War diaries - Gallipoli

[bob lembke]

the ony Some random thoughts on Turks and history.

The last time I was in Istanbul I sent the friend I was traveling with off to a historical site that I had seen twice (with both wives!) and spent a good while searching through the neighborhood that I understand is the book-selling and publishing section. (In a city so large, there probably are others.) You know, start at the "Underground Palace" (the Roman cistern) and, across the street, the headquarters of the Tourist Police, and go west, literally up the street about 2-300 yards. Not east toward Aya Sofia and the Sea of Mamara.

There were about a dozen or more establishments open to the public, and they seemed to be a mix of bookstores, distributors, and publishers, sometimes all in the same operation. Putting a lot of effort in, and asking, I did not find a single book on the history of WW I or the era, certainly not in English, and, knowing how crazy I am, I would have bought a good-looking book in Turkish on WW I if I found one. I did find one book, Turkish but in English, basically not of history, but about history, more correctly, which I bought.

Reading (part of) it, it said, if memory serves, that the Turks, traditionally, did not have a sense of a broad sweep of history as a subject of study, but that rather they have been interested in three more narrow sorts of historical study. This may be nonsense, one author's idea, but the seeming paupacy of historical material suggests a limited interest. If this is true, it is a shame, considering the fascinating and important history of the Turkish empire.

I did pop into a bookstore at a local market, and they did have a book in English on WW I, but of course it was the "Lone Pine Diaries" that I mentioned before, the ony Turkish book on WW I that I had already read, and is in my wife's library.

I did have a funny experience. Going into a bookstore/publisher, I asked the gent that I was looking for material on WW I, and he indicated that he only carried books on al-Islam. Then he showed me a book in English by a Middle e

Eastern author, in English (and I think a number of other languages), which was a rant "proving" that Darwin, Darwinism, evolution, etc. is a great bunch of junk. Creationism, in other words, fundamentalist stuff. He was amazed when I said that I had not heard of the author, and he forced me to accept the book and take it with me, despite energetic denials of interest. (Free, of course.)

Bob Lembke

[bob lembke]

Hi, Bill;

Can we have a citation for that table?

Bob Lembke

[Eceabat]

Bill,

There is one thing I don’t quite understand in your comments, and that it the repeated call for the "release" of records. What exactly is it you mean? The records, or at least those that are catalogued, can be accessed if permission is granted. So what do you mean by released? Open the doors of the archive and let the documents room free in the wild? Allow them to return to their natural environment of the corridors and offices of bureaucracy?

Your man from Beijing could be able to get access to the archives and, through using a translator versed in the Ottoman text, have material put into Turkish or English or directly into Chinese if he has a translator who knows Turkish and Chinese. I have never said that documents can’t be accessed due to lack of linguistic skill, just that somewhere in the process you need someone who has that skill.

No, conducting research in the Turkish archives is not the same as walking in the AWM or the Public Records Office in the UK. But it is not impossible and it can be done. Ask Tim Travers, or Ed Erikson (along with a number of Turkish historians I can name). Yes, people get refused permission and yes, some material can’t be accessed. For example, they haven’t catalogued all the regimental war diaries as yet, a major frustration to Turkish scholars.

Bob, much of the publishing and book dealing industry has moved away from the region of the Underground Cistern, though some remains. The big publishers have moved to larger quarters. However, there are a few other areas in Istanbul that have a concentration of second had bookshops and publishers that are worth visiting. There are a few good book shops in the Taksim-Beyoglu district, around the Cicek Pasaje (the Flower Passage) off Istiklal Caddesi. The Old Book Bazaar just past the Grand Pazar can yield gems, and the Kadikoy area on the Asian side of the city has a few good shops and some nice antique shops as well. If you are ever heading over this way again I’d be happy to provide more details.

And yes, with our moderate pro-Islamist government, there has been a revival of creationist theory, much in line with the US (there is an interesting alliance).

The schema that Bill posted above looks similar to the basic outline published in the Redhouse Dictionaries, which can serve as a starting point for translation.

Cheers

Bill

[bob lembke]

Bill and Bill;

I sort of feel like a junkyard dog growling and hanging onto a dirty old bone, but I actually am getting more interested in some of these points.

I cited some stuff that my wife dug up; I have tracked down her source on Ottoman Turkish, and it is Professor Lars Johanson (or Johansson), from the Johannes Guttenberg University in Mainz, Germany. He is one of the world's leading authorities on the Turkic languages (he says that there are currently at least 20 in common use; I only knew of eight), and my wife's library has ten of his books on Turkish. She used (for eight minutes) Johanson, Lars; The Turkic Languages, 474 pages, xxiii. They have a book of his soley on Ottoman Turkish as well, in German. I will have my wife pull one or both tomorrow.

