The Language of the Story “Tenezzüh” Written in Ottoman Turkish

Abstract

Ömer Seyfettin’s short story “Tenezzüh,” published in the newspaper Sabah in 1902, is among the author’s earliest known works and represents the initial phase in his literary trajectory from Ottoman Turkish to a simplified Turkish. This text strongly reflects the characteristic elements of the late Ottoman linguistic atmosphere: the predominance of Arabic- and Persian-origin vocabulary, syntactic patterns based on compounds and constructions, rhetorical features of the literary style, and the distance between written and spoken language. In the late Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkish, the dominant language in official and cultural spheres, was a multi-layered written language built upon a Turkish core, integrated with Arabic-Persian vocabulary and grammatical patterns. While this language set the norms of high literature and the press, it also became the focal point of debates on simplification and the quest for a national language in the course of modernization. The vocabulary and syntax of “Tenezzüh,” written in Ottoman Turkish during the transitional period, will be described through the distribution of Arabic and Persian elements in the text; the relationship between this distribution and stylistic as well as narrative functions will be revealed. The analysis will first produce a lexical inventory based on an etymological classification within the text; it will distinguish Arabic (e.g., tahattur, muâşaka, sekerât), Persian (e.g., pîş-i hayâl, hâl, formulaic elements such as maşaallâh), and Turkish items and determine their proportions. Then, syntactic features such as the prevalence of izafet, chains of compounds, compound modifiers, and long sentence structures will be examined; their role in the narrative’s temporal flow, the rhythm of descriptive passages, and the production of affect will be evaluated. Thus, “Tenezzüh” will be positioned as an intermediary example that both makes visible the practices of the literary written language in the final phase of linguistic history and helps to make sense of Ömer Seyfettin’s subsequent tendencies toward simplification. The findings aim to discuss the composite nature of the late Ottoman written language and the axes of continuity and rupture in the transition to modern Turkish through the short story “Tenezzüh.”