Sonderdruck aus

MEDITERRANEANLANGUAGE

REVIEWedited by

Alexander Borg and Mareel Erdal

8 (1994)

Harrassowitz Verlag· Wiesbaden

MARCEL ERDALFrankfurt

VOWEL HARMONY IN THE HEBREW SCRIPTVERSION OF THE ANONYMOUS

TEVARlij-I AL-I (O~MANl

Fourteen years ago, Ugo Marazzi- edited 16 folios, recto and verso, of anOttoman text in Hebrew characters. The ms. had been acquired in Jerusalemin 1896 and taken to England but nothing is known about its author or how itreached Ierusalem. The 1906 catalogue of the Bodleian Library in Oxfordmentions the ms. and designates it as "an account of Ottoman history fromthe beginnings up to the year 1421, when Murad the Second ascended to thethrone." In 1932 Babinger'' identified the source of the ms. noting that itconsisted of arather large portion of the anonymous Tev8riğ-i Al-i (Oşmanedited by Giese in 1922.4 Disagreeing with earlier opinions, Giese had shownthis historical work to be one integral text compiled between 1490 and 1512. Itis written in simple Turkish prose interspersed with verse, as was common inthe literature of the period.

The verse portions are not included in our version of the text. However,they need not have been taken out by our anonymous author in the process oftranscribing the text into Hebrew characters, but could easily have been ornit-ted by his immediate source. As already indicated by Barbara Flemming.f verseportions were freely included or omitted from mss. to suit the specific purposefor which the copy was intended. Giese's critical edition quotes variants fromseveral mss. of the work but the source of our ms. is not among them.

Babinger established that the ms. in Hebrew characters was closest to oneof the three Vienna mss. collated by Giese-the one designated Wı, It is im-portant to note, however, that the present ms. was not directly copied from

A slightly shorter earlier version of this paper was presented at the Ierusalem meeting ofthe Comise International des Etudes Ottomanes et Preottomanes (Summer 1990).

2 U. Marazzi, Tevfirfl].-İ Al-İ cO§!Tl8n,Cronaca Anonima Ottomana in Trascrizione Ebraica,Napoli, 1980.

3 F. Babinger, 'Eine altosmanische anonyme Chronik in hebraischer Umschrift', ArchivOrientalnı IV:108-111.

4 F. Giese, Die altosmanischen anonymen Chroniken Tevari1J-İAl-İ cO§!Tl8nin Text undübersetzung herausgegeben, Teil I, Text und Variantenverzeichnis, Breslau (im Selbst-verlage). Vol. II, the translation, appeared in Leipzig in 1925, as Abh. f. d. Kunde desMorgenlandes, XVII.Band, Nr. 1.In vol. I, the text is handwritten.

5 In a Iectııre held at the meeting of German Turcologists in Rauischholzhausen in July1990.

VOWELHARMONY

Wı. Giese states- that two mss. not examined by him-one in Paris and theother in Copenhagen-were found to agree to some extent with Wı. Thus oneof these may turn out to be the source of our text.

Since our Hebrew ms. does not provide any independent historical or lit-erary information, it has understandably been virtually ignored for severaldecades, and fıfty years elapsed between its identifıcation and its publication.The signifıcance of the ms. lies elsewhere, i.e., in its potential utility as sourcematerial for the diachronic study of Ottoman Turkish phonology in the fırsthalf of the XVIlth century. This dating has been confırmed by specialists ofHebrew paleography at the University and National Library in Ierusalem, andis adhered to here in preference to i. Melikoff's vague reference to the xvıthcentury," It is this aspect of the text -its utility as a diachronic checkpoin t forthe study of Turkish historical phonology-that will be the focus of this study.

