The Arabic Language

17.5 Arabic in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey
With the ascendance of the Seljuks in Anatolia, the position of Arabic as the 
language 
par excellence
of the Islamic empire was eroded considerably. The Turkic 
dynasties adopted Persian as their literary language and retained Arabic only 
as the language of religion. In the Ottoman Empire, Turkish became the official 
language of the state, but at the same time Persian and Arabic were maintained 
as the languages of culture. Collectively, the three languages were called the 
elsine-i selāse
(with two Arabic words, 
ʾalsina
and 
ṯalāṯa
, and a Persian connec
-
tive particle!); they constituted the cultural baggage of the intellectual elite. In 
the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the linguistic 
influence of the two cultural languages, Persian and Arabic, increased to such a 
degree that in some literary styles only the morphology and the structure of the 
text remained Turkish, whereas the lexical material was almost completely taken 
from the two other languages.
At the end of the Ottoman Empire, there was an increasing tendency on the 
part of the Arab provinces to stress their right to linguistic autonomy, that is, their 
right to use Arabic as an official language (cf. above, Chapter 12). This feeling was 
reinforced by the developments in the Turkish revolution. First the Young Turks 
and then Atatürk (1881–1938) dissociated the notion of Islam from that of the 
Arabic language. In line with the secularisation of the new Turkish republic, there 
was to be no special place for the Arabic language, and this was formally symbol
-
ised by the abolition in 1928 of the Arabic script that had hitherto been used for 
the writing of Ottoman Turkish. The new emphasis on Turkish identity brought 
with it a campaign to preserve or restore the purity of the Turkish language. Since 
the reformers regarded Turkish as the most perfect language on earth, it was 
inconceivable to them that its lexicon should include large quantities of Persian 
and Arabic words.

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Arabic as a World Language 
325
As a result of the language reform, many of the loanwords and constructions 
that were common in the Ottoman period have become obsolete, but even in 
Modern Turkish a large number of loans from Persian and Arabic (or from Arabic 
through Persian) are still present. These loanwords can often be recognised 
because they are not subject to the strict rules of vowel harmony in Turkish, 
which forbid the combination of back vowels and front vowels within a word. A 
word such as 
kitap
‘book’ (< Arabic 
kitāb
) with front vowel followed by back vowel 
does not obey the rules of vowel harmony, and a word such as 
saat
‘hour’ (< Arabic 
sāʿa
), if it were Turkish, would receive the third-person singular possessive suffix 
-
ı
, but since it is an Arabic word it becomes 
saat-i
. Certain phonetic changes take 
place in the process of borrowing: in the Ottoman spelling, which used the Arabic 
script, the emphatic and pharyngal consonants of Arabic were distinguished but 
not pronounced. Since the spelling reform, the orthography no longer distin
-
guishes these sounds, but follows the pronunciation (
a
often spelled as 
e
; 
w
as 
v
; 
ḥ
, 
ḫ
as 
h
, etc.).
Many Arabic nouns were borrowed together with their plural, so that in 
Ottoman Turkish it was customary to have, for instance, 
hâdise
, plural 
havâdis
(< Arabic 
ḥādiṯa
/
ḫawādiṯ
) ‘event’, whereas in modern Turkish the plural is 
hâdis
-
eler
; likewise 
akide
, plural 
akait
(Arabic 
ʿaqīda
/
ʿaqāʾid
) ‘dogma’, nowadays 
akideler
. 
Common words such as 
kitap
‘book’ always had a Turkish plural 
kitaplar
. Some 
abstract nouns were borrowed in the feminine plural form, such as 
edebiyat
‘litera
-
ture’, 
tafsilât
‘details’; syntactically, these words are still treated as plurals.
Characteristic of Ottoman prose was the use of long compounds of Arabic 
origin, which, if they have not been abolished, remain in use as idiomatic single-
word expressions, for example, 
kuvveianelmerkeziye
‘centrifugal force’ (Arabic 
quwwa
+ 
ʿan
+ 
al-markaz
+ 
iyya
) or 
mukabeleibilmisil
‘retribution’ (Arabic 
muqābala
+ 
bi
+ 
al-miṯl
). In both examples, the connection between the main components of 
the compound word is made with the Persian suffix 
-i-
, which in Persian (and in 
Persian loans in Turkish) indicates the genitive construction (
ezāfe
). In Ottoman 
Turkish, these constructions were still productive, whereas in Modern Turkish 
they have become fixed expressions. In constructions of Arabic nouns with Arabic 
adjectives, on the other hand, the agreement rules of Arabic are still followed, for 
example, 
aklı selim
(Arabic 
ʿaql salīm
) ‘common sense’, but 
esbabı mucibe
(Arabic 
ʾasbāb mūjiba
) ‘compelling circumstances’.
Just like Persian, Turkish has borrowed a large number of nouns that are 
used as postpositions. A few examples may suffice: 
nisbetle
‘compared to’ (Arabic 
nisbatan li-
), 
rağmen
‘in spite of’ (Arabic 
raġman
), 
itibaren
‘from … onwards’ (Arabic 
iʿtibāran
), and even the pronominal expressions 
leh
and 
aleyh
(Arabic 
lahu
and 
ʿalayhi
) in the sense of ‘for’ and ‘against’, for example, with Turkish pronominal 
suffixes 
lehimizde
‘for us’, 
aleyhinde
‘against him’. Originally, Turkish did not have 
conjunctions, but it has borrowed the Arabic 
wa-
‘and’ (Turkish 
ve
), presumably 
through Persian.

