I mediatori dei ‘testi in trascrizione’ (Transkriptionstexte) turchi tra Levante ed Europa
abstract
The so‑called ‘Turkish transcriptional texts’, i.e. Ottoman texts in non‑Arabic scripts, are important sources for the knowledge of the historical grammar, especially phonology, of the Ottoman language. The term was created by Turkologists specifically for texts written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in the Latin alphabet. The texts were usually written by European travellers with no or little knowledge of Turkish, relying on information from native speakers. This essay focuses on how the authors of the texts obtained their linguistic material. A detailed linguistic analysis of selected passages will show that the mediators were often of Greek origin.
Keywords: History of Ottoman language • European grammars of Turkish • Turkish transcriptional texts • Cultural mediators • Ottoman Greeks