War diaries - Gallipoli

[The Plummed Goose]

Dear Bill,

-the australian one, living in australia- my previous reply might have seemed rude to you as if I wanted to ingore no. On the contrary mate, I understand the way you think, honestly, but unfortunately -not your fault- the picture you have is not complete.

cheers

eric

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Eric

G'day mate

Good to hear from you again. BTW - I have never seen you be intentionally rude so nothing to forgive. I have always enjoyed your posts.

I know it is tough being in Turkey and listening to all this discussion while you are on the spot so to say, especially when discussing Turksih WW1 scholarship.

Maybe I have not the full picture of schoalarship but just this week, the porcess of enlightened Turkish scholarship was set back decades. The murder of Hrant Dink, a scholar who wrote extensively about the Armenians was murdered for his opinions. It is irrelevant if this was state sanctioned or not, the impact is just the same. However one suspects thatd just like the burning the the Reichtag or the assasination attempt of the Pope - the hand of official malevolence may be behind it.

The message is clear - say anything that contradicts the official line and you will be prosecuted. If the prosecution fails, you will be executed.

This is not the message that allows free and open scholarship. This is an action that forces many scholars to self edit or stay away from contraversial subjects for fear of their lives. In other words, Turkish scholarship has been firmly corrupted and gutted. I do not expect to see anything of value or note to be produced through what will now be laughingly called Turkish scholarship for the next five years. A new breed of scholars needs to emerge who are not terrified into silence by a malevolent hand. That can only belong to a young person who is in the process of finishing their studies and wishes to strike out when the person feels safe to do so.

However, the Turkish military, whose hand I suspect is behind this assassination, can demonstrate its desire to join the community of democratic nations by opening up its archives which deal specifically with the Great War - archives which we hear is overflowing with good material - let access be freely available to anyone [gasp] as they are in other nations and let the chips of history fall where they will. Then I might believe that some good has come.

But I fear that this is something that is not going to happen. Here is a comment from a fellow called Turan who says he lives in Istanbul:

The comments here are truly reflective of Turk-haters. Filled with hate, turning this unfortunate incident committed by one unknown man into a forum for demanding unrealistic things. But they all fail to mention that the Armos themselves refused to bring their historians to the table to discuss the "so-called" genocide with Turk historians. Its all politics and money. No wonder it was only after the Jews got reperations that the Armos saw the dollar signs. Where were you before then Armenians?

I fear he speaks for the average Turk in the street.

Until then, this assassination only confirms my suspicion that there prevades a hostile environment in Turkey to genuine scholarship. It doesn't matter how much people say things are changing, an assassination like this directly corrupts and hijacks honest scholarship.

Cheers

Bill

[bob lembke]

I have hesitated to comment at this point of this discussion for about 12 hours, and will only state a bit of what is on my mind. The issues on the "discussion-plate" include the Armenian/Turkish mess, the question of reparations to Jews post-Holocaust has been mentioned, we probably should not be beating current political questions to death so much, and finally I do not want to offend Bill of "Aussie-land", whose many posts I have enjoyed and profited from.

However, having said the above, I will make a few comments or responses to some comments that several Pals have made.

The quick response to the shocking killing of the Armenio-Turkish journalist, if it bears out, I think discounts Bill's dire predictions and suspicions. The alleged assassin, a kid, supposedly was caught on a security camera tape, the pictures were widely displayed, and he kid's own father informed the authorities. The kid supposedly still had the gun and the cap he was wearing with him, a professional, or a kid coached by professionals, would have wiped down and tossed the gun, and tossed the cap and possibly other clothing at some other location. Only a jerk would have kept the gun, or a kid. If the Turkish army or government was behind this would the tape have surfaced and been shown to the whole country?

The conspiracy lover might say that this is all orchestrated, the kid, father, etc. all scripted, etc. But that would be very dangerous, would these stories held together for years, etc.

If the Turkish Army and/or the security services were behind this the journalist and his car and the evidence would have been blown to smithereens, there would be little to investigate, and the investigation would not go anywhere.

All countries have lots of nuts and hardheads. Certainly there are lots of right-extremists in Turkey. So do other groups and countries. Armenian terrorists, not many years ago, murdered dozens of Turkish diplomats all over the world. Are all Armenians nuts and all Armenian causes corrupt?