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326
The Arabic Language
In Ottoman Turkish, the 
nisba
adjective was still used in its function as an adjec
-
tive; in adverbial expressions, a noun in the accusative (
ḥāl
construction) was 
preferred, so that 
resmî
meant ‘official’, but 
resmen
‘officially’ (Arabic 
rasmī
/
rasman
); 
likewise 
zarurî
‘necessary’, 
zarureten
‘necessarily’ (Arabic 
ḍarūrī
/
ḍarūratan
). In 
Modern Turkish, the constructions with a 
ḥāl
accusative are often replaced by 
the adjective with Turkish 
olarak
, for example, 
resmî olarak
instead of 
resmen
.
An interesting parallel between the pattern of borrowing in Persian and that 
in Turkish is the use of verbo-nominal compounds with the verbs 
olmak
‘to be, 
become’ and 
etmek
(and synonyms) ‘to do, make’, for example: 
sebep olmak
‘to cause’ (Arabic 
sabab
)
memnun olmak
‘to be pleased’ (Arabic 
mamnūn
)
refakat etmek
‘to accompany’ (Arabic 
rafāqa
)
ziyaret etmek
‘to visit’ (Arabic 
ziyāra
)
rica etmek
‘to request’ (Arabic 
rajāʾ
)
tebdîl etmek
‘to change’ (Arabic 
tabdīl
)
In Ottoman Turkish, such expressions were still understood as Arabic struc
-
tures, so that, for instance, ‘to change clothes’ was expressed as 
tebdîl-i qïyâfet 
etmek
, lit. ‘to make a-change-of-clothes’ with Persian connective 
-i-
. In Modern 
Turkish, this would be expressed as 
kıyafeti tebdil etmek
, lit. ‘to-make-a-change 
clothes’ (with accusative suffix 
-i
), so that the syntactic tie between verb and 
noun has become much tighter. The passive of such constructions is made with 
olunmak
, but in combinations with an Arabic infinitive of the seventh verbal 
measure, which has a passive meaning of itself, 
etmek
is used, for example, 
intişar 
etmek
‘to be published’ (Arabic 
intišār
); the active voice is expressed by the Turkish 
causative: 
intişar ettirmek
‘to publish’.