Like other languages, Ottoman Turkish changed through time. Scholarstraditionally recognise three historical varieties of the language: Old Ottornan,ending at about 1500 or slightly earlier, Middle Ottoman ending at about1800, and Late Ottoman after that. However, language change is not a homo-geneous phenomenon. This fact appears to have been overlooked by Otto-manists until Professor Flemming's recent comments on this point." A closelook at language materials from a particular period will generally reveal the co-existence of arehaizing and innovative trends, representing not so much asharp binary division but points along a continuum correlating with suchparameters as sociolect and dialect and, sometimes-as in modern Turkey-with political outlook. Furthermore, at any given time, the linguistic usage ofindividuals is liable to fluxtuate between arehaizing and innovating trends.Moreover, the choice which speakers make in particular utterances is alsoinfluenced by the momentary pragmatic needs relevant to the situation inwhich these utterances are being used. Another pertinent factor here is thedegree of conscious monitoring exercized by the language user over his speechor writing. Innovativity can be displayed in syntax, as in the case of the devrikcümle in contemporary Turkish, though its manifestation in the lexicon aremore easily noticed.

The sound structure of speech is, of course, just as prone to changethrough time as other structural features. This linguistic level is, however, theleast well reflected in traditional writing systems, since, in order to safeguardreadability, graphemic usage must remain relatively invariant despite fluctua-tions in pronunciations. This factor ten ds to render standard orthographies

6 In 'Einleitung zu meiner Textausgabe der altosmanischen anonymen ChrorıikenTewfuib-İ Aı-i <O~man', Mitteilungen ZUT Osmanisehen Geschichte I, 2/3. Heft, 49 ff.,p. 50, fn. 3.

7 On p. 36 of Le Destan d'Utniir Pacha, Paris, 1954. The statement to be found there, thatPersian gal was pronounced as [z1 in the Destan because it appears as z in our text, İs notreally valid: our text often transliterates its source.

8 In the lecture mentioneti in fn. 4.

70 MAReEL ERDAL

somewhat insensitive to phonological change, much to the detriment ofwhatlinguists can extrapolate from written records. Thus, for instance, manydiachronic sound shifts in Turkish were not represented in texts written in theArabic script. This presented no serious problem to literate native speakers ofTurkish, since they would have been familiar with the pronunciation. Al-though Ottoman in Arabic script was, of course, an adequate means of writtencommunication, it obscures the sound shape of the language both becauseseveral sounds were not explicitly distinguished in it and because of certainorthographical traditions. This is why the so-called transcription texts have, inthe last decades, increasingly tended to attract the attention of scholars inter-ested in this aspect of Turkish language history.? it would not be entirely trueto say that the phonetic documentation in Arabic script is not informative; theuse of this script was not, after all, fully normalised, and did vary with time,especially in the case of the vowels. On the development of vowel harmony,which will be our primary concern here, a lot can be learned form the study ofvocalised mss. For instance, G. Doerfer's extensive study of the vowels of OldOttoman in non-initial syllables!" is based exclusively on such sources.

N on- Turks have, for various purposes, produced Turkish texts as well asmetalinguistic documentation in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Cyrillic, Armenian,Georgian and, as here, Hebrew characters. Not all of these sources have, as yet,been exhaustively studied. The value of Ottoman texts in Hebrew characters,e.g., has not yet been assessed. Our present impression is that texts of the last-mentioned category are rather rare and far-between: it would appear that theJews were rather slow at resorting to Turkish and generally stayed faithful toJudeo-Spanish. i i

We should, at the outset, distinguish between transeribed documentationwritten down by foreigners from such as was produced by citizens of theOttoman empire. Foreigners not immersed in Turkish since their childhoodmight not have internalised the system of Turkish; an Halian merchant mightnot be able to catch the difference between all the realisations of lul and lül asa German envoy might, on occasion, hear Turkish /ıl as his unstressed le/.Then as now, even authors of manuals were not always in full command of thelanguage. ız In this respect, texts produced by citizens of the empire-e.g.,Greeks or Armenians-would be better, as the ones among them who knewTurkish would have been using this language in their daily dealings through-out their life. Some Greek or Armenian features would be incorporated in

9 A good if somewhat outdated overview ofwork on these texts is to be found in G. Hazai,Kurze Einführung in das Studium der turkischen Sprache, Budapest, 1978, pp. 30-35.