As I remember, an Australian entered the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest place on earth for about 1.5 billion Muslims, and, using a firebomb, destroyed a marvelous artifact, a two-story high wooden pulpit, made by master craftsmen about 900 years ago, without a single nail, and presented to the mosque by Saleh-al-din, the great Kurdish victor over the Crusaders. Are we supposed to make generalizations about Australians on the basis of what this person did? I guess he was trying to trigger a major conflict between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

As for the EU, supposedly polls show that the % of Turks who want to join the EU has dropped from about 71% to about 38%. If I was a Turk I would tell the EU to pound salt. First the EU says no capital punishment, and the Turks said "OK". (Lets not make any awkward comparisons about the barbaric "execution" of Saddam and his half-brother, for which the Americans and, yes, the Australians share some responsibility.) Then, tone down the torture at the police station, and the Turks said "OK". Then the EU inspectors said: "The Turks should stop eating tripe sandwiches!" Who the Hell do these EU inspectors think that they are? What about Turkish inspectors going to the UK and telling the Brits to stop eating fish and chips? The Turks love tripe sandwiches. The Turkish economy is growing at 8%, and inflation is fairly well under control, I think.

These were questions about Turkish records from WW I and Gallipoli. I understand that a Turkish company commander had to produce on a regular basis 146 different forms, forcing them to stay up half the night to keep up with them. Even German commanders at Gallipoli (no mean record keepers) complained about this burden on the field-grade officers. A major problem is that modern Turkish is, in the humble opinion of myself and my wife, perhaps the most difficult language in the world. However, Ottoman Turkish was yet more complicated, and was written in the Arabic script, which is worse than it looks. I think that there are very few people in Turkey who can read this stuff, never mind translate millions of pages of records. If a lot of work and investment were put in it, maybe in 30 years these records could be scanned and automatically translated. Into what? English? Why?

I am sympathetic. The last time I visited the Askeri Mueze in Istanbul, I shamelessly traded on the fact that my father fought with the Turkish Army at Gallipoli on the ANZAC beachhead to get into the Military Library and have an interview with the colonel commanding the library. The bottom line is that it is clear that my chances of using the Turkish Army materials are slim to nil, and require the written permission of the Turkish Army General Staff, and not from the General Staff skyscraper next door to the Museum (the one complete with sand-bagged MG nests), but from Ankara. The good news was that I could apply on the Internet. But of course I can only partially translate Turkish, and at a speed somewhere between a snail and paint drying. I will be dead before computers can translate Ottoman Turkish.

One aspect of our civilizing influence in that part of the world is that recently 500 years of Turkish records from the occupation of Iraq were recently burned to a crisp, and I believe by the civilizing crusading "Coalition Forces". Probably not a help in the study of the fighting in Mesapotamia in WW I.

So there. I hope I have offended everyone! (Not really.) Fortunately, I have kept about 70% of what I am thinking to myself.

Bob Lembke

[truthergw]

I have hesitated to comment at this point of this discussion for about 12 hours, and will only state a bit of what is on my mind.

........................................

So there. I hope I have offended everyone! (Not really.) Fortunately, I have kept about 70% of what I am thinking to myself.

Bob Lembke

I agree about 99% . I think translation should be along the lines of 1 turkish document into English for every English into Turkish. Antipodeans to go first.

[bob lembke]

I agree about 99% . I think translation should be along the lines of 1 turkish document into English for every English into Turkish. Antipodeans to go first.

Tom, thanks a lot. I think that your suggestion that we translate one Allied document into Turkish for every Turkish document they are expected to translate into English is brilliant! Am embarrassed that with my great mind I did not think of it myself.

I might add that perhaps it would be fair to have some of the Turkish documents translated into German, French, and perhaps into Russian as well.

Did someone actually suggest that the Turks be required to open their archives and translate them as one of the endless stream of requirements (like stopping the eating of their beloved tripe sandwiches!) that the EU have been constantly inventing over the last 30 or more years? Consider some of the gangster countries that are now being admitted to the EU. I know of what I speak, I have worked in the Balkans for the US Department of State, Cornell University, and a variety of eastern European then communist governments and institutes.

Has anyone ridden the train thru the Christian Balkans and then entered Turkey on the way to Istanbul, and carefully observed the state of things in the non-Turkish states, and then in Turkey? You cross the border, and you are instantly transported 100 years into the future, from the 19th, or the 17 centuries.

Here is my suggested program for the Turks.

1. Grab those pesky EU inspectors, and treat them the same way that Vlad Tepes (i.e., Dracula) treated the Turkish envoys. Specifically, nail their turbans to their skulls and expel them from the country.