I have called one of my tenants, who had offered to tutor my wife and I in Arabic; unfortunately, our proposed study of this language is on hold. Amal has a Ph. D. from a French university and has a research fellowship at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, working on a cure for cystic fibrosis, while continuing working on quite a different cure with her old French research team. When she rented from me she had just arrived and spoke almost no English, and her mentors were delighted that I spoke fair French and a bit of Arabic. (As a scientist, she probably read good scientific English, and she was speaking passable English in literally weeks. One of the sharper knives in the drawer.)

She has, of course, Moroccan Arabic, and standard Arabic, and Koranic Arabic, and we were chatting about Arabic and I spoke my one phrase of Cairene Arabic, without saying I was testing her, and she immediately blurted out: "That is Egyptian." So she certainly is up to speed. (Last year she went to Morocco for a week, to Cairo for a week, and came back with a Moroccan husband from Cairo; she has parked him in Montreal while she completes her fellowship.)

I will quiz her on the Arabic alphabet, and what she knows about the older Arabic alphabet; her knowledge of Koranic Arabic will give us a fix on this; I would guess that the Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a speed-bump on the road from Koranic Arabic to Modern Arabic.

"Bill of Australia"'s table of Ottoman symbols clearly is a small sub-set of the alphabet, but it could be 5% of the symbols, yet cover 60% or 70% of the symbols found in a sample in common use.

This leads me to an idea; some clever person could possibly write a guide or course of study which would allow the translation of most of most Ottoman military records by the English speaker, while requiring about 1% of the effort as learning a broad swath of Ottoman Turkish.

Bob Lembke

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Mates

For those of whom are serious about understanding the fundamentals of Ottoman Script, my sources indicate that no finer resource available for an English speaker is the following work.

It is quite a substantial work - 2,500 pages and in reprint from Beruit so it is sort of available although the going price is about USD150 per copy.

Cheers

Bill

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Mates

Here is the introduction of Redhouse and his comments on transliteration. It gives you the real idea as to the apparent complexity of the language and script. Those of us who are used to working in script other than Roman Script will recognise that this script, painted with a mysterious and cabalistic aura, is not all that difficult. The attached comments of Redhouse will explain the very nature of transliteration between Ottoman Script and Roman orthography. This should remove the veils of mystique and show the actual reality.

Page 1 of 4

Cheers

Bill

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Mates

Page 2 of 4

Cheers

Bill

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Mates

Page 3 of 4

Cheers

Bill

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Mates

Last page

4 of 4

As you see, always good to have a reliable source to help you.

Cheers

Bill

[Sullivan]

Merry Xmas everyone from down under

Does anyone have contacts details (especially electronic) for any war diaries that cover the allies’ involvement on Gallipoli?

Cheers

Zack

Zack,

Tolga Ornek and Feza Toker produced a Gallipoli documentary, it is also available on DVD title 'Gallipoli The Frontline Experience'.

They also published a companion book of same title (English language) with excellent photos and maps of Turkish positions.

You should be able to obtain the book from any good booksellers, the IBSN is 0 86819 783 1.

The library Dewey reference number is 940.426. First published in 2004 in various countries.

Cheers,

James.

[Bryn]

Thanks for that information on the Arabic script, Bill,

Reminds me of when I first started learning to read and write Japanese. Those were the days! As I recall, lots of people reckoned that'd be too hard as well, and while it wasn't easy, it wasn't as difficult as they thought it was either. And that was without having a PhD!

Depends on your motivation, among other things.

Still has nothing to with why no records are publicly available, though.

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bryn

G'day mate

Very cute piece of katakana.

The real test is to try to put my name in katakana - my teachers from Waseda could only come up with Biru san. A girl I studied with was Polish - the poor folks just gave up then.

Cheers

Bill

[bob lembke]

Bryn

G'day mate

Very cute piece of katakana.

The real test is to try to put my name in katakana - my teachers from Waseda could only come up with Biru san. A girl I studied with was Polish - the poor folks just gave up then.

Cheers

Bill

Bill;

"Biru san"? Are you sure that your teachers were not "pulling your leg"? My seven words of Japanese suggests that that might mean "Mr. Beer".

Pulling on my grinch-cloak, Bill seems to be proving my case. Did anyone actually read the four pages of his book that he has usefully posted? Headsplitting. We must remember that the book is 2500 pages long.

