Abstract
The linguistic stock for the names adopted during the application of the Surname Law came from a variety of sources. In the late Ottoman decades archeological findings and the discovery of manuscripts repositioned Turkish in the evolutionary thinking of the time. The late Ottoman simplification efforts and the purist language reform of the 1930s utilized these findings and manuscripts. After the romanization of the alphabet in 1928, the radical language reform efforts from 1932-1934 involved the purge of Arabic and Persian elements from Turkish, and also involved the mobilization of the public to collect folk idioms and spoken vernaculars for the Tarama Dergisi, a glossary of equivalents to Ottoman Turkish. The Turkish History Thesis claimed that Turks were the ancestors of all the brachycephalic peoples, and by implication the rightful inhabitants of Anatolia. The disputed Sun Language Theory of 1936 claimed that Turkish was the ancestor of all languages. Surname booklets, which were written to help citizens produce unique Turkish surnames, were a product of these processes, replicating the methods of the language reform, and putting into circulation a stock of morphemes, and phonemes that would eventually transform the onomastic texture of Turkey’s populace.
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- 1.
For further reading on the publishing of French books in the Ottoman Empire, see Strauss, J. 1999. Le livre français d’Istanbul (1730–1908). Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditeranée, (Livres et lecture dans le monde ottoman). 87–88: 277–301.
- 2.
Other Tanzimat writers who were followers of Namık Kemal in this regard include Ali Suavi, Ziya Paşa, Ahmed Mithat, and Şemseddin Sami (Levend 1949, 113).
- 3.
In the Reform period, the languages listed above gained semi-official status. They were used for administrative purposes in official multilingual gazettes and statistical annuals (sâlnâme), and used as a medium of instruction in schools (Strauss 1995, 223). For further reading on the process of reformation and restoration of the multiple languages of the Ottoman Empire, see Strauss (1995).
- 4.
There were 11,008 secular elementary schools in the Ottoman territories in 1867; by 1895, this number more than doubled, at 28,615 (Shaw 1977, 112).
- 5.
Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz. 2011. Whose Nation? Mustafa Djelaleddin Between Ottomanism and Turkism, in Jerzy Borejsza, ed, The Crimean War 1853–1856: Colonial Skirmish or Rehearsal for World War? Empires, Nations, and Individuals Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton- Institut Historii.
- 6.
Prior to these discoveries, Turkology was a university subject in five universities. Of these five, two were in Russia at Qazan University and St. Petersburg University. Two others were in Austro-Hungary, in Budapest at the Budapest University and in Vienna at Orientalische Akademie, while the final was in Paris at École Spéciale des langues orientales (Mengen, 6).
- 7.
Ercilasun, Bilge. 1999. The Beginning of Runic Studies in Turkey. Studia Orientalia 87: 71–77.
- 8.
Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff (1837–1918) was the German-born Russian founder of Turkology. He studied under the pioneers of comparative Altaic studies at the University of Berlin. Radloff went to Russia in 1858, after having received his doctorate from the University of Jena and started to study Altaic languages. By the 1870s, Radloff’s reputation as a scholar was well established and he even became the Chief Inspector of the Turkic schools of the region. In 1894, he became Director of the Museum of anthropology and ethnography of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
- 9.
Wolfgang. E. Scharlipp. 2004. The Decipherment of the Turkish Runic Inscriptions and its Effects on Turkology in East and West. Journal of Turkish Civilization Studies, No.1: 303–318.
- 10.
Necib Asım taught the Orhon inscriptions, Uygur, and Çağatay languages at the Darülfünun-ı Istanbul (est. 1900), the Ottoman predecessor to Istanbul University, (est. 1933) (İhsanoğlu 2010, II, 563, cited in Ata 2012, 172) from 1908 until 1927. Until Necip Asım’s courses, there were no courses based on Turkish languages at the Darülfünun, where Ottoman Literature, Arabic and Persian literature courses and French literature classes were prevalent (Ata 2012, 172).
- 11.