2. Go back to the old program. Drive north and besiege Vienna again. But don't bust it up much, it is a great city.

3. Then do what you did before and drive north and head for the silver mines of southern Poland.

All this stuff about Turkey not being "European" is rubbish. The European part of Istanbul alone must be the biggest city in Europe, possibly 12 million people. The Turks have been a big player in Europe since when, 1437? (Why am I blanking on that date? The Turks defeated the Serbs and Albanians on Kosovo Polje on June 26, 1389. I was offered the sleeve of the Serb ruler, Knez Milos, beheaded that day, to kiss by a Serb nun in a Serb monastery. She leaped out of the shadows and almost scared the poop out of me.) The Albanians then smelled the coffee and joined the Turkish system, which is the main reason why the Serbs now want to murder them at every opportunity. Mehtmet the Conquerer (sp?) who took Constantanople, had a Grand Viser nicknamed "the Greek", and after him 34 out of the 38 Grand Visers were born Christians. First equal opportunity employers. Also the first people (along with the Arabs) to take Jews seriously, protect them, and apoint them to high position, at a time when the Christians would only appoint Jews to the stake. The 600 or more years of protection of Jews by Muslims ( a religious duty) is being poorly repaid by the 110 years abuse of the Palestinians by the Israelis, now augmented by hundreds of thousands of Christian Russians being imported into the area. (The top Israeli paper Ha'aretz estimates that 70% of the "Russian Jews" imported recently as cannon-fodder and replacements for Israeli Arabs are actually Christians.)

Now! Have I now offended everyone?

Bob Lembke

[truthergw]

...................................................

Now! Have I now offended everyone?

Bob Lembke

Yep.

[Bryn]

Bob wrote:

"I understand that a Turkish company commander had to produce on a regular basis 146 different forms, forcing them to stay up half the night to keep up with them. Even German commanders at Gallipoli (no mean record keepers) complained about this burden on the field-grade officers. A major problem is that modern Turkish is, in the humble opinion of myself and my wife, perhaps the most difficult language in the world. However, Ottoman Turkish was yet more complicated, and was written in the Arabic script, which is worse than it looks. I think that there are very few people in Turkey who can read this stuff, never mind translate millions of pages of records. If a lot of work and investment were put in it, maybe in 30 years these records could be scanned and automatically translated. Into what? English? Why?"

Good points. In response to the fact that officers had to complete 146 forms, I say that's meaningless unless we know what the forms were, what they recorded, and whether they actually were kept. Were they combined into dossiers, or left as random sheets of information? Were they catalogued? If so, how? My point is - if not, how can people claim they are well-kept records? If we don 't know the answers to the questions, then I repeat - how can people claim they are well-kept records?

Turkish is a difficult language and the Arabic script they used pre-Ataturk even more so. Nobody but a fool would argue that. But since people - writing in English - are claiming that these records were so well-kept, how do they know? How do people, who claim that Turkish records (from, say, Gallipoli) were 'meticulously kept' justify this claim? Why is nobody apparently able or willing to answer the simple question: What records were these, that are claimed to have been meticulously kept?

Since the overwhelming majority of these records have NOT been examined, how can people make any kind of claim as to what quality of information they contain, which would surely be a factor in deciding whether they are meticulously-kept? If nobody has read even a fraction of them, how does anyone keep a straight face when claiming ANYTHING about Turkish WW1 records?

For those whose best contribution to the issue is the churlish suggestion of a tit-for-tat translation of records - here's a big difference. The AIF, NZEF, CEF and UK records are freely available, so that's possible. It just doesn't work the other way round. But hey - you didn't know that, because the only other explanation for such comments would be that you were being deliberately obtuse, and surely that's not the case.

If the suggestion that the records (and remember, I said ONE would be sufficient for me to be convinced - but that seems too hard), be translated into English offends, why bring the issue up, or join a discussion on the issue, on a forum conducted in English?

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bob

G'day mate

I think you might have missed the nub of what I was saying judging from your observations. Let me put them in dot point so they do not confuse you.

1. The Turkish military archives are not available to anyone - in contrast to those of Germany, France, Britain, Canada, USA, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand just to name a few places.

2. No one has asked the Turkish authorities to provide translated versions of all their papers.

3. The only request is to make the records available in the same manner as they are available in the nations mentioned in Point #1.

4. A claim was made that the Turks have released "very well produced official histories of WW1." Mention was made of Gallipoli. I rebutted that claim.

5. Despite the Australian and New Zealand authorities volunteering to assist and indeed put money into the production of these volumes, this invitation was turned down flat. The General Staff did not want anyone looking at their archives in the production of the volumes mentioned in Point #4.

6. Bryn has made a reasonable request - release one Turkish soldier's service file from the Great War so the public can examine it. Afterall, other nations have done it and not suffered for the experience.

7. Murdering people who disagree with a regime is not the way to ensure quality scholarship, and indeed it tends to corrupt scholarship.

Bob, if you want to go off on a rant, you are more than free to do so but if you want to rebut what other people say, it is important that you get their comments correct so that the rebuttal is to the point. Elsewise, it just appears as though your comments are on a tangent that has nothing to do with the subject being debated and thus are discounted as a pointless rant.

I know you have more to contribute in terms of historical analysis so take this as a brotherly comment.

Cheers

Bill

[bob lembke]

Bob

G'day mate

I think you might have missed the nub of what I was saying judging from your observations. Let me put them in dot point so they do not confuse you.