10 Zum Vokalismus nichterster Silben in altosmanischen Transkriptionstexten, Stuttgart,1985, with more up-to-date bibliography.

II That, of course, with time absorbed a lot oflexical material from Turkish.12 Cf. my review of E.H. Gilson, The Turkish Grammar of Thomas Vaughan, Ottoman

Turkish at the'End of the XVIIth Century according to an English 'Transkriptionstext' (Wies-baden, 1987), in Ural-Altaische [ahrbücher, NF., 10 (1991),234-8.

VOWELHARMONY 71

their version of Turkish; but their language would, at any rate, form a commu-nicative system whose characteristics could be worked out. Another importantmatter to be determined in connection with each text or text.fragment writtenin a foreign alphabet is the question of its dependence on a model in Arabicwriting. When there was such a model, the minorities of the Ottoman empirecould again be expected to handle it with greater skill and not treat it as if itwere some sort of phonetic transcription. In the XVIIth century, the personwho endeavoured to rewrite most of the Tevtaib-i ..4..1-i <~man in Hebrewcharacters can hardly have been a newcomer to the empire.

Before turning to the Hebrew version of the Giese anonymous, a fewwords about Marazzi's book are necessary. This contains an introduction, thefacsimile, a transliteration, a glossary arranged according to modern Turkishspelling and an index listing transliterations of the words according to theHebrew alphabet order. The transliteration is accompanied by notes listingmany but by no means all points of divergence from Giese's text. This last, itshould be remembered, constitutes a synthesis of three traditions of the workand is by no means what the Hebrew copyist had before him. A lengthy ac-count of the text history and of his own edition, which Giese gives in a separatearticle.P does not appear to have been known to Marazzi. For critical as well asfor linguistic purposes it would have been more useful to add the readings ofthe ms. called Wı; Wı may have been directly copied from the same source asour ms. Better, of course, would have been a collation with the Paris andCopenhagen mss. which I mentioned; Giese also says that he did not record allvariants of Wı. In our field of interest, Marazzi has one consistent error oftransliteration: He frequently miswrites the Hebrew character shuruq, whichrepresents the sound li and is written as a wawwith a dot on its left side, as if itwere a waw followed by a yôd. The introduction contains remarks on pho-netic matters but nothing at all on vowel harmony. No transcription is at-tempted. The glossary lists examples with ör without their suffıxes, apparentlyatrandom.

Arabic phrases are badly mistranscribed in our source, from whichBabinger concludes that the transcriber did not know Arabic. The text alsodistorts quite a number of proper names: e.g., it has Bugda instead of Buğraand qyy<lwp instead of Qaya Alp, while Ay-qutluq becomes Oyqulga. Thislatter phenomenon, Giese says,14happens also in Wı. Before one makes anysuch statement about whoever it was who rewrote the text in Hebrew charac-ters, one should therefore try to fınd his direct source. His understanding ofthe Turkish text appears to be very good, at any rate, to judge by the fact thathe otherwise has relatively few errors; many of these cannot have been mis-readings but must be due to inadvertence. The intention of this recompositioncannot have been to furnish us with a specimen of spoken Turkish, as the

