BIAnet, Turkey
Oct 17 2014
The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora
The association of the Turkish language with the Turkish state and its
politics makes many wary of acknowledging the indelible place of
Turkish in the lives of Ottoman Armenians and their diasporan
descendants.
Jennifer Manoukian
Ä°stanbul - BIA News Desk
There we sat, the proverbial Turk and Armenian, at neighboring tables
in a university student center in New Jersey. My back to his, I drew
my eyes out of the book I was reading to concentrate on the voice
behind me. The gliding vowels of Turkish always sound familiar in the
split second it takes for my brain to mark the language as unknown. As
the man shouted into his cellphone, unaware of the aspiring
eavesdropper nearby, a surge of recognition startled me each time I
managed to catch a hiç or a hemen. These words were, after all, part
of my language too.
That was the microcosmic encounter between two nations notoriously
divided: a non-conversation through a handful of words that belong to
us both. It was an encounter rooted in another time, another world
away'a time before ethno-linguistic nationalism led Armenians and
Turks to retreat into their languages and fortify them against each
other, a time before the Turkish people held exclusive rights to the
Turkish language, and a time before the Armenian people felt a
visceral unease towards most things Turkish.
This scene recalls the intimate relationship that Ottoman Armenians
once had with the Turkish language. Although this relationship grew
strained nearly a century ago when most of the community was pushed
into the diaspora, among many of the descendants of this community
there remains a quiet, reticent affection for the language that still
echoes today in far-flung corners of the Armenian diaspora.
Turkish: A Language of the Ottoman Armenians
How can the relationship between a people and their imperial language
be framed as a transnational, multigenerational love affair in good
faith? Other imperial contexts point to the striking implausibility of
this scenario. The tendency of imperial powers to use language to sink
their claws deeper into the minds of the colonized, strip them of
their cultural identities, and tighten their grip on the territory
they aim to pillage might prompt a raised eyebrow at the metaphor. But
there is a distinction to be made between an Algerian's relationship
to French, an Indian's relationship to English, and an Ottoman
Armenian's relationship to Turkish.
The first distinction concerns the widespread exposure of the Armenian
community to Turkish during the Ottoman period. Ottoman
Armenians'urban and rural, elite and non-elite'existed in a society
where Turkish was the lingua franca in their cities and towns. The
language was not, as was the case in other imperial contexts, spoken
solely by the ruling minority and their collaborators; on the
contrary, Turkish was the dominant language, from the palace to the
marketplace, and permeated all aspects of public life. The Armenian
community was, therefore, compelled, to varying degrees, to assimilate
Turkish in order to function in the society around them.
The Ottoman Armenian relationship to Turkish was also deepened by the
length of time it had to develop. The presence of the imperial
language was not a blip on the timeline of a nation, nor did it
permeate just an elite tier of society. Turkish was pervasive for four
centuries, not only formally in the bureaucracy, but also informally
in cross-confessional interactions in the multilingual towns and
villages of Anatolia.
But it is one distinct outcome of the centuries-long predominance of
Turkish that sets the Ottoman Armenian relationship with the Turkish
language apart from cases of other colonized peoples. Naturally, the
enduring presence of Turkish and its centrality in public life led
many Ottoman Armenians to slip Turkish words into their Armenian
conversations, but by the nineteenth century, there were large
communities of Armenians across Anatolia with little knowledge of the
Armenian language. Centered largely in Cilicia, Yozgat, and Ankara,
these Ottoman Armenians spoke Turkish exclusively and had learned it
as their mother tongue.
The Turkish language might have initially been perceived as the
language of imperial domination, but over the course of generations,
it became the only one many Ottoman Armenians knew. It was the
language they loved in, grieved in, joked in, fought in. In other
words, Turkish became a language that belonged as much to the
Armenians as it did to anyone else.
Turkish in Other Alphabets
In the late Ottoman period, religion was the supreme determinant of
national belonging. If religion took precedence over language, it
meant that, as long as Turkish-speaking Armenians identified as
Christian, they were still considered part of the Armenian community.
This phenomenon was certainly not unique to Ottoman Armenians. Until
the triumphant rise of ethno-linguistic nationalism in the first
decades of the twentieth century, Turkish was a language largely
unburdened by the constraints of religion and ethnicity. Turkish as an
Ottoman language can be seen most vividly in the print cultures of
non-Muslim communities in the Empire.