Hi, Bill! Let me mark up a few comments on your usefully organized points.

1. The Turkish military archives are not available to anyone - in contrast to those of Germany, France, Britain, Canada, USA, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand just to name a few places.

I strongly believe in transparency, open records and historical documents, etc. I agree that the countries you cite have their WW I materials largely open. The Great War is not especially politically sensitive to them. I am no expert here, but WW II is politically sensitive in certain ways, and there are vast archives which are not open to researchers, and laws are exercised to prosecute people whose take on historical topics veer in non-PC directions.

In contrast to the West, WW I is very politically sensitive to the Turks. This is probably a major reason why they are so restrictive; other reasons come to mind, mostly cultural. I think that the Turks are dead wrong here. I am personally affected, as I would like to research my father's and his unit's experience at Gallipoli. I also feel that the archive restrictions and laws punishing "thought-crime" by western states are also dead wrong.

2. No one has asked the Turkish authorities to provide translated versions of all their papers.

I had the sense that that was the drift of some of the comments. Perhaps I was wrong. I don't think that I proposed that, I think I was building on the suggestion of "truthergw" for tit-for-tat translations, with Australians taking the lead in the effort.

How can anyone use these documents (if they exist) if they are not translated, at least in part? Are we familiar with the interesting book, which was translated from Ottoman Turkish, and then into English, called something like The Lone-Pine Diaries, written by a then Lieutenant Faitah, or something like that? It took the Turk who wanted the diary transposed into Modern Turkish months to find someone able and willing to do so, in Istanbul. (You would think that there are thousands of little old (impoverished) men and ladies who would love such a job.) The Turkish language reform was in 1928, I think. Someone 20 then would be 99 today. The complications of Ottoman Turkish go far beyond the use of the Arabic alphabet. Does anyone know of anyone outside of Turkey who can read this stuff?

3. The only request is to make the records available in the same manner as they are available in the nations mentioned in Point #1.

Byrn stated than someone claimed that the Turkish records are in well-kept order, or something like that. I do not recall that, and I certainly did not say that. I merely observed that the Turks of 1915 (and probably 1815 and 1615) were maddened record-keepers and beaurocrats, while I am sure that many in the west consider the Turks "Fuzzi-Wuzzis" incapable of the written record.

My guess is that at certain locations there are immense warehouses full of documents going back hundreds of years, which might be in meticulous order that none of their keepers can comprehend; or they may be in complete confusion. What can be done with them? To read this stuff you have to be able to read the Arabic alphabet, which is worse than it looks, an archaic form of Turkish, the Arabic language, and Farsi. Bill, do you know someone who can deal with this stuff?

There also is the distinct possibility that these records do not exist, perhaps for some 70 years some brand of especially cheap Turkish cigarettes were rolled in these documents, until they all went up in smoke.

But how can one "make the records available in the same manner" as in western archives when no one, the keepers or the potential perusers, can read the stuff, either to organize it or to study the materials?

4. A claim was made that the Turks have released "very well produced official histories of WW1." Mention was made of Gallipoli. I rebutted that claim.

I have no idea. I think I have one of them on CD, but I have not looked at it; I plan to do my serious study of Gallipoli in say three years, although I have collected some material and took a shot at translating an article in Modern Turkish, managing a partial translation of about three pages at great pain and effort.

5. Despite the Australian and New Zealand authorities volunteering to assist and indeed put money into the production of these volumes, this invitation was turned down flat. The General Staff did not want anyone

looking at their archives in the production of the volumes mentioned in Point #4.

I am not surprised. I think that the General Staff is dead wrong here, if that is the case.

6. Bryn has made a reasonable request - release one Turkish soldier's service file from the Great War so the public can examine it. Afterall, other nations have done it and not suffered for the experience.

I agree.

7. Murdering people who disagree with a regime is not the way to ensure quality scholarship, and indeed it tends to corrupt scholarship.

For the reasons I have laid out, it is unlikely that the Turkish government or the Turkish Army are most likely to be involved. The kid who seemingly killed this journalist was probably egged on by adults (he will be treated very differently than an adult, and will be tried in a youth court), and I am sure that there are plenty of right-wing nationalists who would delight in doing this murder. (While on this theme, anyone know anything about the list that I have heard that the Turkish Government released, a list of 533,000 ethnic Turks killed by ethnic Armenians between 1895 and 1915?)

Bob, if you want to go off on a rant, you are more than free to do so but if you want to rebut what other people say, it is important that you get their comments correct so that the rebuttal is to the point. Elsewise, it just appears as though your comments are on a tangent that has nothing to do with the subject being debated and thus are discounted as a pointless rant.

