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The Stamboul Alphabet Of Shemseddin Sami Bey: Precursor To Turkish Script Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Frances Trix
Frances Trix
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich. 48202, U.S.A..
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Extract

Comparative studies of writing systems and script conversion tend to emphasize the extent of cultural re-orientation and the rapidity of implementation of Turkey's shift from the Arabic to the Roman script, but they rarely mention the period that led up to this change. As early as 1863, the Azeri playwright Ahunzade Mirza Fethali presented a proposal for a Latin orthography for Turkish, before the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Osmaniye (Ottoman Society of Science) in Istanbul. A second event in Ottoman script reform, though less well known than Ahunzade's proposal, was the adoption by many former members of the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Arnavudiye (Albanian Society of Science), in Istanbul, in 1879, of a Latin-based alphabet for Albanian. This “Stamboul Alphabet” was designed by Shemseddin Sami Bey and, unlike Ahunzade's proposal, was immediately acted upon and subsequently adopted by the new Albanian presses in Bucharest and Sofia, from which it spread through southern and central Albanian lands, all still under Ottoman rule.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , May 1999 , pp. 255 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1 Coulmas, Florian, The Writing Systems of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 243–44;Google ScholarWellisch, Hans, The Conversion of Scripts: Its Nature, History, and Utilization (New York: John Wiley, 1978), 55–57Google Scholar. Note that researchers in writing systems prefer “Roman” as the more general designation for the script, because there have been various forms of Latin over time. However, I will use the more common “Latin” designation in phrases such as “Latin-based orthography,” and “Latin alphabet.”

2 Şimşir, Bilal, Tiirk Yazt Devrimi (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1992), 21–22.Google Scholar

3 The newly formed group called itself Shoqëria e të Shtypurë Shkronja Shqip—that is, “The Society for the Printing of Albanian Writings.” See Skendi, Stavro, History of the Albanian National Awakening: 1878–1912 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 119, for a discussion of the names of this organization.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The alphabet is known variously as the “Constantinople alphabet,” the “Istanbul alphabet,” the “Frashëri alphabet,” and, in Albanian, the “Stamboll alphabet.” I build on the Albanian form of “Istanbul” (Stamboll), but have chosen a French spelling, “Stamboul,” to emphasize the European linguistic influence on the alphabet during a period in which French was admired by the intellectuals in the city. Moreover, Sami Bey himself had a strong interest in French, as evidenced in his translations from French into Ottoman and in his dictionaries, both French-Turkish (1882) and Turkish-French (1884).

5 In the history of writing systems, appropriating letters from other scripts is not new. Probably the best analogy to the Stamboul alphabet is that of the ancestor of the Cyrillic alphabet that Saints Cyril and Methodius designed in the 9th century through adaptations from the Greek alphabet, the addition of two Hebrew letters that were modified into four letters to express sounds not expressed by the Greek alphabet, and the creation of some new characters to efficiently reduce Slavic to writing. Associations of scripts with 20th-century nationalisms make such adaptations less acceptable today.

6 Heyd, Uriel, Language Reform in Modern Turkey, Oriental Notes and Studies, no. 5 (Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society, 1954).Google Scholar

7 Levend, Agah Sim, Türk Dilinde Gelişme ve Sadeleşme Evreleri (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayinlan 347, 1972.)Google Scholar

8 Şimşir, Türk Yav Devrimi, 38–43.

9 Skendi, Albanian National Awakening, 140.

10 Kaleshi, Hasan, “Le Role de Chemseddin Sami Frachery dans la Formation de Deux Langues Litteraires: Turc et Albanais,” Balcanica I (Belgrade: Academie Serbe des Sciences et des Arts, 1970), 197–216.Google Scholar

11 Skendi, Stavro, “The History of the Albanian Alphabet: A Case of Complex Cultural and Political Development,” Sudösl Forschungen: Internationale Zeitschrift für Geschichte, Kultur und Landeskunde Sudösteuropas (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1960), 263–84Google Scholar. This otherwise excellent article omits particulars that linguists would require to compare alphabets. For example, there is no mention of the Cyrillic graphs in the upper case of the Stamboul alphabet, and even the lower case is described generally, with erroneous mention of representation for /gj/ (p. 270)

12 Vishko, Ali, “Kongresi i Manastirit,” Gjurmime albanologjike, 18 (Prishtina: Institute Albanologjik i Prishtinës, 1988), 155–77.Google Scholar This article has much valuable information but relates support for the Stamboul alphabet to dialect affiliation—that is, Vishko contends that the Stamboul alphabet was favored by people because they were from the southern Albanian dialect region. I reject this in the body of this article.