These were groups who knew the letters, but not the language, of their
liturgies. For the Greek Orthodox Karamanli community, there are
examples of Turkish written in the Greek alphabet. For a certain
subset of the Jewish community, there are texts in Turkish written in
the Hebrew alphabet, as well as Turkish-language materials written in
the Syriac alphabet for the Turkish-speaking Assyrian community.
But by far the most imposing is the corpus of Turkish-language novels,
translations, newspapers, religious texts, dictionaries, and textbooks
written in the Armenian alphabet for the Turkish-speaking Armenian
community of the Ottoman Empire. In a span of two hundred years, over
one hundred periodicals and two thousand books were published in what
became known as Armeno-Turkish.
The bulk of these Armeno-Turkish materials were published in the final
decades of the Ottoman Empire, which suggests a particularly robust
Turkish-speaking Armenian community on the eve of the Armenian
genocide. Knowing that the vast majority of survivors from this
period, regardless of the language they spoke, fled into exile, a
thorny question emerges: What became of the Turkish language in the
early years of the Armenian diaspora once the Turkish-speaking
Armenian communities of Anatolia were expected to dissolve into the
larger Armenian-speaking community? How was the use of Turkish by
Armenians in the post-genocide diaspora understood once it took on a
new dimension as the language of the perpetrator?
Attempts to achieve national cohesion in the aftermath of the genocide
centered largely on language. In Armenian schools and orphanages in
the Near East, there was a particular focus on shedding Turkish and
mastering Armenian as a way to foster a national renaissance among the
fraction of the Armenian community that survived. Whereas the language
attitudes of the children could be cultivated in favor of Armenian, a
lifetime of brushing up against Turkish was not so easily forgotten in
their parents' and grandparents' generation. As language and ethnicity
became more and more intimately intertwined in the Armenian diaspora,
the children became part of a national system that had trouble making
sense of their older Turkish-speaking relatives.
The exclusion of Turkish from the national system created two spheres
governed by two languages; it is this public/private division that is
at the heart of the Armenian diaspora's relationship to Turkish today.
In the early years of the diaspora in the Near East, Europe, and the
Americas, three languages were in constant contact: the standard
Armenian of school and community life; the Turkish or Armenian dialect
of home life; and the language of the host country. Leaving this last
complicating layer aside, Armenian was privileged as the language of
the diaspora, while Turkish was pushed behind closed doors and
maintained in private. The continuation of Armeno-Turkish publications
in places like New York, Boston, and Buenos Aires well into the 1960s
illustrates that, despite the push for linguistic homogeneity, there
was an unwillingness to abandon Turkish in favor of Armenian among the
last generation of Armenians born in the Ottoman Empire.
This continued use of Turkish in the early years of the diaspora helps
explain the seemingly paradoxical way the Armenian diaspora relates to
Turkish today. The transmission of Turkish from the survivor
generation to the first generation born in the diaspora produced
children who straddled the two languages. In this generation, there
are Armenians who are hiding an excellent command of Turkish, thanks
to the conversations they overheard between parents who would use
Turkish to try to speak privately in front of their children, thanks
to the Nasrettin Hoca stories they were told, and thanks to the
practice they got transcribing Turkish messages into Armenian letters
on behalf of Turkish-speaking relatives who never learned to write.
Fossilized Turkish
After nearly a century, the Armenian diaspora still lives with the
linguistic fragments of its Ottoman past. Turkish was certainly at its
strongest among Armenians in the early years of the diaspora, but by
no means have the second, third, or fourth generations completely lost
touch with the language. Turkish is firmly implanted in the colloquial
Western Armenian spoken among descendants of Ottoman Armenians from
both Turkish- and Armenian-speaking families. Mixing in Turkish is
still so commonplace in conversation that it is a great compliment to
be known to speak makour [clean] Armenian.
So deeply are Turkish words and expressions embedded in the daily
language of family life that it often takes an Armenian language class
to reveal the Turkish origins of some of the most frequently used
words. In classrooms across the diaspora, students are learning that
they are not the only ones who call their grandfathers dede, or say
haydi to get their friends moving or sus to get them to be quiet. They
are not the only ones calling eggplant patlıcan, pouring coffee into a
fincan, or expressing their disbelief with a sighing babam. Certainly
Armenian equivalents of these words exist, but for many, they feel
stilted or artificially engineered when compared to the Turkish words
associated with the warmth of childhood.