I confess that I do tend to go off on rants as I am totally "over the top" about the stupidity of Our Great Leader (GWB), and also of the people that have been seduced into his Crusade, despite my being rather "right" and conservative. (As we speak a cousin is roaming about al-Anbar Province for his second tour with the Marines, with the specific job of looking for these damned IEDs. Hardly a more dangerous job could be found. Just read that we have, to date, 2000 double amputees.) But a lot of my "rant" was tounge-in-cheek. I think that this thread has been a bit all over the place, and a lot of the comments have been driven by the various opinions, predjudices (in a non-pregorative sense), and enthusiasms of the Pals corresponding.

I know you have more to contribute in terms of historical analysis so take this as a brotherly comment.

Cheers

Bill

[Bryn]

As Bill points out - I never asked for a translated document, so it seems that's somebody else's idea.

If someone can post the original personnel record of a private soldier of the 77th Regiment (that served and died at Gallipoli) I'll get it translated myself. If the records are as meticulously kept as is claimed, locating one such example shouldn't be any problem at all.

If not, then as far as I'm concerned any statements to the effect that the Turks kept 'meticulous' (or any such superlative), records at Gallipoli are based on nothing more than hearsay.

[Eceabat]

Pals,

Like Bob, I have thought long and hard about weighing in on this thread. If I offend anyone I apologise in advance. To the moderators I say that I have tried to be moderate and if I bend or break the rules of decorum please moderate at will.

As journalists who live here in Turkey, both my wife Serpil and I are appalled by the murder of Hrant Dink, the killing touching Serpil deeply as she knew him quite well and will be attending his funeral. It was indeed an attack on freedom of speech and human rights and should be condemned by any right thinking person.

However, I do not see that the murder of this fine man relates directly or even indirectly to the lack of access to the Turkish state archives, the subject of discussion of this thread.

Bill, you say that you suspect the Turkish military for the killing of Hrant Dink. Obviously, if these suspicions, along with those of the heavy hand of the state, are based on any factual information whatsoever, I urge you to contact the chief prosecutor in Istanbul, Aykut Cengiz Engin (contact details can be provided on request), who is investigating the murder. Otherwise, give it a rest. Talking of arrests, that is exactly what has happened to the young man suspected of gunning down Hrant Dink.

If you had read the articles or listened to the comments condemning the murder of Dink in the Turkish media, (let along the thousands of Turks who gathered in protests across the country to chant "We are all Armenians, we are all Hrant Dink") I honestly do not believe you would say "Turkish scholarship has been firmly corrupted and gutted".

That gutted Turkish scholarship has also just turned out another excellent book, dealing with the relations between Mustafa Kemal and his superiors, both military and political. The book is at times critical of Kemal and is a good meaty read. Bill, as you so often decry the argument that modern Turkish, let alone the Ottoman script of the past, is none too easy to learn, I am sure you will be able to race through this book soon after getting your hands on it.

If you hark back to an earlier posting of mine on this thread, you may recall that I fully agreed that the scholarship and translation of the English version of the General Staff’s condensed history of the Gallipoli Campaign was dreadful. The translation was carried out by officers of the Turkish military’s history section as I understand it (which is not a great testimony to the standard of communications skills within a NATO ally). But does going on about cronies on the beach at Majorca (why any self respecting Turk would go there when Turkey’s beaches are much nicer I don’t know?) add anything to this debate?

As to giving greater access to English speaking scholars (and the rest of us) I have been told that the University of Queensland is in discussions with Turkish authorities, civil and military, to engage on a long term project to translate ALL of the documents relating to the Gallipoli Campaign into English. While I can’t fully confirm this, though my source was well placed, and I doubt very much that ALL the documents will be translated (there being such a mountain of them), if and when it happens it sounds exciting.

It has been said that the Turkish archives are not open to anyone. As I have written before, yes access is limited but it is there. Bob wrote that during a visit to Istanbul and the Military Museum he was told he would have to get General Staff permission to access material. That is true of military records (and even the library). I know, I’ve done it (and have also researched at the Naval and Airforce museums as well and been given helpful and courteous assistance at all times). Yes, you have to jump through hoops, but that isn’t to say that having done so you absolutely, definitely, completely and utterly won’t get access. Ask and you may just receive.

(pauses, takes deep breath and decides it is best to stop here)

Cheers

Bill Sellars

[erickson]

First -- the A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ÇANAKKALE CAMPAIGN IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR (JUNE 1914 - JANUARY 1916) by The Turkish General Staff Directorate of Military History and Strategic Studies and Directorate of Inspection Publications ANKARA, THE TURKISH GENERAL STAFF PRINTING HOUSE 2004 is a poorly translated version of the single-volume summary of the 3-volume official history -- and I've not seen it. The original Turkish language single-volume summary is just that -- a summary, but the maps and charts alone are worth trying to find it. Best not to judge the official histories, in Turkish, until you have had a chance to look at one.

