Abstract
This chapter examines the practice of writing linguistically Turkish texts in the Armenian script in order to excavate different registers of cross-cultural hybridity, long overlooked by nationalist views of Ottoman literary production. Thereby, this chapter offers an analysis of primary sources from different genres to illuminate the diversity of the Armeno-Turkish corpus and its multiple entanglements with other languages and cultures, as well as to demonstrate what kind of cross-cultural negotiations might have played a role in creating them. Finally, it locates the phenomenon of writing in the alphabet of the “Other” within a broader Mediterranean context to shed light on analogous digraphic practices.
I would like to thank my colleague Dzovinar Derderian for her insightful suggestions on this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Maykel Verkuyten, The Social Psychology of Ethnic Identity (Hove and New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 150.
- 2.
The invention of the Armenian alphabet is generally thought to have been one of the two or three most important events in the history of the nation, along with the adoption of Christianity. It is even argued that the nation has survived thanks to the invention of Armenian letters. See Anne M. Avakian, Armenian Folklore Bibliography, University of California Publications: Catalogs and Bibliographies (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994), xvi; Boghos Levon Zekiyan, “Christianity to Modernity,” in The Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of National Identity, ed. Edmund Herzig and Marina Kurkchiyan, Caucasus World: Peoples of the Caucasus (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 51. The assymetry between Armenians’ and Turks’ relationship to language and script, however, is striking. Armenians wrote more than ten languages in their script whereas Turks used more than ten alphabets to write their language. This might also bring into question especially the ownership of the Turkish language. For such a perspective, see Jennifer Manoukian, “The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora,” Jadaliyya, accessed September 8, 2017, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/19480/the-legacy-of-turkish-in-the-armenian-diaspora.
- 3.
For instance, Sebouh Aslanian has rightly used the terms “hyphenated,” “macaronic,” “hybrid,” and “heterographic” to describe Armeno-Turkish writings, language, and specific works. Sebouh D. Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites’: Abbot Mkhitar’s 1727 Armeno-Turkish Grammar of Modern Western Armenian,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 25 (2016): 54–86.
- 4.
Friedrich von Kraelitz-Greifenhorst, “Ermeni Harfleriyle Türkçe Hakkında Çalışmalar,” trans. Hakan T. Karateke, Kebikeç, no. 4 (1996): 6. This paper was first read at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1911 and was published as a booklet under the title Studien zum Armenisch-Türkischen a year later.
- 5.
See, Murat Cankara, “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet,” Middle Eastern Studies 51, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 1–16, doi: 10.1080/00263206.2014.951038
- 6.
Here I must note that, with the growing popularity of Armeno-Turkish as a subject matter, manuscripts and handwritten material have begun to surface that will probably outnumber printed material in the near future.
- 7.
For Muslim/Turkish intellectuals’ relationship to Armenian script and Armeno-Turkish, see, Cankara, “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters.”
- 8.
Hasmik Stepanyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Süreli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası, 1727–1968 [Bibliographie des livres et de la presse Armeno-Turque] (Istanbul: Turkuaz Yayınları, 2005). See also, Haig Berberian, “La Littérature Arméno-Turque,” in Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, ed. Louis Bazin, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1964), 809–819.
- 9.
Günil Özlem Ayaydın Cebe, “19. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Toplumu ve Basılı Türkçe Edebiyat: Etkileşimler, Değişimler, Çeşitlilik [19th Century Ottoman Society and Printed Turkish Literature: Interactions, Exchanges, and Diversity]” (Ph.D. diss., Bilkent University, 2009), 315.
- 10.
Apart from the pioneers in the field, whom I mention throughout this chapter, there has been an obvious increase in the scholarship on Armeno-Turkish publications in the past two decades. For example, Garo Aprahamyan, Laurent Mignon, and Börte Sagaster have contributed to scholarship on Aremno-Turkish in the following volume: Evangelia Balta and Mehmet Ölmez, eds., Between Religion and Language: Turkish-Speaking Christians, Jews and Greek-Speaking Muslims and Catholics in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren Yayınları, 2011). Among the latest studies see especially Laurent Mignon, “A Pilgrim’s Progress: Armenian and Kurdish Literatures in Turkish and the Rewriting of Literary History,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 2 (2014): 182–200; Murat Cankara, “Reading Akabi, (Re-)Writing History: On the Questions of Currency and Interpretation of Armeno-Turkish Fiction,” in Cultural Encounters in the Turkish-Speaking Communities of the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2014), 53–75; Masayuki Ueno, “One Script, Two Languages: Garabed Panosian and His Armeno-Turkish Newspapers in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 4 (2016): 605–22; Aslanian, “Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites.”