Feelings about Turkish in the Armenian diaspora do, however, vary
greatly. Anger at the Turkish government's continued denial of the
Armenian genocide has led some to be wary of all things Turkish,
including the language. This attitude, however, is a reaction to the
injustice that the Turkish language has come to represent over the
past century. The relationship between Turkish and Armenian people
long predates the Armenian genocide. To see Turkish as a pollutant and
to try to eliminate all traces of the language from colloquial
Armenian is to ignore the historical lineage of the Armenian people.
Centuries of proximity to the Turkish language cannot be easily
undone. Many Armenians in the diaspora bear these historical ties in
their names, ranging from the practical (Boyaciyan [son of a painter],
Terziyan [son of a tailor], Kuyumciyan [son of a jeweler]) to the
perplexing (Altıparmakyan [son of someone with six fingers], Dilsizyan
[son of someone without a tongue], and Deveciyan [son of a camel
driver]).
Many Armenians also bear these ties in the pronunciation of the
Turkish words they have retained. Having been estranged from the
language during the linguistic reforms of the early Turkish Republic,
there is a fossilized form of Ottoman-era Turkish that exists not in
Turkey, but in homes throughout the Armenian diaspora. Since contact
with Turkish broke after the genocide, the language was frozen in 1915
and has been transmitted in this outdated form to subsequent
generations. As a result, Armenians across the diaspora, who have
inherited Turkish rather than studied it, tend to pronounce words like
lokhum or çocukh like Anatolian peasants from another age.
The ties can also be seen in the way Armenians in the diaspora have
appropriated Turkish and created with it. For instance, in the case of
the Turkish zevzek, the word is taken and subjected to the rules of
Armenian noun formation to emerge in a hybrid form as zevzekutiun.
This phenomenon can also be seen with the Armenian diminutive suffix
`ig - , creating words like canig from the word can. Conversely,
Armenian words can also be subjected to the rules of Turkish grammar
to invent hybrid expressions. For example, in the colloquial Armenian
expression çe mı [isn't it?], the Turkish interrogative participle mı
is added to the Armenian word to create a question with a grammatical
form that only exists in Turkish.
A Momentary Suspension of Politics
The Armenian genocide dispossessed Ottoman Armenians of nearly
everything but their language. In the years immediately following the
genocide, efforts to stomp out Turkish words and expressions from
everyday language did not triumph over the domestic sphere where
Turkish has endured in colloquial Western Armenian.
The politics that Turkish came to represent after the fall of the
Ottoman Empire, however, have added a certain ambivalence to the use
of the language since the early years of the Armenian diaspora. While
certain Turkish words and expressions may awaken happy family
memories, the towering position of Armenian genocide denial in
diasporan Armenian culture affects the way the Turkish language is
perceived in the Armenian diaspora. In other words, the association of
the Turkish language with the Turkish state and its politics makes
many wary of acknowledging the indelible place of Turkish in the lives
of Ottoman Armenians and their diasporan descendants.
Amid the ambivalence that Turkish generates, there are flashes of a
momentary disconnect between language and politics where pre-1915
Armenian attitudes towards Turkish'ones shaped more by ease of
expression than by the pain that the language has grown to symbolize
today'can be seen. These dueling attitudes can exist even within a
single individual: within an Armenian-American who boycotts Turkish
hazelnuts and soothes himself with Turkish proverbs his grandmother
would recite to him as a child; within a French-Armenian who
demonstrates against genocide denial every 24 April and coos yavrum
(or yavrus, replacing the Turkish suffix with the Armenian one) to her
children; within a Lebanese-Armenian who rails against the destruction
of Ottoman Armenian cultural heritage sites in Anatolia with the
colorful Turkish curses always on the tip of his tongue.
The private dimension of the legacy of Turkish in the Armenian
diaspora makes it almost invisible to those outside the Armenian
community, particularly to those in Turkey who may have little idea
that the Ottoman past continues to breathe through the language of the
Armenians.