13 Mentioned in fn. 6 above.14 Same paper, p. SI.

72 MAReEL ERDAL

source in Arabic script is followed in representing the velar IIJI with the letterg, in spelling names such as Allieddiu as "Ale-el-din and so forth. The impor-tance of the text would he in those cases in which he did allow his knowledgeof the spoken language to interfere with what he wrote, e.g., when he writesBedridin, fully vocalised, where the source must have spelled the name with alam. In other cases, the Hebrew script compelled him to interfere: e.g., Hebrewwriting distinguishes between the phonemes !kı and 19i, which Arabic do esnot do in front-vowel words. The choices which our anonymous makes con-ceming front ıkı and 19i in word-initial position are the same as in ModernTurkish, with the exception of gendü 'self and gişi 'person': these latter arefound also in other transcription texts. Concerrıing the distinction betweenword-initial ltı and ldl, the ms. does not always make the same choices as itssource, e.g., in deşkun, which appears as teşkutı in the Giese edition. Otherphonetic features such as geştilet for geçtiler or the alternation of initial 19iand ıyı in front-vowel words are mentioned by Marazzi. 15 The ms. quite oftenhas the vowels 101 and lul, distinguished correctly in practically all theinstances I noticed. We know that such features couldn't have stood in thems.'s direct source, as they do not appear in texts written in Arabic script. Thefact that foreign loans in our text are phonologicaliy less well integrated intothe scheme of vowel harmony rules than is generaliy the case with rıonnativevocabulary in modern Turkish need not necessarily be the result of slavishtransference but may well reflect a lower degree of formal receptivity to loansat this historical stage.

One of the most conspicuous linguistic features in our text is the shape ofthe plural suffix when added to verb forms. Lars Johanson 16 has shown that, ina number of peripheral Turkish dialects, in some Ottoman transcription textsand in some dialects of eastern Oguz languages, +ler is not subjected to vowelharmony but retains its alternant with lel in back-vowel words as well. Withvery few exceptions, this is the case also here: The verbal plural suffıx nearlyalways has a yôd. We find, e.g., yensunler. dolandururler, okumışlerdür,kurtulalerdi, this last even spelled with the vowel e. The vast majority of ex-amples are with the -di past, a fact not surprising in a history book: ağlaştiler,eldiler. eijmediler, betıştiler, boçezledilei, buluştiler, ceveblaştiler are fromthe first letters of the alphabet. Exceptions with back-vowel verbs are less than

15 Using ıyı instead of 19I in this way is one of the characteristics of some Iewish varieties ofTurkish to this day. This need not be a Iewish feature shown by our ms., however, as suchan alteration has been observed in transcription texts of other groups of the Ottomanempire as well, It may, for all we know, have existed at that time in the vulgar speech ofthe Turks themselves, and only have been archaically retained in preserit-day [ewishspeech. It is only for the last fifty years or so that the Turkish Iews have had to go toTurkish primary school, getting prone to the normative influence of standard educatedpronunciation.

16 Pluralsuffixformen im Südwesttürkischen, Mainz = Akad. d. Wiss. u. d. Lit., Abh. d.Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Jahrgang 1981 Nr.9.

VOWELHARMONY 73

five percent. The weight of these instances gives one the impression that thephenomenon may in fact be due to the unchanging frontness of the vowel ofthe -di form in the third person. Johanson wanted to explain what he had dis-covered by the hypothesis that verbal +ler in fact came from a plural form ofthe copula, the verb i- in Ottoman and modern Turkish. While this seems toofar-fetched as an etymology, the analogy of forms like idi and imiş may havehelped. Professor Tietze has expressed the view that the suffix +ler here mightjust be a case of a wrongly interpreted ending lam-ra. This possibility shouldby no means be excluded, in view of verbal forms like duraldendi an dqılmeyüp and nominal forms as bunlere, dawller, bazıler, sularden, Rumde,bunce or okurce. The weakness of palatal harmony may have been the result ofvarious substrates in Near-eastern Turkish, only later overcome by the internalsystem-constraints of the language. The frontness of the ending in the wordakçe 'silver drachm' which, similar to its syonyms in many other languages,must come from ak 'white', is peculiar, even if it is borrowed. i do not think,however, that all this can account for the verbal data: The last-rrıentionedexamples are sporadic whereas +ler in verb forms is the rule. Also, Johansonquotes similar facts from several spoken varieties of Turkish.