- 11.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 36–37.
- 12.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, ed. and trans. John T. Scott (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), 289.
- 13.
Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), 181–183.
- 14.
“Diese Armenier kann man in der Tat christliche Türken nennen, so ganz haben sie die Sitten und selbst die Sprache jener herrschenden Nation angenommen” [These Armenians, as a matter of fact, could be called “Christian Turks” as they adopted all the manners, and even the language, of the ruling nation]. Helmuth Moltke, Briefe über Zustände und Begebenheiten in der Türkei aus den Jahren 1835 bis 1839 (Berlin: Posen und Brombert, E. S. Mittler, 1841), 32, http://archive.org/details/briefeberzust00molt.
- 15.
For two different accounts on the Turkish case, see Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford, UK ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 16.
Nils Langer and Agnete Nesse, “Linguistic Purism,” in The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, ed. Juan M. Hernández-Campoy and J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 610.
- 17.
Langer and Nesse, “Linguistic Purism,” 611.
- 18.
The term was “reactivated to describe a cultural [phenomenon]” in the twentieth century. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 2005 [1995]), 5.
- 19.
For a critique of “cultural preservationism” and “praise of contamination,” see Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Contamination,” in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 101–13. I would like to express my gratitude for Michael Pifer who brought Appiah’s work to my attention.
- 20.
Ömer Seyfettin (1884–1920) and Müfide Ferit [Tek] (1892–1971) are just two examples.
- 21.
The matter is even more complicated in the Armenian case. The practice of writing Turkish in Armenian letters is attributed to Protestant Armenians, Catholic Armenians or missionaries in different sources. Especially for Catholics, “non-nationalness” is emphasized. See Hrach‘ya Achaṛyan, Hayots‘ lezvi patmut‘yun, vol. 2 (Yerevan: Haypethrat, 1951), 265; Agop J. Hacikyan, The Heritage of Armenian Literature: Volume III: From the Eighteenth Century to Modern Times, vol. 3 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 59; and Krikor Beledian, “Ötekilerin Dilinde Yazılmış Bir Tanıklığı Tercüme Etmek” [Traduire un témoignage écrit dans la langue des autres] in Geri Dönüşü Yok: Bir Babanın Güncesinde ve Kızının Belleğinde Ermeni Soykırımı, by Vahram Altounian and Janine Altounian, trans. Renan Akman (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2014), 98.
- 22.
For transliteration I have used the system used by the Library of Congress. I have left names familiar to the English-speaking world, or those already used in publications in Latinized forms, as they are.
- 23.
Ahmet Davutoğlu, “Turkish-Armenian Relations in the Process of De-Ottomanization or ‘Dehistoricization’: Is a ‘Just Memory’ Possible?,” Turkish Policy Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 27.
- 24.
For another Armeno-Turkish text which, in this case, waited for around three centuries to be translated, see Eremia Kʻēōmiwrchean, Eremya Chelebi Kömürjian’s Armeno-Turkish Poem “The Jewish Bride,” ed. Avedis Krikor Sanjian and Andreas Tietze (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981).
- 25.
G. Kh. Step‘anyan, “Aṛajaban,” in Agapii patmut‘yuně (Yerevan: Gitut‘yunneri Akademiayi Hrataragch‘ut‘yun, 1953), 23–25.
- 26.
Johann Strauss, in a number of articles, emphasizes the plurality of Ottoman print culture and promotes a generally comparative outlook on the cultural production of different Ottoman millets. See Johann Strauss, “Romanlar, Ah! O Romanlar! Les Débuts de La Lecture Moderne Dans l’Empire Ottoman (1850–1900),” TURCICA XXVI (1994): 125–63 and Johann Strauss, “Who Read What In the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th Centuries)?,” Arabic Middle Eastern Literatures 6 (2003): 39–76. See also Evangelia Balta’s analysis of Turkish texts written in the Greek script, known as Karamanlidika. Evangelia Balta, “Périodisation et Typologie de La Production Des Livres Karamanlis,” Bulletin of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies 12 (1997): 129–153.