Which transliteration system does this book present? Is it still in use? My understanding is that there are several Arabic to English transliteration systems in use today, and that others have been abandoned. When I finally get hold of the the elusive "William" I will be better able to quantify these questions. The University of Pennsylvania is one of the finest universities in the US; some ratings say #6, and I will ask William if how many of the 20,000 odd students and perhaps 3000 faculty know Ottoman Turkish. As he controls the materials in Ottoman Turkish, he should know.

Again, written Ottoman Turkish is a combination of old Turkish, which must be more complicated than Modern Turkish, itself which I presume to be the most complicated major language in the world in use today, plus Persian text and prose, plus Arabic text and poetry, all written down in an Arabic alphabet which may, indeed only have 24 "letters", but these are seemingly written in about 800 different symbols.

There certainly seem to be a reason why this language was the written language of an empire that conquered 60 nations, which existed until 80-odd years ago, whose teaching only ceased less than 80 years ago, but today no one seems to be able to read it. I also assume that there is a reason why there only was a 3% literacy rate in a country which was highly organized and burea, if economically and technically backward.

Byrn, what do you mean by "no records are publicly available "? It now seems, according to several people that have actually gone in and used them, that they are available, and that the standards as to which people are allowed to use them is not enormously high. But there are restrictions. I certainly understand the difficulties in making them available to someone in Japan.

When I used the British Library, I was vetted as to my qualifications and need to use the Library, although I think that most people who were both literate and sober would have gotten in. Additionally, the restrictions on copying material were so strict that the possibility of usefully doing so was almost nil, with old materials.

When I was doing research on the Mexican War at the New York Public Library, I was allowed to use the materials, pencil only, but also locked in a wire cage with the book, pencil, and paper. My mentor, a Columbia University-trained historian, was happy that I had access, but annoyed as for some reason he was not allowed access, although a trained historian and a career educator.

My wife's university allows me to go into the stacks on certain hours, only showing a driver's license, but across the river the Princeton University library, with WW I materials that Penn does not have, requires $400 before you can enter the facility.

The German national libraries have been extremely helpful and flexible wvia e-mail inquiry, copying materials and entire books at reasonable rates and mailing them to me prior to my paying for them, so much so that I have never had to actually visit them, but they refuse to copy some older materials, due to fragility.

All countries and libraries have their procedures, and deny access and/or copying to certain holdings. One can imagine that the military of a possibly-third world country might be rigid. It does seem that the situation is improving, and that more Turks are becoming more interested in this history, as the West views history. (The seeming lack of domestic interest in these historical matters certainly must have been a factor in the limited access.) I personally am resigned to the situation, despite my personal interest in finding out what my Father did in the Gallipoli action.

Bob Lembke

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bob

G'day mate

Algebra looks difficult if you picked up a text for the first time. Once you gain familiarity with prinicples, it becomes easy and routine. The above was not published as an easy primer but to illustrate the sum total problem to be mastered. If you find it too complex then so be it. To me it is a torch, lightening up the path to further knowledge. At this point I may not know much about Ottoman Script but now I know a hell of a lot more than before. Nothing fearsome about it at all. Like with learning all scripts, it is essential to get the forms down pat. Like all semetic scripts, the vowels do not form part of the word except by super or subscript. Nothing difficult about that at all. All this introduction does is highlight the transliteration concepts and problems. The other 2,500 pages deals with a dictionary rather than a discussion of the language. What yu have is the nub of the writing system. If it can be summarised in four pages by the then world authority on Ottoman Script, we are not looking at anything very complex. That doesn't mean learning it won't take effort - it will. But for me it doesn't mean years of training - only a couple months to work out the military terms I need to know along with the forms of other common words. Anything more is a bonus. Like I said, about 1500 words at the most. Things I don't know I can transliterate into Roman Script and put it through a translator. This is not rocket science mate, just systematic understanding of a discipline.

Like Kennedy said: Some ask "Why?" but I ask "Why not?"

Some see problems, I see a challenge.

But despite all the above, I still do not see any records to practice this on.

Cheers

Bill

[bob lembke]

Bill;

To pessamistic me the bright ray of hope is the fact that only a small subset of the language, at least the vocabilary part, might be necessary to usefully read military records, if not diaries and the like. I am sceptical that 34 symbols or something like that represents the "alphabet" as then written. What about the four forms for the different location in the given word? Perhaps the different forms are close. William the Illusive may provide the answers. I should have Prof. Johanson's tome tonight.

A good test would be to feed some Modern Turkish into a translator system and see what pops out the other end. My wife's Brit literary forum has a game where English is machine translated into ultra-simple Spanish and then back to English, and people try to place the product. Your translator promises to translate between Turkish and Swahili, for example. I am sceptical. Why doesn't someone run some modern Turkish into English? If that works fairly well this type of problem will be simpler.

