Turkish language reform: The Scottish connection
At a time when anti-Ottoman bigotry abounded, the Scotsman Elias John Wilkinson Gibb was a sympathetic interpreter of Islam to the Christian West. What struck Gibb, with his “Scott
Turkish language reform: The Scottish connection
At a time when anti-Ottoman bigotry abounded, the Scotsman Elias John Wilkinson Gibb was a sympathetic interpreter of Islam to the Christian West. What struck Gibb, with his “Scottish democratic intellect”, was how distant written Ottoman Turkish was from the spoken language.
The first advocate of Turkish language reform was a Scotsman by the name of Elias John Wilkinson Gibb. Brought up on the poetry of Burns, Gibb was born in Glasgow in 1857. He continued living in the family home at Lochwood until he was thirty-two, whereupon he moved to London to continue his studies of Turkish poetry. As a boy he was a pupil at Park School, which was run by Dr Collier, the author of The History of England. At the age of sixteen he enrolled as a student at Glasgow University where he studied Mathematics, Logic and Arabic and there is a photograph in a 1920s volume of the Transactions of Glasgow University Oriental Society showing a young Gibb dressed as a Turkish officer wearing a fez, presumably on his way to a fancy dress party.
In his study of Ottoman poetry, what struck Gibb from the outset was how distant written Ottoman Turkish, both literary and non-literary, was from the spoken language and from the early language of thirteenth-century Asia Minor and Central Asia. After leaving university and