English Writers on the Turkish Language, 1670-1832

OS MA NL1 ARAŞT 1RM ALAR 1 VII-VIII l~DITORS İSMAİL OF ~'HIS E . ERONSAL - SPECI AL JSSUE Ca::RISTOPHER FERRARD Ca::RISTINE WOODHEAD :. THE JOURNAL OF OTTOMAN STUDIES VII-VIU ı ı ı ir · İstanbul - 1988 ENGLISH WRITERS ON THE TURKISH LANGUAGE, 1670- 1832 Geoffrey Lewis . The first Englishman to write a Tuı:kish gram.mar, albeit in Latin, w as William Seaman. Born in 1606 (the. Dictionary of National Biography does not say where), lıe matriculated at Balliol College, . Oxford,. in 1623-4:, graduating Bachelor of Arts at the same time, and b.ecame a Ma;:ıter of Arts in 1626. Two years later he ·o btained the living of Upton Scudamore in Wiltshire. He was rector of it until his death on 7 November 1680, and there he was burled. His parishioners w~re doubtless happy to have him back at .Iast. Shortly after his .appointment, he travelled to Istanbul in the service of Sir Peter Wych, who was British Arnbassadar there from 1628 to 1639. In 1652, Seaman published The re·i gn of sultan Orchan second king o{the TurksJ a translation from Sa'deddin. He dedicated it to Lady Jane Merick, formerly Sir Peter's wife, giving as one of his reasons for doing so, 'because (dııring my youth) I ·b egan the study gf the Turkish language while I was a ..servant of your family.' We may conjecture that he served them as chaplain and as tutar to the~r çhildr~n. · In 1650 he began a Turkish translation of the New Testament, in fully pointed Arabic script, which was published. at Oxford in 1666. There is a small mysıtery 'here. The eiıtry in. the Bodleian catalogue runs : 'Testamentum novum. Turcice redditum. Opera Gu. Seaman. [In the Nogai dialect] .. .' -B ut Nogai it is not, as two specimen sentences will show. 'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was Wi•th God, and the Word was God' comes out as: bidöyette idi sakhun [sic for sukhan] ve sakhun Allahta idi ve 84 Allah idi. 'All: things were made by Him' : mecmü'lar anu11 ile [yiikhüd anu11 elinde] mevcüd oldilar. A .possible explanation is that the · catalogue entry may have been the work of Thomas Hyde, Bodley's Librarian from 1665 to 1701, or of sameone equally learned and cantankerous, who chose this way of registering l;ıis contempt for Seaman's -dog-Ottoı:nan. Seaman's Grammatica Linguae Turcicae was published by the Oxford University Press in 1670. Here, from his Preface, is his a{!count of why he wrote it:· It is known to all how troublesome to all neighbouring nations and :rightly feared by them has been the . power of the Turks from many years back, nor can it be doubted that it would strike terror into other nations· further removed if they were to win dominion over the Mediterranean Sea, which they largely surround. To which, now that the island of Crete has .been lately [1669] subjugated, the road is open excessively wi-de ... N ot yet, however, are we sufficiently well acquainted with their affairs ... because their language ... has hitherto . remained unknown ·to Chrislians and neglected. Impelled by these considerations and principally by this concern, ... ·that the Christian faith and the truth . of the Gospeı be communicated to them in thel.r ·vernacular tongue ... I have conipleted this Grammar and committed it to type ... What the .· 'l'urkish langiıage is like, this Grammar shows... · · AlthoU:gh the teXt is in Latin, With the Turkish · in Arabic characters, the ·book is paginated back to front and right to left, as if it were wholly in Arabic characters. Seaman is not very good on phonetics. He does note the unvoicing of d afte.r an unvoiced consonant, for example he remarks that haqzqatde is ·pron~unced Hakikatte and. he notes too the voicing of t before a vowel, as in giderem or · güf,er·in from g·itmek. But he lists only five .vowel~ : eja, i, o/u, that is, the three vowels marked in Arabic writing, with alternative pronunciations for fatha and damma. He . transeribes the word for 'your sons' as Ogullerungnuz and for 'our fathers' as .Babalerumiız. He is aware· of ~he existence of vowel 85 harmon:y insofar·as it ·is marked by suffixes whose finalleiter may be qiif ·or kaf. So · when speaking of the aorist negative :· 'Verbs which make their infinitive in rnek ·h ave these marks of negation : Mem, Mezem, Mez ·and Me. Those making it in maq are recognized by these marks of negation : Mam-, Mazem, Maz, Ma.' Except . in the first section, where he deseribes the sounds, he rarely indicates the pronunciation of the words he cites. I shall therefor.e beg no questions .but shall employ an unrefined transliteration, in italic, of the words he gives in Arabic script. Turkish words in roman type -are as he transliterates them. It is clear that he was priınarily concerned with the written language. His examples, as he says in his Preface, ·are ta:ken from the best authors. One might ·hazard a guess that he was a shy man. It is not surprising that on the few occasions when he offers same siı;nple conversational sentences they do not carry conviction. As an e~~mple of the use of i _ le, he of.fers anlaru'l'J ile oturma, 'Do not sit with them,' although he adds 'alsa read as anlar ile/ ·Same of the questionable information :he supplies m ay be ·put down to oversight. Having said that adjectives ca:nnot be used without a noun, he la:ter states that adjectives whose nouns are not e;ı.cpressed are declined like nouns. But often his mistakes are due to a : ıack of familiarity with the spoken language. He · observes that ııouns ending in vowels, or, as he puts iÇ, in eli.f, waw, he, and ya make their genitive in ni11 or nu'l'J. While .recognizing that final rwiiw oı· he ~ay :be consonants, he says, 'I have seen, though rarely, words eı:ıding in y!i without ·the chararcteristic n in the genitive as in nehiyu1J qifidesi budur, «the :rule of negation iı:ı this». Had he thought of asking a Turk to re~d the words to 'him, he would have realized that 'negation' was nehy not nehı: so · that there was no need to postuiate an exception to the rule. He lists the cases of the noun ı,ı.s ı?ix in number, including the vocative- Ya ata 'O father!'- but not the locative. He mentions the suffix de, not as · a ca.Se ending but as a preposition. 'It must be noticed that the prepositions (if it be permissible so to call them) are placed not before but after their cases, though same are suffixed to them and others are separate'. He gives the 'prepositions whi ch 86 are affixed to the stern of the word' as de) den) siz or .~uz) and ce. He says de means 'iiı, at, by, concerning,' though the last meaning is· not justified by his example (ilm-i felek beyaninde) '·concerning the science of astronomy.' It is hard to see why he does not ·call the locative a case, a concept surely farnillar to him from Latin, and why he lists den as both case-ending and 'preposition'. He gives the co~parative in rek/rak) which was in full use in his century, and he notes that eyurek is rarer than yelc and yekrek. For the suffixed pronoun of the thir (...truncated)