I personally would love this sort of thing to work, but am still sceptical.

Bob Lembke

[Bryn]

I've been doing some more thinking on the difficulties (according to some posters, pretty much impossibilities), of learning the Ottoman Turkish script, combined wth an insight I had when replying to Kim, and have to ask: can Ed Erickson read this script enough to translate documents from the Turkish archives?

And if not, who does? And who do they work for?

I mentioned this to Kim as a means of implying that the script is indeed 'learnable', but now that I think about it, that's never been specifically claimed.

[Ozzie]

Remember the Roseta stone?

Things can be achieved if the right forces are available.

In this case, I suspect it will be a very old scholar who is willing to give their time.

Can someone unearth this person?

Some languages have nuances and meanings that are far deeper than our English, every word, and variation of that word puts a different spin on the final sentence.

When having something translated, I would prefer it to come from a native speaker, everytime.

Kim

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

When having something translated, I would prefer it to come from a native speaker, everytime.

Someone trained in the nuances and meanings that are evident in English or similar to the fellows who translated the Turkish Official History of Gallipoli?

Cheers

Bill

[Bryn]

Kim,

The problem with assuming a native speaker can translate better than a non-native is that the native speaker has to know both languages very well, or is always going to be a non-native speaker of one of the languages; either the language being translated from, or the one being translated into.

As an example, imagine you're asked to translate some of the writings of Shakespeare into modern Japanese. Of course you can read the English, but how will you translate it into the other language? If, on the other hand, I can find a native speaker of Japanese who also has at least a reasonable command of English, it's possible that person may be able to do the translation, even though they're not a native speaker of English. There will, however, be a lot of mistakes.

Relatively few people are native speakers of two languages, but of course they're the ideal for translators between the two languages.

Ed Erickson advised me, among other things, to learn Turkish and Ottoman if I wanted to examine the personnel records in the Turkish archives. Now I'm merely asking if he know the language/s himself. Seems like a fair question to me.

Remember he also advised me that he didn't need to have seen the individual personnel records to 'know' they were there in the archives, and that I should just accept the word of someone who was 'better informed' on the subject than me. The problem with that is, it seems those records aren't there at all, and probably don't exist anywhere. Which is exactly what I was saying all along.

Being able to read Ottoman Turkish script won't help with reading non-existent records, so the whole matter of its complexity is, to me, completely irrelevant.

[Ozzie]

Bryn,

I am not an academic, or a learned person as some appear to be. I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of language.

What I do know, from having worked with migrants from Greece, Spain and Italy, is that when you try to learn another language, the little things are the ones that cause the problems.

Now, it is OK, for someone to say, Hey, look at it this way it is easy, but to some it is not.

I do see your point in that one has to be conversant in English and the original language to do a correct translation. To me, that requires more than a recipe as from above.

Yes, there is some argument as to whether or not there are individual soldier records ,and if one takes it down to the exact wording, there appears not to be.

So it is all right for some members of this forum to put up generalisations, and be lauded for them, but not for others.

People are human, and where one makes a mistake and is crucified for it, others make statements that are not quite "all right" and are praised.

Hello????

Kim

[Bryn]

Kim,

Having studied and taught it for many years, I do know something of the 'ins and outs of language', including a little bit of Turkish, so I have a fair idea of what's involved. While you're right that it's not easy for some (I'd say most) people, it is easy for others. People who say it's easy can only be referring to themselves, and we either believe them - that it is easy for them - or we can call them liars because it's not easy for others. Anyway, as I say, the whole 'learning this language is too complex' thing has nothing to do with the fact that these personnel records don't exist, which was my only real interest in the topic anyway.

I'm not sure what your statement that, "People are human, and where one makes a mistake and is crucified for it, others make statements that are not quite "all right" and are praised", refers to. Do you have any examples in mind, or is it a general statement?

[Ozzie]

Overall view of recent postings led me to this conclusion, Bryn

Kim

[bob lembke]

The spousal unit brought me Prof. Johanson's book last night, and, more usefully, the business card of the Penn bibliographer of its Middle Eastern materials who, as I said, knows both Arabic and Turkish. So I will have useful information later today.

I did skim the section on Ottoman Turkish, and it, and the other sections, were written by linguists for linguists, and 90% of it cannot be understood at all, at least by me. But there clearly were a succession of "Ottoman Turkish" languages, written in multiple scripts, including things I never heard of, and from the middle of the 19th century the changes within the language were occurring especially quickly. Obviously Persian grammar was important in Ottoman Turkish, and we can recall that at least one of the four pages of the book that Bill posted goes on about Persian grammar, which is important in Ottoman Turkish.