* This article originally appeared on Jadaliyya.
http://www.bianet.org/english/world/159235-the-legacy-of-turkish-in-the-armenian-diaspora
Oct 17 2014
The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora
The association of the Turkish language with the Turkish state and its
politics makes many wary of acknowledging the indelible place of
Turkish in the lives of Ottoman Armenians and their diasporan
descendants.
Jennifer Manoukian
Ä°stanbul - BIA News Desk
There we sat, the proverbial Turk and Armenian, at neighboring tables
in a university student center in New Jersey. My back to his, I drew
my eyes out of the book I was reading to concentrate on the voice
behind me. The gliding vowels of Turkish always sound familiar in the
split second it takes for my brain to mark the language as unknown. As
the man shouted into his cellphone, unaware of the aspiring
eavesdropper nearby, a surge of recognition startled me each time I
managed to catch a hiç or a hemen. These words were, after all, part
of my language too.
That was the microcosmic encounter between two nations notoriously
divided: a non-conversation through a handful of words that belong to
us both. It was an encounter rooted in another time, another world
away'a time before ethno-linguistic nationalism led Armenians and
Turks to retreat into their languages and fortify them against each
other, a time before the Turkish people held exclusive rights to the
Turkish language, and a time before the Armenian people felt a
visceral unease towards most things Turkish.
This scene recalls the intimate relationship that Ottoman Armenians
once had with the Turkish language. Although this relationship grew
strained nearly a century ago when most of the community was pushed
into the diaspora, among many of the descendants of this community
there remains a quiet, reticent affection for the language that still
echoes today in far-flung corners of the Armenian diaspora.
Turkish: A Language of the Ottoman Armenians
How can the relationship between a people and their imperial language
be framed as a transnational, multigenerational love affair in good
faith? Other imperial contexts point to the striking implausibility of
this scenario. The tendency of imperial powers to use language to sink
their claws deeper into the minds of the colonized, strip them of
their cultural identities, and tighten their grip on the territory
they aim to pillage might prompt a raised eyebrow at the metaphor. But
there is a distinction to be made between an Algerian's relationship
to French, an Indian's relationship to English, and an Ottoman
Armenian's relationship to Turkish.
The first distinction concerns the widespread exposure of the Armenian
community to Turkish during the Ottoman period. Ottoman
Armenians'urban and rural, elite and non-elite'existed in a society
where Turkish was the lingua franca in their cities and towns. The
language was not, as was the case in other imperial contexts, spoken
solely by the ruling minority and their collaborators; on the
contrary, Turkish was the dominant language, from the palace to the
marketplace, and permeated all aspects of public life. The Armenian
community was, therefore, compelled, to varying degrees, to assimilate
Turkish in order to function in the society around them.
The Ottoman Armenian relationship to Turkish was also deepened by the
length of time it had to develop. The presence of the imperial
language was not a blip on the timeline of a nation, nor did it
permeate just an elite tier of society. Turkish was pervasive for four
centuries, not only formally in the bureaucracy, but also informally
in cross-confessional interactions in the multilingual towns and
villages of Anatolia.
But it is one distinct outcome of the centuries-long predominance of
Turkish that sets the Ottoman Armenian relationship with the Turkish
language apart from cases of other colonized peoples. Naturally, the
enduring presence of Turkish and its centrality in public life led
many Ottoman Armenians to slip Turkish words into their Armenian
conversations, but by the nineteenth century, there were large
communities of Armenians across Anatolia with little knowledge of the
Armenian language. Centered largely in Cilicia, Yozgat, and Ankara,
these Ottoman Armenians spoke Turkish exclusively and had learned it
as their mother tongue.
The Turkish language might have initially been perceived as the
language of imperial domination, but over the course of generations,
it became the only one many Ottoman Armenians knew. It was the
language they loved in, grieved in, joked in, fought in. In other
words, Turkish became a language that belonged as much to the
Armenians as it did to anyone else.
Turkish in Other Alphabets
In the late Ottoman period, religion was the supreme determinant of
national belonging. If religion took precedence over language, it
meant that, as long as Turkish-speaking Armenians identified as
Christian, they were still considered part of the Armenian community.
This phenomenon was certainly not unique to Ottoman Armenians. Until
the triumphant rise of ethno-linguistic nationalism in the first
decades of the twentieth century, Turkish was a language largely
unburdened by the constraints of religion and ethnicity. Turkish as an
Ottoman language can be seen most vividly in the print cultures of
non-Muslim communities in the Empire.