The narrow vowels pose problems of a very different nature, especially inour text. We know from Doerfer's work'? how much these vawels varied evenin Old Ottoman vocalised texts in Arabic script. Vowels appear to be often leftunmarked in the Tevanb-i Al-i 'Oşmşiı mss. Therefore, unless we have theactual rnss. from which the Hebrew-script copy was made, we cannot knowwhich vowels of his source the anonymous copyist left as they were, which heintroduced and which he changed against his source. In this situation we areforced to deal with the data in naive fashion, as it were, and take the text as itis. There seems to be a general assumption which I would like to contest, thatfourfold harmony is a mark of lateness in the history of the Turkic languages.The fact is that the earliest Turkic sources have fourfold harmony in very manysuffıxes, and my impression is that the text I am discussing has just about asmuch as they do. When comparing the Old Ottoman data concerning the nar-row vowels with those of Old Turkic, 18 we fmd that the following changes havetaken place: When a vowel originally showing fourfold harmony was [ollowedby [p/b v m g IJ]' it went over to the harmony of [u ü]. This statementaccounts also for an opaque word like yeluijuz 'alone'. The only suffıx whichmay not be following this rule is the formatiye -Xm, which derives nouns fromverbs; the only relevant word here is seçiidim 'a running', attested in one realinstance and in another one where a fmite verb appears to have been mis un -

17 üp. cit.lS This term covers the large corpus of texts written down in Central Asia between the

VIIIth and the XIIIth century. By comparing sources using different types of seripts(especially those of Indian type) one can gain near certainty as to the vowel system of OldTurkic. No ongoing work on that topic has as yet been published.

74 MAReEL ERDAL

derstood. i would not have mentioned this margina! form if the formatiye-Xm had not been singled out as an exception by Doerfer-? as well. His ex-planation for this is that the products of this formatiye are 'erstarrt', as he says,by which he probably means that they were lexica!ised. In the case of the suffıx+lll; the rounding is a reflex of the lost igl,or the change occurred before the19i of +lXgwas dropped. Ana!ogy made the second person plura! conditiona!suffix into +sAgUz following the possessive and the perfect suffi.xesof the sameperson. Ana!ogy has also been called in to explain the vowel of the privativesuffıx +sUz, which was +sXz in Old Turkie: it has been said that it gotassirnilated to the vowel of the suffıx +lll. In our rns. the vowel of this suffıxvaries rather wildly; we even find SUS1Z and susuz less than one line apart. Acomparison with Old Turkic leaves only the rounding in the Ottoman suffıx-gUn unaccounted for by the theory being defended here: Our text stili hasazgun, basgun, daşkun and kırgun as against keskin both in the Giese editionand in the present ms., spelled with matres 1ectionis in both sources. No suchrounding can be observed in the imperative partiele gi1, ete. The case of thefırst person plural enelitic pronoun, which changed from biz to Uz, is differ-ent: Here, a labia! consonant was absorbed into the voweL.I take mi/mı to bethe original shape of the interrogative partide; Old Turkic m Umust be the re-suIt of secondary rounding, as e:g., in biit- for origina! bit-o Ka§gari20 statesthat the Oguz say ml instead of mU, but Doerfer was wrong in taking him tohave said that the Oguz say bardum instead of bardım. This shows us that thecorısonant-related change of the fourfold archphoneme to u/u had not yettaken place in Kaşgari 's time.

The suffi.x+LXk, which had fourfold harmony in Old Turkic, caused a lotof trouble for scholars interested in the history of Ottoman because its vowelmostly appeared as [i, ı] even after rounded vowels, sometimes even as [u, ü]after unrounded ones. In our text, as in the transcription texts apparently re-flecting the rnore popular language, it mostly has fourfold harmony. Fourfoldharmony is even more the rule with the morphernes for passive, reflexive andreciproca! diathesis and for the causative morpheme in ltı. Thus with OldTurkic and Modern Turkish, against Old Ottornan as deseribed by Doerfer.The very rare exceptions I have come across have vawels following theformative.

