The language I am learning is Istanbul Türkçe. It is the more formal variant Turkish and the official language of the modern nation-state of Turkey.
It’s ancestor, Proto-Turkic, is said to have originated around 1000BCE in the region that is now modern Mongolia. Here, however, the exact meaning of origination is not entirely clear. It seems to mean something like “spawn,” as if from the earth or the air. Naturally, this cannot be the case, for languages cannot simply appear. Instead, it is likely that it evolved from some prior manner of linguistic communication. The lack of evidence for the early history of Turkic language leaves plenty of room for speculation. Some have argued that the Turkic languages derive from a so-called Altaic language family, heavily relying on modern lexical similarities between it and the languages placed in this category, such as Korean, Mongolian, and Japanese which average around 20 percent. Other evidence proponents of this theory cite are the grammatical similarities between the ways of speech. While this theory is still accepted by some, it has been heavily criticized. Critics, taking a more historical view, argue that whatever similarities exist between these languages are more likely to have formed by contact between their speakers. By comparison, one does not call English a Romance language. The theory of contact instead of relation is made more probable by the nomadic lives most Turkic-speaking groups lived and some still live. The earliest Turkic writing was then written with runes. With Chinese westward expansion (notably marked by conflict between Muslim lead armies and Chinese armies in central Asia), a group of Turkic-speaking people named the Oğhuz migrated South East into the lands of the Abbasid Caliphate, many of whom had already converted to Islam. By this time, also, the Abbasid Army had been manned by Turkic-speaking mercenaries. These two assimilating forces, religion and political integration, led to Turkic-speaking groups adopting components of Arabic and Persian speech. With the disintegration of central authority in Baghdad, the militarily empowered Turkic-speaking rulers began establishing their own increasingly autonomous polities. One of these polities, that of the Seljuks would push the frontier of the Muslim-ruled world into Anatolia at the expanse of the Roman Empire. They continued and contributed to the earlier mixing of Turkic, Arabic, and Persian. Turkish was then written in the Persian variant of Arabic script. After the Mongols invaded, the much-weakened Seljuk ruled area existed only in Anatolia. After its eventual disintegration, local chiefs established smaller polities, known to scholars as military-patronage states. These heavily Turkic polities would continue the tradition of language mixing. One of these polities, that of Osman Bey, would grow into the Ottoman Empire. The hybrid language they used, the language of the court, is known as Ottoman Turkish to English-speakers. Outside of the court, however, non-elites spoke various regional dialects known to the elites as rough or vulgar Turkish.
After the first World War and founding of the modern nation-state of Turkey, the new elites of the state adopted the conflicting ideals of romantic nationalism and Westernization. They saw a need to create modern Turkish based on vulgar Turkish, which they decided was more ethnically pure than the language of the court. A political motive for these changes could be found in the need to disassociate the new regime from the old. In centralizing power, the new elites also sought to undermine the power of the religious establishment by promoting secularism and identifying with the “civilized” world. They created a committee transform Turkic speech into a single, west-oriented, language. The committee changed the alphabet to a Latin-based script and removed as many “oriental” (Arabic and Persian) words as possible. It preferred the use of Turkic alternatives and where they did not exist, they created them. These reforms may have been successful politically, and Ottoman did become a dead language, however, the new language they created, Turkish, was not everything they had hoped. Some people refused to change their speech and to this day, the words created by the committee exist alongside a loan-word more rooted in Turkic speech. Further, most of the people in the nation-state have a daily form of speech and a formal way of speaking. Their daily speech evolved from vulgar Turkic and later was influenced by modern Turkish. The exception of Istanbul, where modern Turkish is closest to the daily language. This is the language taught in academia and the one I am learning.
Considering this vast history of Turkic speakers allows me the patience for irregularities in the language. It turns them from nuisances and senseless flaws to things that can be admired and understood. I have learned that even in the Turkified Turkic of today, it helps to know some Arabic, though it is not necessary. In my Arabic class just a few days ago, we learned about irregular plurals such as كتاب (kitab) which changes into كتب ( kutub) in the plural. This explains why in modern Turkish the word for library, Kütübhane is not kitabhane.
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