These were groups who knew the letters, but not the language, of their
liturgies. For the Greek Orthodox Karamanli community, there are
examples of Turkish written in the Greek alphabet. For a certain
subset of the Jewish community, there are texts in Turkish written in
the Hebrew alphabet, as well as Turkish-language materials written in
the Syriac alphabet for the Turkish-speaking Assyrian community.
But by far the most imposing is the corpus of Turkish-language novels,
translations, newspapers, religious texts, dictionaries, and textbooks
written in the Armenian alphabet for the Turkish-speaking Armenian
community of the Ottoman Empire. In a span of two hundred years, over
one hundred periodicals and two thousand books were published in what
became known as Armeno-Turkish.
The bulk of these Armeno-Turkish materials were published in the final
decades of the Ottoman Empire, which suggests a particularly robust
Turkish-speaking Armenian community on the eve of the Armenian
genocide. Knowing that the vast majority of survivors from this
period, regardless of the language they spoke, fled into exile, a
thorny question emerges: What became of the Turkish language in the
early years of the Armenian diaspora once the Turkish-speaking
Armenian communities of Anatolia were expected to dissolve into the
larger Armenian-speaking community? How was the use of Turkish by
Armenians in the post-genocide diaspora understood once it took on a
new dimension as the language of the perpetrator?
Attempts to achieve national cohesion in the aftermath of the genocide
centered largely on language. In Armenian schools and orphanages in
the Near East, there was a particular focus on shedding Turkish and
mastering Armenian as a way to foster a national renaissance among the
fraction of the Armenian community that survived. Whereas the language
attitudes of the children could be cultivated in favor of Armenian, a
lifetime of brushing up against Turkish was not so easily forgotten in
their parents' and grandparents' generation. As language and ethnicity
became more and more intimately intertwined in the Armenian diaspora,
the children became part of a national system that had trouble making
sense of their older Turkish-speaking relatives.
The exclusion of Turkish from the national system created two spheres
governed by two languages; it is this public/private division that is
at the heart of the Armenian diaspora's relationship to Turkish today.
In the early years of the diaspora in the Near East, Europe, and the
Americas, three languages were in constant contact: the standard
Armenian of school and community life; the Turkish or Armenian dialect
of home life; and the language of the host country. Leaving this last
complicating layer aside, Armenian was privileged as the language of
the diaspora, while Turkish was pushed behind closed doors and
maintained in private. The continuation of Armeno-Turkish publications
in places like New York, Boston, and Buenos Aires well into the 1960s
illustrates that, despite the push for linguistic homogeneity, there
was an unwillingness to abandon Turkish in favor of Armenian among the
last generation of Armenians born in the Ottoman Empire.
This continued use of Turkish in the early years of the diaspora helps
explain the seemingly paradoxical way the Armenian diaspora relates to
Turkish today. The transmission of Turkish from the survivor
generation to the first generation born in the diaspora produced
children who straddled the two languages. In this generation, there
are Armenians who are hiding an excellent command of Turkish, thanks
to the conversations they overheard between parents who would use
Turkish to try to speak privately in front of their children, thanks
to the Nasrettin Hoca stories they were told, and thanks to the
practice they got transcribing Turkish messages into Armenian letters
on behalf of Turkish-speaking relatives who never learned to write.
Fossilized Turkish
After nearly a century, the Armenian diaspora still lives with the
linguistic fragments of its Ottoman past. Turkish was certainly at its
strongest among Armenians in the early years of the diaspora, but by
no means have the second, third, or fourth generations completely lost
touch with the language. Turkish is firmly implanted in the colloquial
Western Armenian spoken among descendants of Ottoman Armenians from
both Turkish- and Armenian-speaking families. Mixing in Turkish is
still so commonplace in conversation that it is a great compliment to
be known to speak makour [clean] Armenian.
So deeply are Turkish words and expressions embedded in the daily
language of family life that it often takes an Armenian language class
to reveal the Turkish origins of some of the most frequently used
words. In classrooms across the diaspora, students are learning that
they are not the only ones who call their grandfathers dede, or say
haydi to get their friends moving or sus to get them to be quiet. They
are not the only ones calling eggplant patlıcan, pouring coffee into a
fincan, or expressing their disbelief with a sighing babam. Certainly
Armenian equivalents of these words exist, but for many, they feel
stilted or artificially engineered when compared to the Turkish words
associated with the warmth of childhood.
