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Armeno-Turkish: Betrayal or Blessing?

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  • Armeno-Turkish: Betrayal or Blessing?

    PRESS RELEASE
    St Nersess Seminary
    September 28, 2005
    150 Stratton Rd.
    New Rochelle, NY 10804
    Phone: 914-636-2003

    Armeno-Turkish: Betrayal or Blessing?

    It looks like Armenian but it's not.

    For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950,
    more than 2000 books were printed in the Turkish language using the
    divinely-inspired letters of the Armenian alphabet. On the surface,
    the phenomenon of "Armeno-Turkish" would seem like yet another sad
    chapter in Armenian history as Armenians gradually lost their
    language, culture and identity under Ottoman tyranny.

    Bedross Der Matossian sees the phenomenon not as a sign of the
    deterioration of Armenian ethnic identity, but of its extraordinary
    endurance and resilience. In an intriguing lecture delivered at the
    Seminary on Tuesday, September 27, the young doctoral candidate in
    Middle Eastern Studies argued that the tradition of writing Turkish
    with Armenian letters is an overlooked example of the versatility of
    the Armenian alphabet and "a creative mechanism for maintaining
    Armenian identity in a multi-ethnic environment."

    Der Matossian's lecture, entitled, The Phenomenon of the
    Armeno-Turkish Literature in the 19th century Ottoman Empire, was the
    first in a series of five public lectures being offered this Fall as
    part of St. Nersess Seminary's commemoration of the 1600th
    anniversary of the creation of the Armenian alphabet.

    Armenian? Turkish?


    Armeno-Turkish books are not hard to find. If you know the 38
    characters of the Armenian alphabet and you glance across the shelves
    of an Armenian library or church office; or peek into the boxes in
    medz-mayrig's (grandma's) attic, you will almost surely come across a
    book printed in Armenian, which you will not be able to read--unless
    you speak Turkish.

    Armenians in the Ottoman Empire wrote books on history, fine arts,
    religion, science, and philosophy in Turkish using not the
    conventional Arabic script, but the ayp, pen, kim of our ancestors.
    Armeno-Turkish business contracts, school books, dictionaries,
    grammars, translations of European literature, Bibles, hymnals and
    even prayer books were published in more than fifty cities including
    Venice, Vienna, Trieste, Boston and New York.

    This rich body of highly erudite writings can hardly be taken as the
    last gasp of a dying culture. It marked a true cultural-intellectual
    achievement. Der Matossian displayed a list of more than 30 distinct
    newspapers published in Armeno-Turkish, which circulated during the
    60's and 70's of the 19th century.

    Der Matossian repeatedly referred to Armeno-Turkish as a "language."
    The Armenians who wrote Ottoman Turkish were not simply transcribing
    the sounds of the Turkish language; they meticulously preserved the
    Turkish words, syntax, punctuation and grammatical structures. This
    triggered the publication of Armeno-Turkish dictionaries and grammar
    books, many examples of which survive today. The famous Haigazian
    Pararan, the preeminent lexicon of Classical Armenian published by
    the Armenian Mekhitarist Fathers of Venice in the early 18th century,
    gives an Armeno-Turkish equivalent for each word found between its
    massive covers.

    `As the language evolved, Armeno-Turkish gradually adopted Arabic and
    Persian words and word forms,' Der Matossian observed, "Expressions
    which a Turk would probably not understand."

    An Armenian Oddity?


    Not only Armenians read Armeno-Turkish, but the non-Armenian elite,
    including the Ottoman Turkish intelligentsia, who were exposed to
    European literature and emerging political ideas thanks, in part, to
    the Armenians who translated these writing into Armeno-Turkish.

    Turkish has no native alphabet. The Turks adopted the Arabic script
    along with Islam.

    "Arguably, the Armenian letters function better than Arabic as a
    script for Ottoman Turkish," said Der Matossian, a native of
    Jerusalem, who is fluent in Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and
    English. "During the First Ottoman Constitutional Period (1876) there
    was even the suggestion that Armenian be used as the official
    alphabet of the Empire," the young scholar said.

