The problem with hybridity: a critique of Armeno-Turkish studies

ABSTRACT

The study of Armeno-Turkish Literature, or Turkish written in Armenian script, has boomed of late, posing a challenge to Turkish literary historiography's neglect of Armeno-Turkish texts. Though this scholarship has argued against the exclusion of Armenians from late Ottoman cultural history, it has also unintentionally reproduced the nationalist, exclusionary logic that such segregation rested upon in the first place. This article offers a critique of the now dominant scholarly understanding of Armeno-Turkish as a “hybrid” of ostensibly distinct late Ottoman-era Armenian and Turkish languages and cultures. It does so by reframing Turkish as an Armenian language, moving beyond the shortcomings of hybridity theory toward a more productive, “depropriative” idiom for the study of Armeno-Turkish that denationalizes the Turkish language.

KEYWORDS:

• Armeno-Turkish
• Armenian literature
• Turkish literature
• late Ottoman empire
• hybridity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I have transliterated Armeno-Turkish words according to the system proposed in Çelik and Sargsyan, “Ermeni harfli Türkçe.” The transliteration of Armenian follows the Library of Congress romanization table. Turkish in the Arabic script has been transliterated to conform with modern Turkish orthography.

2 For catalogues of Armeno-Turkish books and periodicals, see H. A. Stepʻanyan, Hayataṛ tʻurkʻeren grkʻeri; and Mildanoğlu, Ermenice süreli yayınlar, 391–96.

3 Papastergiadis, “Tracing Hybridity in Theory,” 259.

4 Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” 58.

5 Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 154, 156.

6 See Papastergiadis, “Tracing Hybridity in Theory,” 264.

7 The lack of a broader colonial discourse is more pronounced in the Ottoman-Armenian case as opposed to, say, that of the empire’s Arab and nomadic populations. On the latter, see Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” and Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’.”

8 Even some scholars who advocate for a postcolonial approach to the study of the empire concede this point. See Göçek, “Parameters of a Postcolonial Sociology of the Ottoman Empire,” 95–96.

9 Some Armenians indeed thought about Turkish as a lingua franca. An advertisement for an Armeno-Turkish novel that appeared in the similarly Armeno-Turkish periodical Mecmaayı havadis referred to it as “cümleye malüm olan lisanı türki” (the Turkish language known to all). See Mecmaayı havadis, February 13, 1854.

10 Berberian, “La littérature arméno-turque,” 809; Kraelitz-Greifenhorst, “Ermeni harfleriyle Türkçe hakkında araştırmalar,” 13–14; Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites,’” 63; Ueno, “One Script, Two Languages,” 607; Cankara, “Armeno-Turkish Writing,” 174–75; Der Matossian, “The Development of Armeno-Turkish,” 67; Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion, 36.

11 Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites,’” 59–60.

12 Riggs, preface to Outline of a Grammar of the Turkish Language as Written in the Armenian Character, n.p.

13 Pratt, “On the Armeno-Turkish Alphabet,” 376.

14 Kraelitz-Greifenhorst, “Ermeni harfleriyle Türkçe hakkında araştırmalar,” 15. He listed the most common Armenian words and terms to appear in this literature at the end of his article. See Kraelitz-Greifenhorst, “Ermeni harfleriyle Türkçe hakkında araştırmalar,” 29–30.

15 For more on this scholarship, see Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion, 28–32.

16 Köprülüzade Mehmet Fuat, “Türk edebiyatının Ermeni edebiyatı üzerindeki tesiratı.”

17 Kurtikean, “Tʻrkʻagēt hay banasteghtsner ew ashughner.”

18 Cankara, “İmparatorluk ve roman,” 143–44.

19 The novel was apparently only published once without a named author. See Aḳabi hikyayesi. Though Şemseddin Sami’s 1872/3 Taaşşuk-ı Talat ve Fıtnat is frequently cited as the first Turkish novel, it was preceded by at least five Armeno-Turkish ones, including Aḳabi. See Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion, 35, 37. For the Armenian translation, see Agapii patmutʻyuně.

20 G. Kh. Stepʻanyan, preface to Agapii patmutʻyuně, 25.

21 Tietze, preface to Akabi hikyayesi: İlk Türkçe roman, ix. A French translation was published in 2018. See Vartanian, L’histoire d’Akabi. Laurent Mignon notes that Armenians writing in the Arabic script were also mostly ignored by Turkish literary historians, suggesting that the alphabet barrier was not the sole reason for their exclusion. See Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion, 47–48.