- 27.
Davutoğlu, “Turkish-Armenian Relations,” 21.
- 28.
Kraelitz-Greifenhorst, “Ermeni Harfleriyle Türkçe Hakkında Çalışmalar,” 14.
- 29.
Beledian, “Ötekilerin Dilinde Yazılmış Bir Tanıklığı Tercüme Etmek,” 97–98.
- 30.
According to Achaṛyan, Kraelitz-Greifenhorst had not only mistransliterated words in Armenian script but also had misread some Turkish words as well; therefore, Achaṛyan posits, he had reached the wrong conclusion that Armeno-Turkish was a distinct dialect with its own vocabulary and grammar. Achaṛyan, Hayots‘ lezvi patmut‘yun, 2: 267–268.
- 31.
“One of the aims of the present publication is to lay the proof/evidence that there is no distinct variety of Ottoman Turkish which belongs to a social or national group and is called Armeno-Turkish, as far as the printings that are left behind are concerned. We are rather dealing with a peculiarity of Ottoman Turkish, which, only thanks to the script in which it was written, gained a particular quality.” Armin. Hetzer, Dačkerēn-Texte: Eine Chrestomathie Aus Armenierdrucken Des 19. Jahrhunderts in Türkischer Sprache (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1987), 12.
- 32.
Moreover, the relationship between pronounciation and orthography has not been elucidated as yet. At the same time, the orthographic variation in Armeno-Turkish texts is overwhelming. One can find the same word spelled multiple ways even on the same page. This is because words are usually written as they are pronounced, and thus, heard. Yet there are cases in which the Arabic ortography is followed, that is, transliterated, and Armenian letters are slightly modified in order to render a sound that does not exist in Armenian pronunciation. Therefore it is not always that easy to comment on the accents of Turcophone Armenians. This, being a political issue at the same time (late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ Turkish popular performances abound in Armenian stereotypes harassed and mocked for not speaking Turkish [properly]), is a serious hindrance to the efforts to define the phenomenon.
- 33.
Hybridity in syntax is a much harder issue to deal with. For a salient example, see Hovsēp‘ Marush’s Pir Sēfil Zēvchē [A miserable wife] (Istanbul, 1868), in which he writes in Turkish using a modern Armenian sentence structure. This, however, is a matter that deserves an independent analysis.
- 34.
Achaṛyan, Hayots‘ lezvi patmut‘yun, 2: 260–261.
- 35.
Achaṛyan, Hayots‘ lezvi patmut‘yun, 2: 271.
- 36.
Sebouh D. Aslanian, in a recent article on Abbot Mekhitar’s 1727 dated Armeno-Turkish grammar of western Armenian, has argued that an uncritical account of the language “would focus on the intrinsic attributes of the Armenian script and see it not only as a utilitarian medium of communication but also as a sacral boundary marker of collective identity.” Aslanian in particular has critiqued an overly general assumption that the Armenian script had for Armeno-Turkish writers “sacrosanct qualities” and therefore could have played role as a “boundary maintenance mechanism,” noting that this viewpoint “lacks any empirical basis in history.” Aslanian, “Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites,” 68–69.
- 37.
Hovsēp‘ Vardanean’s [Hovsep Vartanyan, later Vartan Pasha] Agapi Hik‘eayēsi [The story of Akabi] (1851) and Pōshpōghaz Pir Atēm [A garrulous person] (1852), Hovhannēs H. Balěgchean’s Gaṛnik, Kiwliwnea vē Tigraněn Tēhshēt‘lu Vēfat‘lēri Hik‘eayēsi [The story of Karnig, Gülünya, and Dikran’s horrible death] (Istanbul, 1863), Hovsēp‘ Marush’s Pir Sēfil Zēvchē [A miserable wife] (Istanbul, 1868), and Vijen T‘ilk‘iean’s Kiwlinea yakhōt k‘ēnti kēōriwnmēyērēk‘ hēr k‘ēsi kēōrēn pir gěz [Gülünya or the invisible girl who would see everybody] (Istanbul, 1868).
- 38.