13 Fawaz, Leila, “From the Editor,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26, 4 (1994): 566.Google Scholar

14 Perry, John, “Language Reform in Turkey and Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, 3 (1985): 295–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Documents in this script include almanacs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, textbooks, and monographs. A collection of these items has been donated by Albanian immigrants to the library of the Albanian-American Teqe Bektashiane, located near Detroit, Michigan. Another set of documents are letters sent to the organizations of the Congress of Monastir in 1908, and the final statement of that Congress, collected in Buda, A., Domi, M., Polio, S., Prifti, K., and Samara, M., ed., Alfabete i Gjuhes Shqipe dhe Kongresi i Manastirit: Studime, Materiale, Dokumente (The Alphabet of the Albanian Language and the Congress of Monastir: Studies, Materials, Documents) (Tirana: Institute of History, Language and Letters, 1972). I located this collection on my trip to Albania in 1993.Google Scholar

16 Sami, Shemsettin, “Lisan-i Turki Osmani,” in Hafta (10 zi'l- hicce 1298), 12, cited in Agah Sim Levent, Türk Dilinde Gelişme, 130–34;Google Scholar and Levend, Agah Sirn, Şemsettin Sami (Ankara: Ankara Universitesi Basimevi, 1969), 152–57.Google Scholar

17 Sami, Shemseddin, Kamus-i Türki (Istanbul: Ikdam Matbaasi, 1899–1900 [1317–18]).Google Scholar

18 Sami, Shemseddin, Kamus ul-ʿAlam: tarih ve cografya lugati ve tabir-i esahhiyle kaffe-yi esma-yi hassa-yi camidir (Istanbul: Mihran Matbaasi, 1889–1898 [1306–16]).Google Scholar

19 A major exception to this is the secular poetry written in Albanian in the Arabic script by poets from central Albanian lands in the 18th century. These poets are referred to in the Albanian tradition as the Bejtexhinjt—that is, those who make beyts, or poetic couplets.

20 These percentages are from census figures from the first half of the 20th century (Albanian censuses in 1921, 1927). If the Albanian areas of Kosovo and western Macedonia were also included, as they were under Ottoman rule, the percentage of Muslims would be somewhat higher. See Peter AlbanischenBartl, Die Bartl, DieMuslime tur Zeii der nationalen Unabhangigkeitsbewegung (1878–1912), Albanische Forschungen 8 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1968), for earlier statistics by sancak.Google Scholar

21 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983, rev., 1991).Google Scholar

22 lbid., 75.

23 Language was a main dimension for expressing the new identity and orientation brought about by modernization; it was also the common bond that defined the national community. For further discussion of modernization, see Karpat's, article, “The Land Regime, Social Structure, and Modernization in the Ottoman Empire,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East, ed. Polk, Wm. and Chambers, Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 69–92.Google Scholar

24 See Camaj, Martin, Albanian Grammar (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984), 3;Google ScholarByron, Janet, Selection among Alternates in Language Standardization: The Case of Albanian (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 78–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Kemp, J. Alan, “Introduction to Lepsius' Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters,” in Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics, ed. Konrad Koerner, E. F. (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1981), 5:1–83.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 71.

27 Shemseddin Sami Bey's later lexicographic work (French-Turkish dictionary, 1882; Turkish-French dictionary, 1884), in which he included systematic pronunciation notation, showed his ongoing interest in phonologically descriptive notation. Sami Bey's familiarity with Lepsius's work, with the work of the Austrian albanologist von Hahn and with French linguists, reflected in his short monograph “Language” (1885), further reveal his links to 19th-century European linguistics.