22 G. Stepʻanyan, “Hayataṛ turkʻeren hay mamulě,” 239–74.

23 Berberian, “La littérature arméno-turque,” 809–19.

24 See Pamukciyan, “Ermeni harfli Türkçe el yazma bir cönk,” 415.

25 Pamukciyan, Ermeni harfli Türkçe metinler.

26 See Sanjian, introduction to Eremya Chelebi Kömürjian’s Armeno-Turkish Poem “The Jewish Bride.”

27 See Kut, “Ermeni harfli Türkçe telif ve tercüme konuları.”

28 See Hetzer, Dačkerēn-Texte.

29 H. A. Stepʻanyan, Hayataṛ tʻurkʻeren grakanutʻyuně, 5. Sebouh Aslanian offers a critique of the book’s outlook in Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites,’” 79–82.

30 See Khaṛatyan, “Hayataṛ tʻurkʻeren mamulě,” 85.

31 Hacikyan et al., The Heritage of Armenian Literature, 58–59. The Ottoman state never made a concerted effort to impose the Turkish language on its subject peoples. Even when non-Muslims converted, they would often retain their original language. See Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 36. Berberian also made the point that the case of Turkish-speaking Armenians was not one unique to the Ottoman Empire nor was it the product of coercive top-down assimilation. See Berberian, “La littérature arméno-turque,” 809.

32 See Koptaş, “Ermeni harfleriyle Türkçe” (2002); and “Ermeni harfleriyle Türkçe” (2003).

33 See Kutalmış, “Arap ve Ermeni harfli Türkçe Hüdâvendigâr gazetesi;” Kutalmış, “On the Turkish in Armenian Script;” Demir, “19. yüzyıl Ermeni harfli Türkçe metinlerde çekimli şekiller;” Gölpınar, “Ermeni harfli Türkçe bir dram maşukını katl idemeyen kız üzerinde metin incelemesi;” Karakılcık, “Hovsep H. Kurbanyan’ın ‘İki kapu yoldaşları yahod hakku adaletin zahiri’si, 1885, ikinci cilt.”

34 The same can be said of Strauss’ work on Karamanlıca literature, which is more prominent than his scholarship on Armeno-Turkish. See Strauss, “The Millets and the Ottoman Language;” and “Is Karamanli Literature Part of a ‘Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian) Literature’?”

35 See, for example, Strauss, “Les livres et l’imprimerie,” 7n8, 20.

36 On Ottoman multilingualism and everyday urban life, see Strauss, “Linguistic Diversity and Everyday Life.” On the politics of language, see Strauss, “Language and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire.” For an earlier example of his work on the history of reading, see Strauss, “Romanlar, ah! Ô romanlar!”

37 It should be noted here that the languages of print did not reflect the diversity of spoken languages. Relatively few – Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew – were written or printed regularly until the nineteenth century. See Strauss, “Who Read What,” 40.

38 Strauss, “Who Read What,” 39.

39 On literature in translation in the late Ottoman Empire, see Strauss, “What Was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire?”

40 Strauss, “Who Read What,” 44, 51. Particularly popular among Armenian readers were the works of Ahmet Mithat Efendi, whose novel Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi appeared in Armeno-Turkish in 1879, four years after its original print run. See Strauss, “Who Read What,” 53. Overall, however, Armenian and Armeno-Turkish versions of Ottoman Turkish works were printed only rarely before 1908. See Strauss, “Language and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire,” 133.

41 A handful of MA theses and PhD dissertations by students at Turkish universities touching upon similar subject matter were completed at around the same time. See Erkan Erğinci, “Öteki metinler, öteki kadınlar;” Ayaydın Cebe, “Ondokuzuncu yüzyılda Osmanlı toplumu ve basılı Türkçe edebiyat;” Önem, “Türkçe yazan Ermeni yazarlarda Türk ve Ermeni imajı;” Uslu, “Melodram ve komedi;” Karakılcık, “Hovsep H. Kurbanyan’ın ‘İki kapu yoldaşları yahod hakku adaletin zahiri’si, 1885, ikinci cilt;” and Nas, “Between National and Minor Literature in Turkey.” A few others were completed in 2001. See Demir, “19. yüzyıl Ermeni harfli Türkçe metinlerde çekimli şekiller;” Gölpınar, “Ermeni harfli Türkçe bir dram maşukını katl idemeyen kız üzerinde metin incelemesi;” and Tunçboyacıyan, “Akabi hikayesi, Boşboğaz bir adem ve Temaşa-i dünya romanları.”

42 Cankara, “İmparatorluk ve roman,” 23. On Turkish intellectuals’ familiarity with Armeno-Turkish, see also Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion, 46–47. Halit Ziya was trained by the Mkhit‘arists, a monastic order of Catholic Armenians, in Izmir. See Strauss, “Language and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire,” 139n43.

43 Cankara, “İmparatorluk ve roman,” iii. Though “alışveriş” may be translated as something like “exchange” rather than “encounter,” Cankara himself uses the latter, twice translating “kültürel alışveriş” as “cultural encounter” in the English version of his abstract. The translation is repeated in the dissertation’s keywords.

