TURKISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. Turk ish, now generally understood as referring to the Osmanli or Otto man Turkish speech of Europe and Asia Minor, is correctly the name of a family of tongues. The Turks were known to China in the 6th century A.D., and the Turkish inscriptions from the Orkhon river district in northern Asia bear dates from before the middle of the 8th century. The best known divisions of the Turks are the Uigurs, the Seljuks, and the Osmanlis. The last named took Constantinople in 1453 and set up the Ottoman empire. (See TURKEY.) The root of the name is turk, meaning "power" (or, as some authorities have it "to arrive at maturity"). The name is found in many languages from China to the Caucasus, but was not used by the Osmanli Turks until the beginning of this century. The Turkish languages are spoken over 140 degrees of longitude, from Macedonia to Siberia, and are characterized by a remarkable homogeneity. These languages are everywhere easily identifiable and leave ineffaceable marks on surrounding tongues (e.g., in Mongolia and Siberia). The Asiatic Turks were at different pe riods decidedly forceful and their languages made attacks on other speech systems, analogous to those physical assaults made by the Turks on surrounding peoples.
A prominent feature of the Turkish languages is the vocalic harmony (prevailing throughout the family) upon the eight vowels, a, ft; a, o, u. The Turkish tongues are sweet-sound ing and a comprehensive scheme of vowel-attractions governs the euphonic interests of the family. Nouns are declined and com pounds can be built up by adding suffix to suffix: from chal (mak), "play a musical instrument" chal-gi, "a musical instru ment"; chal-gi-ji "a musician," and with -ldr (a sign of the plur.), chal-gi-ji-leir, "musicians." This building up from a stem is seen to perfection in the verb. The declension of nouns now comprises genitive, dative, accusative, locative, and ablative, although in earlier times there were other cases. The plural (marked by the suffixes -1dr, -tar, -ddr, and -ndr) is not invariably used : bir tavuk satmak, to sell one I hen," tavuk satmak, "to sell hens." The copula is frequently omitted, in which event the order of words reveals the sense : oglan ogsitz (lit. "boy orphan"), the boy is an orphan, and ogsfiz oglan, "a boy orphan." The usual copula in the Turkish languages is the aorist of durmak, "to stand up." "The boy is an orphan" with the copula
expressed would be oglan ogsitz tur-ur. The construction of the sentence is accomplished by use of pronouns both before and after the predicate in accordance with the following table. (In the post-predicate position the pronoun is merely an enclitic.) Suffixes to the general verb are of two kinds, (a) those forming nouns of action (trap), or in Osmanli -dik and (b) predicative suffixes which form other tenses or moods of the verb. These are added to the base, e.g., from attnak (to throw), base at+suffix -in or -iniz gives the imperative atin, atiniz, "throw!" Frequently, however, the base alone is used as an imperative and, except in its written form, the Turkish language in whatever dialect it is found is far from stable.
The Turkish numeral system is decimal. It is nearly, but not quite, uniform throughout the languages; it is possible that the parent idiom had not developed a complete system befbre the break-up of the primal family. In certain cases the colloquial has borrowed one or two number-names from surrounding peoples. The Osmanli Turkish numerals are: I, bir, 2 iki, 3 uch, 4 art, 5 besh, 6 alti, 7 yedi, 8 sekiz, 9 doquz, 10 on. Eleven is on bir, and so regularly to 20, which is yirmi; 3o otuz; 4o kerk ; 5o elli; 6o almish; 7o yetmish, and so regularly to 100 (yuz). One thousand is bin.
The general outlines of the language have remained unchanged throughout the centuries, but in details there are wide differences between the languages of the different localities. The modern Ottoman (Osmanli) Turkish differs very widely from the Turkish tongues of northern Asia. It is much more harmonious to the ear and much simpler in grammatical structure. It is a difficult task to trace the development of written Turkish from the kok-tirk or pseudorunic script of the Orkhon regions through the Uigur script of Mongolia and Turkestan to the modern use in Turkey and central Asia of the Arabic script adapted to Turkish needs. For Turkish has used several different scripts, writing in Syriac characters (Estrangelo) and a modified form of this script called Manichaean, in Brahmi, in Tibetan, in Armenian, Greek and Hebrew. The most modern development is the deci sion of the decree of the Turkish government in 1928 that the Roman alphabet should be universally substituted for the Arabic script.