Kevork Pamukciyan, Biyografileriyle Ermeniler (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2003), 294.
- 39.
Simōn Aṛakʿelean, 1915 Engare Vuguat‘ě vē Mēnfilikʿ Khatʿěratʿěm (Istanbul: S. Ōhanean Mat‘paasě, 1921). The book has been recently transliterated into Latin alphabet and published. Simon Arakelyan, Ankara Vukuatı: Menfilik Hatıralarım, ed. and trans. Murat Cankara (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2017).
- 40.
For a detailed account of the novel, see Murat Cankara, “Reading Akabi, (Re-)Writing History: On the Questions of Currency and Interpretation of Armeno-Turkish Fiction,” in Cultural Encounters in the Turkish-Speaking Communities of the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2014), 53–75.
- 41.
This booklet has been recently transliterated into Latin alphabet and published. Hovsep Vartanyan, Boşboğaz Bir Âdem, ed. and trans. Murat Cankara (Istanbul: Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2017).
- 42.
Abbot Mekhitar (1675–1749) was the founder of a Catholic Armenian monastic congregation which was established on the island of San Lazzaro. Another branch was later founded in Vienna. The Mekhitarists, with their printing press and erudite scholarship, played an eminent role in facilitating a national awakening in Armenian culture. They are also known for a rich variety of Armeno-Turkish publications.
- 43.
Hovsēp‘ Vardanean, T‘arikhi Nabōlēon Pōnabart‘ē, imbēratʿoru ahalii Fransa (Gōst‘antaniyē: Miwhēntisean Hōvannēsin T‘apkhanēsintē, 1855), 3–4.
- 44.
Yet the promotion of vernacular use in Armenian had begun a century earlier. Abbot Mekhitar published a grammar of the vernacular in Armeno-Turkish in 1727 as “Some pious individuals have pleaded with me on numerous occasions to compose the declension of nouns, the conjugation of verbs, and the state of other parts of the grammar of the vernacular language which is spoken by Armenians who live in Asia Minor.” Quoted in Aslanian, “Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites,” 85. Khach‘atur Abovean (1809–1848), a Russian-Armenian, had already written Verk‘ Hayastani (wounds of Armenia) in his local dialect. The book, usually regarded as “the first Armenian novel,” was written in 1841 but published in 1858. For an English translation of the preface, see Hacikyan, The Heritage of Armenian Literature Volume III, 214–218. Moreover, vernacular Armenian and local dialects had been used in the press, as well as in translations from western literature such as Robinson Crusoe. Marc Nichanian, Ages et usages de la langue arménienne (Paris: Editions Entente, 1989), 290–304. For a general account on the vernacularization processes of languages in the Ottoman Empire and a critique of western influence on these processes, see Michiel Leezenberg, “The Vernacular Revolution: Reclaiming Early Modern Grammatical Traditions in the Ottoman Empire,” History of Humanities 1, no. 2 (2016): 251–75. Leezenberg did not touch upon Armeno-Turkish texts, such as Abbot Mekhitar’s 1727 grammar of vernacular Armenian, which is a serious shortcoming.
- 45.
Johann Strauss, “The Millets and the Ottoman Language: The Contribution of Ottoman Greeks to Ottoman Letters (19th–20th Centuries),” Die Welt Des Islams 35 (1995): 212–215.
- 46.
M. Kayahan Özgül, XIX. Asrın Benzersiz Bir Politekniği: Münif Paşa (Istanbul: Elips Kitap, 2005), 110–111.
- 47.
Step‘anyan notes that the book was intended for well-read Turks. G. Kh. Step‘anyan, “Aṛajaban,” in Agapi: Vep (Yerevan: Sovetakan Grogh Hratarakch‘ut‘yun, 1979), 11.
- 48.
These “philosophical letters” were collected in ten volumes, the first of which was published around the mid-eighteenth century under the pen name Conte Agostino Santi Pupieni. The letters, more than 200 in number, were on various topics such as science, education, philosophy, nature, morality, etc. The translator, H. Erēmean, was the translator-in-chief of the Danish Embassy in Istanbul. In the preface he stresses that his translation was a selective one and he preferred pieces, mostly on education, that were “necessary for the reader” and appropriate for the “nation’s customs.”
- 49.