Feelings about Turkish in the Armenian diaspora do, however, vary
greatly. Anger at the Turkish government's continued denial of the
Armenian genocide has led some to be wary of all things Turkish,
including the language. This attitude, however, is a reaction to the
injustice that the Turkish language has come to represent over the
past century. The relationship between Turkish and Armenian people
long predates the Armenian genocide. To see Turkish as a pollutant and
to try to eliminate all traces of the language from colloquial
Armenian is to ignore the historical lineage of the Armenian people.
Centuries of proximity to the Turkish language cannot be easily
undone. Many Armenians in the diaspora bear these historical ties in
their names, ranging from the practical (Boyaciyan [son of a painter],
Terziyan [son of a tailor], Kuyumciyan [son of a jeweler]) to the
perplexing (Altıparmakyan [son of someone with six fingers], Dilsizyan
[son of someone without a tongue], and Deveciyan [son of a camel
driver]).
Many Armenians also bear these ties in the pronunciation of the
Turkish words they have retained. Having been estranged from the
language during the linguistic reforms of the early Turkish Republic,
there is a fossilized form of Ottoman-era Turkish that exists not in
Turkey, but in homes throughout the Armenian diaspora. Since contact
with Turkish broke after the genocide, the language was frozen in 1915
and has been transmitted in this outdated form to subsequent
generations. As a result, Armenians across the diaspora, who have
inherited Turkish rather than studied it, tend to pronounce words like
lokhum or çocukh like Anatolian peasants from another age.
The ties can also be seen in the way Armenians in the diaspora have
appropriated Turkish and created with it. For instance, in the case of
the Turkish zevzek, the word is taken and subjected to the rules of
Armenian noun formation to emerge in a hybrid form as zevzekutiun.
This phenomenon can also be seen with the Armenian diminutive suffix
`ig - , creating words like canig from the word can. Conversely,
Armenian words can also be subjected to the rules of Turkish grammar
to invent hybrid expressions. For example, in the colloquial Armenian
expression çe mı [isn't it?], the Turkish interrogative participle mı
is added to the Armenian word to create a question with a grammatical
form that only exists in Turkish.
A Momentary Suspension of Politics
The Armenian genocide dispossessed Ottoman Armenians of nearly
everything but their language. In the years immediately following the
genocide, efforts to stomp out Turkish words and expressions from
everyday language did not triumph over the domestic sphere where
Turkish has endured in colloquial Western Armenian.
The politics that Turkish came to represent after the fall of the
Ottoman Empire, however, have added a certain ambivalence to the use
of the language since the early years of the Armenian diaspora. While
certain Turkish words and expressions may awaken happy family
memories, the towering position of Armenian genocide denial in
diasporan Armenian culture affects the way the Turkish language is
perceived in the Armenian diaspora. In other words, the association of
the Turkish language with the Turkish state and its politics makes
many wary of acknowledging the indelible place of Turkish in the lives
of Ottoman Armenians and their diasporan descendants.
Amid the ambivalence that Turkish generates, there are flashes of a
momentary disconnect between language and politics where pre-1915
Armenian attitudes towards Turkish'ones shaped more by ease of
expression than by the pain that the language has grown to symbolize
today'can be seen. These dueling attitudes can exist even within a
single individual: within an Armenian-American who boycotts Turkish
hazelnuts and soothes himself with Turkish proverbs his grandmother
would recite to him as a child; within a French-Armenian who
demonstrates against genocide denial every 24 April and coos yavrum
(or yavrus, replacing the Turkish suffix with the Armenian one) to her
children; within a Lebanese-Armenian who rails against the destruction
of Ottoman Armenian cultural heritage sites in Anatolia with the
colorful Turkish curses always on the tip of his tongue.
The private dimension of the legacy of Turkish in the Armenian
diaspora makes it almost invisible to those outside the Armenian
community, particularly to those in Turkey who may have little idea
that the Ottoman past continues to breathe through the language of the
Armenians.
* This article originally appeared on Jadaliyya.
http://www.bianet.org/english/world/159235-the-legacy-of-turkish-in-the-armenian-diaspora