Second -- the military archives are open to scholars, without regard to origin or affiliation... and yes, you've got to jump through some hoops to get in there. If you're not a scholar with a good CV, you probably won't get in. They screen thusly because the facility is very small -- it's not like going to Kew or to College Park. The military archives contain about 1.5 million holdings on WW1 alone. While they have not published "service records" the Turks have published hundreds of archival military documents (in Ottoman and translated into modern Turkish) in the ATASE monthly journals.

Third -- I don't think that either the German, Austria, Italian, or French official histories of WW1 are translated into English by those governments ...... so, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Turkish to translated their 27-volume set of military histories of WW1.

Best regards

[Bryn]

First - okay, so at last someone who's seen some of these records (Ed Erickson) has confirmed that the Turks do have WW1 "service records".

Second - my next questions are: Has anybody on the forum actually seen one and know what information is contained within them?

Third - despite extensive searching, I am still unable to find, anywhere in this thread, any instance where anybody specifically asked that the Turks translate their records into English. So why doesn't everyone who's made a federal case of a complete non-event just get over it.

[bob lembke]

I just went back and poked thru the thread from the start, and I think that no one (with one exception) actually asked that the Turks translate their archives, but that several people, including myself, began to make that assumption, given the drift of the discussion. The one exception was Tom R., who made the delightful suggestion that the Turks translate a document into English when another state translates one into Turkish, and suggesting that the Australians start the process. So perhaps we can put that question to bed.

However, the difficulty of translation question is very important, IMHO. My estimation that almost no one can now translate Ottoman Turkish, especially hand-written documents, is largely based on the comments in the foreword of The Lone Pine Diaries, if that is the title of the book, in which the guy who found the diaries had to look for months in Istanbul before he could find someone willing and able to transcribe the Ottoman Turkish into Modern Turkish. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps a certain number of people have this skill. If so, are they all scholars, did some use of Ottoman Turkish continue for some purpose (Ataturk tended to bring activities that he did not approve of to a rather abrupt halt), possibly one or more of the other seven Turkic languages still use the Arabic script, etc.? There are several people presumably following this discussion who probably have a good grasp of this. If the only people who can read this stuff are a few scholars and a few old folks with an average age of 92 it will be difficult to get a staff to organise these files and set up access.

Can someone with a real grasp of this question tell us if there are a significant number of people who can still read this stuff?

Although Arabic and Ottoman Turkish shared the same (I hope) alphabet, the levels of difficulty are very different. Arabic is a very small language, although one with complexities. However, supposedly it takes ten years of study to be really proficient. At my wife's university, the University of Pennsylvania, a top school, there supposedly are 100 students in first-year Arabic, and three in third-year Arabic. Of the 1000 employees in the US embassy in the Green Zone in Baghdad, supposedly six are very proficient in Arabic. The US Army recently approached me and asked me to sign up, don my desert camoflage, and go to Iraq as a translator, although I have been collecting Social Security for over five years. (I have about 40 words in standard Arabic, one verb, could produce about 10 words in Koranic Arabic, know four words in Cairine Arabic, and about three days ago upped my grasp of Palestinian Arabic from one word to three. Are we in trouble over there?)

The difficulty level upramp from Arabic to Ottoman Turkish is major. One ideally would need to have not only a knowledge of Modern Turkish, but also Arabic and Pharsi, and a grasp of poetry in all three languages. The Turkish habit of constructing words using not only the suffixes and prefixes beloved of the Germans, but also "infixes" inserted in the middle of a compound word is murder, and there are factors such as "vowel harmony" that the western mind can only wonder at.

My wife, an exceptional linguist, looked at Turkish for two days and moved on to Arabic. She wisely commented that: "Turkish must be the product of people with too much time on their hands." She also calls it "Mongolian with a Swedish pronunciation", which actually has some truth to it.

So can someone who actually knows the answer (contrasted with my speculations) tell us how common is a grasp of Ottoman Turkish, and if there are any people facile in it, other than tenured professors and 90 year olds in wheelchairs and diapers, so that a corps of archivists could be recruited?

Byrn - Is there anyone in Japan who can read this stuff?

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

Guys;

I have asked my wife to put me in touch with a friend at the library she works at, the research library at the University of Pennsylvania. He is in charge of biblioigraphy for Middle Eastern studies. I understand that he has excellent Arabic and lesser Turkish. Of course, questions of usability of collections, including Ottoman Turkish, are central to his responsibility.