44 Cankara, “İmparatorluk ve roman,” 146.

45 See Cankara, “İmparatorluk ve roman,” 146.

46 Cankara, “Reading Akabi,” 54.

47 Cankara, “Reading Akabi,” 72.

48 Cankara, “Millilik ve melezlik,” 42.

49 Cankara, “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters,” 1, 8.

50 Cankara, “Çifte maduniyet, çifte işlev,” 112. “Appropriation” is Cankara’s own translation of “sahiplenme.”

51 Cankara, “Millilik ve melezlik,” 41.

52 Cankara, “Armeno-Turkish Writing,” 174.

53 Cankara, “Armeno-Turkish Writing,” 173–74.

54 Cankara, “Armeno-Turkish Writing,” 188.

55 Mignon, “Lost in Transliteration,” 112; Mignon, “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 183.

56 Mignon, “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 197–99.

57 Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion. On Armeno-Turkish, see especially 27–50.

58 Sagaster, “The Role of Turcophone Armenians,” 105; Aprahamyan, “A Note on the Bibliographic Catalogues of Armeno-Turkish Literature;” Ueno, “One Script, Two Languages,” 605.

59 Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites.’” Cankara endorsed his usage of these terms. See Cankara, “Armeno-Turkish Writing,” 174n3.

60 Peter Burke has noted the vast number of terms – too many, in his opinion – used in hybrid theory to describe what is essentially the same phenomenon. See Burke, Cultural Hybridity, 34–65.

61 See note 14 above.

62 Der Matossian, “The Development of Armeno-Turkish,” 67.

63 Ergen, Son dönem Osmanlı yemek kültüründe Ermeni mutfağının katkısı, 11–12.

64 Armenian studies scholars have for decades, but with increasing frequency, criticized the treatment of Ottoman-Armenian history within their own field as well. For a few prominent examples, see Suny, “Introduction: From National Character to National Tradition;” Libaridian, “Re-Imagining the Past, Rethinking the Present;” Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites,’” 78–83; Ekmekçioǧlu, “Introducing the ‘Armenian Ottoman History’ Issue of JOTSA;” and Aslanian, “From ‘Autonomous’ to ‘Interactive’ Histories,” 89–110.

65 A similar stagnation has been identified in the study of sectarianism, for example. See Valbjørn, “Beyond the Beyond(s),” 92.

66 There has been of late a heightened awareness within the field that Armenians were active in the formation and development of late Ottoman culture. See, for example, Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites,’” 79. This awareness has not led to a critical reassessment of hybridity, however.

67 Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 18–19, 39–40.

68 Mignon has already gestured, albeit very briefly, toward a rethinking of Armenian literature as multilingual. This amounts to a single sentence, however, not a developed critique. See Mignon, “Lost in Transliteration,” 122.

69 The first novel in modern western Armenian and the first Turkish novel were published in 1851 in Istanbul. The former, Hovhannēs Hisarean’s Khosrov u Makʻruhi, began to appear in serial form in the inaugural issue of Hisarean’s monthly, Banasēr. See Banasēr, January 1851, 22–28. Both Hisarean and Vardanean were educated by the Mkhit‘arists. See Strauss, “Who Read What,” 44. The first modern Armenian translation of François Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque appeared in Paris in 1859, the same year its Turkish translation – the first literary translation into the language, according to Strauss – was completed, though it was published in Istanbul in 1862. See Strauss, “Who Read What,” 42. On shared tastes, see note 40 above.

70 Ueno, “One Script, Two Languages,” 608; Cankara, “İmparatorluk ve roman,” 23. For a list of Turkish textbooks used in Armenian schools in either or both scripts, see Tsʻutsʻak ěntreal dasagrotsʻ, 3–5. For a textbook in Armenian covering Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian grammar, see Kalıbcıyan, Miftah-ı lisan-ı Osmani. For a late example of an illustrated Armeno-Turkish primer for children, see Küçük çocuḳların ilk kitabı. Armeno-Turkish periodicals such as Manzumei efkyar occasionally printed articles in the Arabic script, suggesting that Armenian audiences would be expected to be able to read them. See Ueno, “One Script, Two Languages,” 615.

71 Cankara has noted that a number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman intellectuals – Ali Suavi, Ahmet Mithat, Namık Kemal, and Rıza Tevfik – acknowledged the Armenian alphabet’s compatibility with the Turkish language. For an overview, see Cankara, “‘Türkçeye en uygun alfabe Ermenilerinki.’” Halit Ziya also argued that the Armenian script was the foreign alphabet best suited for writing Turkish. See Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion, 27.