    American Protestant missionaries also learned and used Armeno-Turkish
    in their missionary efforts among the Armenians of 19th-century
    Ottoman Turkey. `Grammatically Turkish is a simpler language than
    Armenian but the Armenian alphabet is much easier to learn than the
    Arabic script. This made Armeno-Turkish a highly effective tool for
    the missionaries,' said Der Matossian. `For many Armenians of the
    time, the Bible was only accessible in Armeno-Turkish translations
    produced by the missionaries. The Armenian Church used only Krapar
    (Classical Armenian), which the general population did not
    understand,' he said. Protestant missionaries also produced an
    Armeno-Kurdish translation of the Scriptures, as well as
    Greco-Turkish (so-called Karamanli) and other versions.

    For Those Who Do Not Know Armenian


    Again and again Der Matossian insisted that the use of Armeno-Turkish
    should be seen not as a betrayal of Armenian identity, but as a
    creative effort to preserve it under the most unfavorable conditions.
    Several elderly members of the audience were visibly moved when Der
    Matossian read an Armeno-Turkish prayer that was dedicated `to those
    who do not know Armenian.' Giving thanks to God for the blessing of
    holy communion, the prayer had only four Armenian words:
    haghortootyoon(communion), Heesoos (Jesus), nushkhark (Eucharistic
    bread), and pazhag (chalice). Der Matossian said that Armeno-Turkish
    fully exploited the Turkish language but preserved certain `sacred'
    words in Armenian as a way of maintaining Armenian ethnic boundaries.

    `I am hearing a language that I don't love express a thought that is
    very precious to me,' said Edward Yessayian, tears streaming down his
    cheeks.

    The Language of the State and Dominant Group


    `As a result of Ottoman domination and compulsory conversion to
    Islam, many Armenians of the Ottoman Empire gradually lost their
    ancestral language but they adhered religiously to their alphabet,
    teaching it to their children even though they could no longer speak
    the words it was intended to record,' Der Matossian said. `The
    readiness of our people to apply the Armenian alphabet as a vehicle
    for writing the language of the dominant group is astonishing and
    highly significant.' It is not that the Armenians could not learn the
    Arabic script - the intelligentsia wrote and spoke Turkish fluently.

    `Rather," Der Matossian said, `It was their way of preserving,
    consciously or unconsciously, their ethnic and religious identity and
    maintaining boundaries around their distinctive identity. I would
    even venture,' Der Matossian said in response to a question, `that in
    developing Armeno-Turkish, the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire sought
    to `armenize' or to consecrate for themselves a small sanctuary in
    the hostile world they were living in. For Armenians, religion and
    alphabet cannot be separated.'

    "Bedross gave a 3-hour lecture in 40 minutes," said Fr. Daniel
    Findikyan. `Here is an entirely overlooked aspect of the creative
    genius and theological depth of our Armenian-Christian heritage and
    forebears.'

    Der Matossian is a graduate of the Hebrew University and currently a
    Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in the Department of Middle
    East and Asian Languages and Cultures. His concentration is on
    inter-ethnic relationships during the Second Constitutional Period of
    the Ottoman Empire.

    "The great reward of being a teacher is to raise a good student,"
    said Dr. Roberta Ervine in her introductory remarks. "We are in the
    presence of something special when we meet a young man like Bedross
    who has devoted his life to exploring, preserving and teaching a
    precious culture."

    Ervine was Mr. Der Matossian's teacher in the Holy Translators' Soorp
    Tarkmanchats School in Jerusalem. She called him "the best, most
    perceptive student of Armenian history that I had had in 21 years as
    a teacher in Jerusalem."

    The next scheduled lecture in this series will take place at the
    Seminary on Monday, October 24 at 7:30 PM. Professor Michael Stone,
    the noted armenologist from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, will
    deliver a lecture entitled, `Why Have an Armenian Language?'
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