I did ask her about Arabic-English transliteration systems (not computer systems, but a recognized standard of transliteration). She said that, in contrast to, say, Russian in Cyrillic into transliterated Russian, where there is a fairly standard system in use today, currerntly there are "several" systems in use for transliterating Arabic into Latin lettering, and that, historically, there were "many". (My wife has good Russian, and does some of her office's Russian ordering; but she has almost no Arabic, but additionally does the Arabic-language ordering. She works with a good book dealer in Beirut, who happily is back in operation. So she knows a fair amount about these matters, but not as much as the gentleman I mentioned.

Given an acceptable OCR Arabic to Latin-type transliterated Arabic system (I think that that would be possible, but about 5000 times as difficult as reading postal area codes), what would you have at the end of that process? A new language; Ottoman Turkish written in Latin characters! This might be a bit easier to work with by a modern Turk, with practice, but it still is Ottoman Turkish, but in a new alphabet.

Writing a translation program to translate Ottoman Turkish, in Arabic or a Latin alphabet, would be a monster problem.

I have not worked with OCR systems, or language translation programs, but I have been quite involved in text to voice systems some time ago, and was a computer professional for 25 years. So I have some sense of the problems here.

Even in the totally easier problem of, in German, going from Fraktur to modern typeface, I hear different things from different people on how well that process works. But that is child's play compared to the problems that we (or maybe only me) are talking about.

Will report when I hear from that fellow.

Bob Lembke

[grantmal]

"Perhaps they have taken on board the idea of becoming part of the EU and to do so, they need to accept a few fundamental principles - free access to archives being one of them."

It's not just the Turkish archives that need liberating Bill.....how do we get the Coldstream Guards archives to adhere to EU "free access" provisions? I doubt their archivist would talk even if he was tied to a chair and belted with a knotted rope .....apologies to the faint hearts and James Bond fans.......

Good on you,

Grant

[Wayne Saillard]

I can vouch for the difficulty in finding someone to translate Ottoman Turk script. After obtaining a POW letter form, which had been sent by a Turk detained in one of the prison camps on Malta, I naturally tried to find someone to translate it for me.

All my attempts failed - until a person known to this forum offered to see if he could help. He approached two people and, after chasing them for months, has recently advised that the letter has now been translated into modern Turk and is in the process of being translated into English soon.

Thanks to snippets of information provided to date, I now know that the POW letter form (which looks like an aerogram) was used by the speaker of the Turk parliament, who had been sent here with other Ottoman officials in 1919 after the British occupation of Istanbul.

I would like to publicly thank him for all the time and trouble he has gone to thus far.

Regards

Wayne

[alliekiwi]

As a total aside... it must have been terrible trying to censor letters from Turkish prisoners! Although I'm guessing there must have been a few people around in the british service who could translate from Ottoman turkish at the time. But 90 years down the track, they aren't here to help us translate anything, either!

Allie

[bob lembke]

Please look at the scan of the PC kindly posted by Wayne. (Actually, we do not know for certain that that is Ottoman Turkish or Arabic, although it is most likely the former.)

See all those dots? I don't know the details (super-wife has some grasp of it; her first step in tackling Arabic was to read a book on the Arabic alphabet.), but each of those dots modifies one of the letters of the writing. I believe that each converts a letter into what might be considered a different letter. I believe that a letter might acquire one, two, or possibly three dots. So we actually have three or four letters. (I think that the base set of letters is about 55, but every native-speaker I have asked has given me a somewhat different answer.

Can anyone in the audience state that they can accurately associate each one of those dots with one specific letter? The sample posted seems to be written by the Speaker of the Turkish Parliament. What if the writer was a weakly-literate first sergeant (it is easy to be weakly literate in Ottoman Turkish) crouching in a dugout, under shell-fire, filling out one of those 146 forms? (I have letters from my father, one written hours before he took part in a flame attack at Verdun, where he saved the life of a lieutenant of IR 155 whose hand was torn off by a French 75 fragment; minutes later Pop himself was badly wounded by another French 75 fragment and lay in a hole for three days before being found. This letter, written with one of those nasty blue waterproof pencils, is almost unreadable. My grand-father's letters to my father thunder for him to write in ink, but an ink-pot is not very practical in the trenches.)

So a workable OCR system for Ottoman Turkish probably would have to have the ability to consider the language itself, and not just the form of a few characters, like zero to nine in the post-office example. Or an OCR system would have a very high error rate, even if it can figure out each wiggle-letter itself accurately. Fed into some language translation system, the results would probably be garbage.

Yet another level of complexity. I have heard linguists joke that: "In Arabic, every word means itself, its opposite, and yet another word for camel." Anyone who ever translated German, large dictionary in hand, will have looked up a word, only to find 25 or 30 meanings, some related, some not, know what problem I am thinking of. What if everything works perfectly, the OCR, the transliteration to Modern Turkish, the translation to English (sort of), and there are 25 or 30 meanings to a word, including white, black, and camel. One would think that having a "large" language (many words) would lessen this problem, but remember, German is the second "largest" language in the world, and this problem is endemic in that language.