Three synchronic factors have been mentioned by scholars in connectionwith the use of fourfold harmony in suffıxes which they expected to haveeither [u ül or [i ıl. Fourfold harrnony has been said to occur: Ca)the furtherthe syllable is from the end of the word, Cb)when it occurs in unstressed posi-tion, and Cc) when it occurs in a elosed syllable. These three factors, which canall be found to have same influence in aur text as well, can be summed up as

19 üp. cit., p. 23.20 The XIth century Turkic linguist Malımüd al-Kasvart, author of the Dfwan Luyati )t·

Turk (Compendium of the Turkie Dialects).

VOWELHARMONY 75

follows: Vowels tended towards fourfold harmonywhen therewas little expira-tory energy to spare for them. This is an influence from the domain of speechperformance, which speakers allowed to interfere with their utterances andwith their writing to different degrees. The diachronical phonological rulewhich changed the Old Turkic fourfold archphoneme to [u ü] when followedby [p b v m g] or [IJ] should not be confused with such an optional influence,as hitherto done by most scholars. The said influence appears to have becomeso dominant, however, that its mechanics were too complicated to maintain.Since there was hardly any functionalload carried by the opposition betweenthe three archphonemes III, IUI and rxı, this distinction was dropped alto-gether. According to one hypothesis.U there was a short stage of general vowelindifference, followed by a reorganisation of the rules of harmony.Alternations as that of +slz - +sXz- +sUz could be considered to be traces ofthis stage, but more research into detail is needed before one can make anypositive statements. Saying that fourfold vowel harmony got correlated with areduced use of expiratory energy is paramount to stating that it appeared inred uc ed vowels. Such reduced vowels could, on occasion, get wholly absorbedinto an adjacent consonant, when such a consonant was suitable to becominga syllable peak. If the absorbed vowel was in the front class, its presence wouldbe reflected in the palatal pronunciation of the consonant in question. Suchpalatalisation, in turn, could appear as the letter İ in a transcription text of thetype we are dealing with here. What i mean to say is that if we, on occasion,found an i instead of the expected lü/, this might not be due to a passage of thesuffix in question into a different archphoneme class, nor uncertainty or indif-ference on the part of the author, but an attempt to mark a pronunciation fea-ture which the script was not design ed to record.V The intended feature neednot have had any phonological relevance but could belong to mere per-formance. Surface syncopation of vowels was made good use of when adaptingthe language to verse: Qarakhanid poetry= already shows an alternation be-tween syncopated and unsyncopated vowels to suit the metre.

By the time our ms. was being composed, Ottoman fourfold harmony wasalready spreading to areas which it had not occupied earlier. While a rulecould be discovered to account for the practice of the spontaneous user of thelanguage, somebody copying a ms. cannot be expected to be consistent in thisdomain, which concerns usage and not grammar: Distinctions of semanticmeaning hardIyever hinged on the extent of fourfold harmony one adopted.What we fınd in our source is an overall but in fact quite weak pressure in the

21 Expounded by Lars Johanson in various papers.22 A case in point is the notation of the baek high unrourıded vowel /ıl either with the char-

aeter for i or the character for a in some Old Turkie sourees; the former would be mark-ing the features {high, unrounded}, the latter the features {baek, unrounded]. In theabsenee of a eharaeter to mark all three features, a hesitation between the letters for raland for [i] need not reflect any phonetie variation.

23 The earIiest Muslim- Turkie Iiterature, Xlth century.

76 MAReEL ERDAL

direction of an extension of such harmony, in a few cases together with theGiese text and in another few cases beyond it.

Presumably, our anonymous was not endeavouring to be innovative; heappears to have been recording the more traditional way which people ex-pressed themselves in at his time. This is probably to be expected, as he musthave seen himself as a mere reproducer, unaware that what he was recordingin a medium unusual for the language would be revealing to future genera-tions. What his exact contribution to our knowledge in fact is will only becomedear when W 1 and the other two mss. close to it are fully collated. Only thenwill there be any point in trying to answer another difficult question, namely,whether there was a Jewish variety of Ottoman Turkish. Even if that existed asan established entity at that time, it is not certain that any clues for it can befound in the present source. At present, even the reconstruction of commonspoken Turkish for the seventeeth century is beset with many question marks.