Re: languages in Russia

From: Eugene Holman (holman_at_elo.helsinki.fi)
Date: 09/03/04 

Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 07:06:13 +0300

In article <222ae656.0409021852.5e92699@posting.google.com>,
ybg@theworld.com (Yusuf B Gursey) wrote:

> holman@elo.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman) wrote in message
news:<holman-0209041134140001@hupnet245-8.hupnet.helsinki.fi>...
> > In article <7df91bca.0409012331.2965ca84@posting.google.com>,
> > tyusha@freemail.ru (Xenia) wrote:
> >
> > <deleted>
> > >
> > > So what is the basis for your confidence? Any dipolmat will tell you
> > > notorious stories how hard it is to write a treaty in Kazakh, because
> > > the nomadic language lacks any abstract concepts, let alone terms of
> > > international law.
> >
> > Much the same was true for Turkish up until the reforms and modernizations
>
> the is utterly false for Turkish. the Ottomans were drawing up
> international treaties with European powers for centuries. many
> "international" words, like passport, bomb, captain, bank had already
> entered Turkish through trade andn the Navy (mainly from Venetian
> Italian, some were redone a little under the influence of French in
> the 19th cent.) before the 19th cent. see Kahane & Tietze "Lingua
> Franca of the Levant ...").

Thank you for making my general statement more precise.

What I had meant was that pre-Atatürkian Turkish was riddled with
loanwords for abstract concepts that were inconsistent with the structure
of Turkish and which many speakers of Turkish did not understand. Since
they were written in a vowelless Arabic scrpt, the average Turk couldn't
even pronounce them.

<deletions>

Regards,
Eugene Holman

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