One final point. (Here I am venturing into an area I am only weakly knowledgeable about, and the spouse is not at hand.) In languages there are subsets of the whole language called, I believe, "cases" or "voices". English, the largest language in the world, there are three. Latin and German share an extremely complex grammar, and have eight. Modern Turkish has, I believe, 47. (I hardly think that the situation in Ottoman Turkish is any simpler.) One of them, if used in a passage, implicitly warns: "What I am saying may be true, it may not; I may know that it is not true, or I may have no Idea of the truth or falsehood of what I am saying." How does machine translation handle this? Does it print the translated text in red ink as a warning?

We are in a deep and murky swamp here.

Bob Lembke

[Wayne Saillard]

May I please clarify that, as mentioned in post #42,

1 : The letter depicted IS written in Ottoman Turk script.

2 : It WAS written by Hadji Adil Bey, speaker of the Ottoman Turk government during the First World War.

This has been confirmed by three Turkish sources.

Please note that I only posted the addressee portion of the letter. The sender portion is in English and bears his 'round-up ID number' - 2757, while the contents of the letter are entirely in Ottoman Turk script.

Further information about the circumstances in which he, and other Ottoman officials, were exiled to Malta can be found in the Wikipedia article entitled MALTA EXILES.

Regards

Wayne

[bob lembke]

May I please clarify that, as mentioned in post #42,

1 : The letter depicted IS written in Ottoman Turk script.

2 : It WAS written by Hadji Adil Bey, speaker of the Ottoman Turk government during the First World War.

This has been confirmed by three Turkish sources.

Please note that I only posted the addressee portion of the letter. The sender portion is in English and bears his 'round-up ID number' - 2757, while the contents of the letter are entirely in Ottoman Turk script.

Further information about the circumstances in which he, and other Ottoman officials, were exiled to Malta can be found in the Wikipedia article entitled MALTA EXILES.

Regards

Wayne

Great! almost completed a post, and it vanished. Again:

My "spousal unit", the "Librarian of Fortune", as she sometimes styles herself, has not reached the Middle East bibliographer yet, but she pulled a book on Ottoman Turkish from the stacks and perused it. (Nice to work in a building with 7 million books on open shelves and to have faculty borrowing privileges. Her university has 15 other libraries, as well.)

It ain't pretty!

There was/is three, not one Ottoman Turkish languages. One for scholars, one for commerce, and one for the common man. I do not know how military records fit in this scheme. This is perhaps the basis for the fact that there seems to be at least two Greek languages currently existing side by side, for example, one for newspapers, and one for common usage. Not an expert here. The Greeks might have gotten this during the long Turkish occupation. No wonder some Greeks still hate the Turks!

More bad news. Ottoman Turkish was not just written in the Arabic alphabet, but also in the Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets, all of whom are duzies for native English language speakers. As you may know, the above minorities and some others had various privileges, including their own courts. I would guess that military documents were written in Arabic only, but we cannot be sure of that. (Actually there was a fifth "alphabet"; one sultan found spoken talk irritating and he had deaf-mute brothers brought in and had the court learn sign language, so people could "talk" while he listened to the tinkling fountains and ate his sherbets made with crushed jem stones, etc. So there is also an Ottoman Turkish in sign language!)

Additionally, the grammar of Ottoman Turkish was considerably more complicated that that of Modern Turkish. (In my semi-informed opinion, Modern Turkish must be, overall, the most complicated language in the world.) For example, while Modern Turkish has 47 "cases, voices, and tenses", as the spouse put it (again, English, the "biggest" language in the world, has 3), Ottoman Turkish had more, but I don't have the number.

So the Ottoman Turkish complexities are simply on another planet. Hopefully, the Ottoman military standardized on the Arabic alphabet and possibly a sub-set of the cases, voices, and tenses; hopefully leaving out the "true, not true, don't know" case, for example. But this is a colossal problem.

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

Wayne;

Many thanks for the helpful posts and especially the scan. I initially led off my post with my thanks, and when I lost the text in some cyber black hole I repeated the substance but not my thanks. The sample of Ottoman Turkish handwriting is most helpful in getting our arms about this problem.

Bob Lembke

[alliekiwi]

I find this thread utterly fascinating, and am forever thankful that I grew up speaking English. I know non-native speakers of English who have ranted to me about such things as though, through, thorough, tough, ought etc, but as Bob says - Ottoman Turkish looks a real doozy.

Allie

[Wayne Saillard]

Hello Bob !

Glad to have been able to make a small contribution to the thread with this letter.

Regards

Wayne

[bob lembke]

Debriefed the spouse in person, and only one other thing to add at this moment. The first Turkish novel, published about 1851, came out in Ottoman Turkish in the Armenian alphabet.

Bob Lembke