by the Turkish reading public being part of a wider, renewed regard for Ottoman legacies. Among the analysed texts are autobiographies by writers, journalists, soldiers and politicians, including classics like Halide Edip Adıvar and Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, but also texts by authors virtually unknown to Western readers, such as Ahmed Emin Yalman. While the official Turkish republican discourse went towards a dismissal of the imperial past, autobiographical narratives offer a more balanced picture. From the earliest memories and personal origins of the authors, to the conflict and violence that overshadowed private lives in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, this book aims at showing examples of how the authors painted what one of them called "images of a past world."