28 Buda, et al. , Alfabeti i Gjuhes Shqipe, 17.Google Scholar

29 Skendi, Albanian National Awakening, 139.

30 Luarasi, Kristo, Ditërëfenjësi (Kalendari) Kombiar për 1898 (National Almanac for 1898) (Sofia: Mbrodhesija, 1898).Google Scholar

31 In modern terms, we would say that what Sami Bey referred to as “scientific” was the phono-graphic basis of the alphabet. We now know that many writing systems are morpho-graphic and tend to become more so with age. That is, morphemes, such as the plural in English, are efficiently symbolized by fewer graphemes than their pronunciations would require (the plural {s} morpheme in English stands for either /s/ or /z/). We know that there are advantages to alphabets being morphemically rather than strictly phonemically based (see Venezky, Richard, “Principles for the Design of Practical Writing Systems,” Anthropological Linguistics, 12, 7 (1970): 256–70)Google Scholar, and that at least for proficient readers morpho-graphic systems are more efficient. We also know that reading is a complex process and that some deviations from phonemic correspondences can help distinguish meaning, all of which implies that criticism of Ottoman, at least in this regard, needs to be contextualized. However, this was not generally known in the 19th century.

32 Şimşir, , Türk Yazi Devrimi, 39.Google Scholar

33 Buda, et al. , Alfabeti i Gjuhes Shqipe, 21.Google Scholar

34 Karpat, Kemal, Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 122–23.Google Scholar

35 This is available in Albanian in Sami Frashëri: Vepra 2 (Prishtinë: Rilindja, 1978), 21–107, and in German (Was war Albanien, was ist es, was wird es werden? [Vienna and Leipzig: A. Holder, hof-und universitats-buchhandler, 1913). Levend does not accept Sami Bey's authorship of this monograph on the basis of its content and style, and his reading of Sami Bey's character. Some suggest that Sami Bey's brother, Nairn, wrote it; others that Shahin Kolonja, who translated it into Turkish, wrote it (Levend, Şemsettin Sami, 143–51). However, from my reading of the monograph in Albanian, both the content, with the frequent reference to etymologies and early history (like some of his articles on Turkish) and the style support Sami Bey's authorship. Kemal Karpat characterizes Sami Bey as an Ottoman reformist—that is, politically an Ottoman and culturally and ethnically an Albanian.

36 Skendi, “The Albanian Alphabet,” 272.

37 Ibid., 271.

38 Bartl, Die albanishcen Muslime 1878–1912, 168–69.

39 Baba Rexheb, a Bektashi leader and native of the Gjirokastër region, born in 1901, provided me with this account in the fall of 1991 at his tekke outside Detroit.

40 Skendi, , Albanian National Awakening, 385.Google Scholar

41 Şimşir, , Türk Yau Devrimi, 42–43.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 42; Vishko, “Kongresi i Manastirit,” 172.

43 Buda, et al. , Alfabeti i Gjuhes Shqipe.Google Scholar

44 For a fuller account of the Congress of Monastir, its factions, and its results, see my article ”Alphabet Conflict in the Balkans: Albanian and the Congress of Monastir,” International Journal of the Sociology Language 127(1997): 1–23.Google Scholar

45 Karpat, , Ottoman Population 1830–1914, 86.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., 96.

47 The historical background of not tampering with the Latin alphabet goes back to the Middle Ages when Latin, as the language in which the Vulgate was written, was held inviolable. Only in Iceland and for a while in England were runic letters tolerated as additions to the Latin alphabet. These died out in England before the invention of printing. This long conservative tradition, coupled with English's minimal use of diacritics and imperial sense of itself as separate from the continent, combined to fashion a most conservative script aesthetic in which any change or addition was viewed negatively.

48 Buda, et al. , Alfabeti i Gjuhes Shqipe, 38.Google Scholar

49 Skendi, “The Albanian Alphabet,” 283.

50 For a study of the contributions of Sami Bey to the development of the literary languages of Turkish and Albanian, see Kaleshi, “Le Role de Chemseddin Sami Frachery.”

51 Ibid., 213–15.