This first publication of the article, based on the deciphering of the runic script by the Danish scholar Vilhem Thompson, was published a year before Thomson’s book, probably because of the Tenth Congress of Orientalists in Geneva in September, 1894. Thomsen is said to have given a copy of his book to Ahmet Mithat Efendi at the Congress.
- 12.
For more a comprehensive overview of the status of studies in linguistic Turkology in the last two decades, increasingly focused on typology and contact phenomena, see Johanson (2001).
- 13.
The text of the Dede Korkut stories, said to date from the tenth century, was recovered in the Dresden Library in the early nineteenth century, but the first complete transcription was not made until 1916, by Kilisli Rifat, who published Kitab-i Dede Korkut Ala Lisan-i Tai’fe Oghuzhan. In 1938 Orhan Shaik Gokyay transliterated the text from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet (Sümer et al. 1972, xxii).
- 14.
Taha Parla maintains that major ideological positions in Turkey have been based on Gökalp’s corporatist model (Parla 1985, 7).
- 15.
Gökalp’s early development is considered similar to Muhammad ‘Abduh, Egyptian Muslim modernist, of a generation earlier (Heyd 1950, 26).
- 16.
Gökalp began to study French on the advice of Abdullah Cevdet, so that he could read the work of French scholars (Deny 1925, 5).
- 17.
For further reading on how Gökalp adapted Émile Durkheim’s sociology, see Nefes (2013).
- 18.
- 19.
The collection of 19 short articles in the form of dialogues with the unknown philosopher and five other dialogues written for children were to be his final articles.
- 20.
The titles of two articles on the modernization of the family that appeared in 1917 attest to the importance the family had for intellectuals: one of these was published in Yeni Mecmua and entitled Aile ahlakı: Konak’tan Yuva’ya (Family Morality: from the Konak to the Yuva) 17 (1917) 321–324, referring to a transition to a nuclear family, and the other, called Medeni Aile, Milli Aile (The Modern Family, the National Family), Tanin 29 October, 1917.
- 21.
Conventional meaning of this term is the religious community united by Islamic faith, though Gökalp seems to have also considered this term to encompass Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. See Turnaoğlu (2017, 177–178).
- 22.
See Bouquet (2013, 289) for the way these double names evolved in the late Ottoman period to individuating their bearers in contrast to the sixteenth century when they would have conferred distinction.
- 23.
- 24.
Also noted by Eissenstadt (2014).
- 25.
“Tunalı Hilmi published his proposal in the Hakimiyet-i milliye newspaper on August 27, 1923. According to this proposal, a Turkish commission would be established in the Education Ministry, terms would be Turkified, school books would be prepared according to the rules of öztürkçe, newspapers would be given [imtiyaz/permission] only if they used these rules, official communication would be done in [öztürkçe] and laws in the Grand National Assembly would be written this way. Because there was no foundation for it, the proposal did not go beyond being a personal wish” (Levend 1949, 391).
- 26.
For a comprehensive account of the alphabet reform, and how it was received and in turn shaped by various actors, see Hale Yılmaz (2013, 139–178).
- 27.
This became the official Ottoman residence and was intended to be more modern. Built under Sultan Mahmut II (1808–1839), it was furnished with western style furniture and the Sultan himself emulated Western monarchs “shortening his beard and wearing his own version of contemporary Western hats, frock coats and trousers” (Shaw 1977, 49).
- 28.
This is a title that means “one who distinguished himself in a gaza …a war against unbelievers…Muslim raider of the frontiers who made his living chiefly from booty” (Bayerle 1997, 68). It was a title that belonged to a particular frontier lifestyle, but survived in Turkish lore (ibid.).
- 29.
- 30.
Bir milletin manevi kıyafeti olan lisanı, maddi kıyafetine benzemelidir. Şapka taşıyan bir başın sarıklı bir dille konuşmasına imkan var mı?
- 31.
The name of a mountain popular for skiing near the city of Bursa.
- 32.
Kissing the top of the hand is a sign of respect to elders.
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Türköz, M. (2018). Intellectual Precursors and Cultural Context: Turkology, Language Reform, and Surnames. In: Naming and Nation-building in Turkey. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56656-0_2
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