72 Hacı Bey Zade Ahmet Muhtar, “İfade,” n.p. On the same page, a note from the author in Armenian asks Armenophone readers to be forgiving toward any spelling mistakes, given that the tract was composed by a non-Armenian (ōtarazgi). For a similar manual, see [Karamadtiosyan], Miftah-ı kıraat-ı huruf-ı Ermeniye fi lisan-ı Osmani. Strauss points to a notice in a magazine inviting Turcophone readers to its printing office if they wished to learn to read Armeno-Turkish in less than twenty-four hours. See Çıngıraklı Tatar, May 9, 1289 [1873], cited in Strauss, “Is Karamanli Literature,” 182.

73 Strauss, “Les livres et l’imprimerie,” 7n10, 18–20. For a list of major Armenian printers and letter founders in Istanbul, see Tuğlacı, “Osmanlı Türkiyesi’nde Ermeni matbaacılığı ve Ermenilerin Türk matbaacılığına katkısı,” 55–56.

74 Yılmaz, “A Bookseller on Bab-ı Ali Street,” 113, 119; Seymen, “Erbâb-ı mütalaaya hizmet,” 69, 71; Strauss, “Who Read What,” 47. Talim-i kıraat was pirated by the Şirket-i Sahafiye-i İraniye and sold at less than a third of its original price.

75 Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, 234; Mignon, Uncoupling Language and Religion, 32. Şerif Mardin considers the Fénelon translation one of the earliest attempts at “familiarizing Ottoman audiences with the foundations of Western culture.” The book featured Turkish text facing the French. See Abrégé de la vie des plus illustres philosophes.

76 Georgeon, “Les cafés à Istanbul,” 68–69.

77 Mkhitʻar Sebastatsʻi, Duṛn k‘erakanut‘ean, 3–4.

78 Hakōb Patriarkʻ [Nalean], Zēn hogewor, 6–7.

79 Çamçyan, Gülzari tevariḫ, iv.

80 Varṭanyan, Tariḫi Naṗoleon, ix–x. The book was also published in the Arabic script. See Strauss, “The Millets and the Ottoman Language,” 211. Vardanean earlier used the phrase lisanı maderzadı to refer to Armenian in the first issue of his Mecmaayı havadis. See Mecmaayı havadis, November 1, 1852, 2. The influential editor Karapet Pʻanosean used it as well. See “Büyük bir zarar,” Manzumei efkyar, November 20, 1893, cited in Cankara, “Vatandaş, Türkçe öğren!,” 11. The idea that Armenian is the “mother tongue” (mayreni lezu) of the Armenian people gained traction among intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century. See Manoukian, “Cultural Nationalism and the Spread of a ‘National Language,’” 5.

81 “İslahatı Mühimme: Kʻristosi S. Ekeghetsʻin u iren hakaṛakordnerě ew mükyafat,” Meghu, March 7, 1864, 62. Numerous Armenian language periodicals would commonly include Armeno-Turkish articles, and vice versa. For a list of publications that were known to frequently mix the two, see H. A. Stepʻanyan, Hayataṛ tʻurkʻeren grkʻeri, 619–26.

82 Armenians used Armeno-Turkish to participate in state politics as well. It is not uncommon to find petitions and other archival documents written in Armeno-Turkish alongside their Arabic-script versions. For an example taken at random, see Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Hariciye Nezâreti, Siyasî Kısmı, 1527/20 (December 20, 1862).

83 Coffing, “Bible-reading among the Armenians of Central Turkey,” 7–8. The missionary does not mention what script the book was written in, but it can probably be safely assumed it was Armenian, as the ABCFM was an active publisher of Armeno-Turkish and Armenian texts for children and adults. For a snapshot, see “Report, Publication Department, 1883, by Edwin E. Bliss,” SALT Research, May 20, 1884, https://archives.saltresearch.org/handle/123456789/45112.

84 There are also, admittedly less numerous, counterexamples. Karapet Pʻanosean, to name one, called for Armenian schools to emphasize Ottoman Turkish education given that it was “our state language.” See Ueno, “One Script, Two Languages,” 612. Pʻanosean disregarded concerns that such training would lead to assimilation, noting that Armenians had been speaking Turkish for hundreds of years. See “Fransızca illeti,” Münadiyi Erciyas, February 1, 1860, 133–34, cited in Cankara, “Başka bir Türkçe mümkün müydü?” 7.

85 Armeno-Turkish was so entrenched in quotidian life that it was used in practices as mundane as daily recordkeeping. See Der Matossian, “The Development of Armeno-Turkish,” 68.

86 The influence of Turkish upon Armenian is perhaps better known. See Achaṛean, Tʻurkʻerēnē pʻokhaṛeal baṛer hayerēni mēj; and Kochar, Turet͡skie ėlementy. This relationship was reciprocal, however. See Dankoff, Armenian Loanwords in Turkish. On the issue of linguistic purity in the somewhat comparable study of Judeo-Arabic, see Shohat, “The Invention of Judeo-Arabic,” 191–92.