Giuseppe Antonio Costantini, Fasělk‘eari mēk‘t‘uplēr, trans. H. Erēmean, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Venice: S. Ghazar Manast‘ěrě, 1837), 10.
- 50.
Albio C. Cassio, “The Langauge of Doric Comedy,” in The Language of Greek Comedy, ed. Andres Willi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 55. For a theoretical account, see Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Arkana, 1989), 27–50.
- 51.
In a diglossic situation, the H(igh) variety is usually associated with the “written,” “literary,” “formal” and “classical,” whereas the L(ow) variety with the “spoken,” “informal” and “vulgar.” For more, see Ronald Wardhaugh and Janet M. Fuller, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 7th ed. (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 90–92.
- 52.
Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, ed. and trans. S. H. Butcher (London: Macmillan, 1898), 23.
- 53.
Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, 21.
- 54.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 72.
- 55.
In the Mekhitarist archives in Venice there are 25 manuscripts of plays written in Turkish (in the Armenian script) and in Turkish mixed with Modern Armenian. Yervant Baret Manok, Doğu ile Batı Arasında San Lazarro Sahnesi: Ermeni Mıkhitarist Manastırı ve İlk Türkçe Tiyatro Oyunları (Istanbul: bgst Yayınları, 2013), 53. This translation is based on an MA thesis titled “Gli inizi del teatro armeno a San Lazzaro in Venezia e le rappresentazioni in Turco.”
- 56.
For a historical account of Armenian theater on the island of San Lazzaro, see Boğos Levon Zekiyan, Venedik’ten İstanbul’a Modern Ermeni Tiyatrosunun İlk Adımları: Ermeni Rönesansı ve Mıkhitaristlerin Tiyatro Faaliyetleri [The first steps of modern Armenian theater and the movement of Armenian rebirth in the eighteenth century], trans. Boğos Çalgıcıoğlu (Istanbul: bgst Yayınları, 2013).
- 57.
Manok, Doğu ile Batı Arasında San Lazarro Sahnesi, 40–41, 43, 51; Zekiyan, Venedik’ten İstanbul’a Modern Ermeni Tiyatrosunun İlk Adımları, 25–27. Manok argues that one important reason why Mekhitarist priests preferred Turkish for writing their plays was the fact that they wanted “to employ a realistic language in their comedies.” Since the plays’ dramatis personæ included Jews, Turks and Greeks, as well as Armenians, it would not have been natural if they all talked in Armenian; hence the playwright chose to make them speak in their respective Turkish dialect. Manok, Doğu ile Batı Arasında San Lazarro Sahnesi, 53.
- 58.
Murat Cankara, “İmparatorluk ve Roman: Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Romanları Osmanlı/Türk Edebiyat Tarihyazımında Konumlandırmak” [Empire and Novel: Placing Armeno-Turkish Novels in Ottoman/Turkish Literary Historiography]” (Ph.D. diss., Bilkent University, 2011), 303–355.
- 59.
For details, see Cankara, “Reading Akabi, (Re-)Writing History: On the Questions of Currency and Interpretation of Armeno-Turkish Fiction.”
- 60.
Avram Galanti, Vatandaş: Türkçe Konuş! Yahut Türkçenin Tamimi Meselesi (Tarihi, İçtimai, Siyasi Tedkik) (Istanbul: Hüsn-i Tabiat Matbaası, 1928), 14.
- 61.
For more, see O. Hegyi, “Minority and Restricted Uses of the Arabic Alphabet: The Aljamiado Phenomenon,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 99, no. 2 (June 1979): 262–269.
- 62.
David Damrosch , who coined the term, describes how writing systems could constitute and penetrate boundaries in the Ancient Near East. He argues that “literary production was shaped as much by the spread of scripts as by the spread of particular languages.” David Damrosch, “Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and the Formation of World Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 68 (2007): 218.
- 63.
A striking example of a hyphenated identity as creator of culture in the Mediterranean context was Terence. Born a slave in North Africa, he was taken to Rome where he adapted Greek comedies, as well as composed Latin ones, which had a significant impact on literary production accross the continent in the centuries to follow. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Contamination,” 111.
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Cankara, M. (2018). Armeno-Turkish Writing and the Question of Hybridity. In: Babayan, K., Pifer, M. (eds) An Armenian Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_8
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