My skimming of the book produced another basic problem and complexity in Ottoman Turkish; that Arabic and Ottoman Turkish are profoundly different languages (which I and probably everyone else knew), although there are considerable elements of Arabic in Ottoman Turkish; but also that the Arabic alphabet is not only very complex but is quite badly suited to represent the Ottoman Turkish language, creating its own problems.

I noticed an interesting assertion; that today Turks speaking in Modern Turkish tend to speak somewhat different languages depending on their political stance. Left or liberal people tend to speak, supposedly, a more highly "reformed" language, while conservatives speak an "older" sort of Turkish, perhaps including some of the various borrowings from other languages that language reformers have actively been trying to purge from Turkish for at least 150 years.

It seems that Ataturk left half of his estate to some organization set up to further the reform of Turkish, and that the language was in considerable flux until perhaps the early 1980's, when the language stabilized. It was stated that one problem produced by this process was that children and parents supposedly had some difficulty in understanding each other. (I thought that that was a universal problem!)

Bob Lembke

[Bryn]

Bob, I'll reword what I said before to make it clearer what I mean: when I said no records were 'publicly available', I meant that no individual personnel records were available. The 'publicly' was probably confusing as people thought I meant records in the archives.

All along, though, I have stressed that I am referring only to individual service records. These are not in the archives and so are not available by definition.

It's possible some were burnt in Iraq recently, but that's just a guess, right?

[bob lembke]

Bill / Eceabat wrote:

" I’ve been asking some questions of Turkish friends involved in the field of research on the campaign. One I spoke to was Haluk Oral, a historian, Ottoman scholar and avid collector of documents from the Gallipoli Campaign.

First off, he is unaware of there being a single detailed service file for private soldiers in the Ottoman Army. According to him, when a man was conscripted a file or notebook as he says, was opened at the town or centre where the man was inducted. This recorded his basic details such as name, father’s name, home town or village, height, etc. Haluk said that this record stayed at the place of induction, being closed when and if the man ever returned from service.

There would have been records of our sample man’s transfer after basic training to a unit, though as the war went on groups of conscripts were sent as a bloc to the front, and then assigned to units. Before the war, recruitment for most infantry units was based on a regional area, thus the 57th regiment came from the Edirne region close to what is now Turkey’s border with Greece and Bulgaria.

Haluk said that there would have been company or battalion records of men, when assigned, kit issued, when left unit through transfer, illness, wounds or death. However, these would have been brief. According to him, there was no centralised file where all this paperwork came together.

However, he reckons that if you took a name of a particular soldier, you may be able to find at least part of this paper trail. I am thinking of trying this with a couple of researchers that I know and having a go (time permitting).

For officers, it was different, and extensive files were kept on each, many of which still exist. "

I hope that we can accept this. Bill has worked in these archives, and his Turkish friend seems about as qualified a person as we could find on the nature and state of the personnel records for individual Turkish EMs of 1915. This is a situation that seems familiar to me, in my work on German military history, as a RAF firebombing raid late in WW II supposedly destroyed the Archives of the Prussian Army. One can only reliably expect to find information on the small sub-set of German officers who were "regular" officers, and very little, if any, on any EM, unless he died in the war and has a known grave.

What seems to me a useful exercise would be to perhaps encourage Bill to launch a researcher at the archives, possibly with some financial support. If people begin to do this, simple economics suggests that a corps of Ottoman researchers might begin to form. This in turn might have other beneficial effects, possibly encouraging the Turkish military to put some effort into these archives and their facilities. I am getting the sense that there is considerable movemnet here. Note that the Turks seem to have compiled a list of about 84,000 Turks who fell at Gallipoli; this is certainly a major development if people are really interested in the individual Turkish soldier.

Byrn wrote:

" It's possible some were burnt in Iraq recently, but that's just a guess, right? "

If the news reports I read were accurate, the regional archive for a good part of the territory now comprising Iraq was burned and completely destroyed. I am careful about sources, but I can't remember in what source I read this in, and I read the Brit and Israeli press daily as well as several US papers, and some others, such as Turkish, occasionally.

If this is true and the description of the nature of the Turkish Army personnel records are correct, the single most complete personnel record on EM were destroyed for men inducted in that corner of the Turkish Empire.

Likewise, the Serbs managed to burn the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo a few years ago. I have stood in the utterly bare ruin about 2 1/2 years ago. A million items were destroyed, and we can assume that some were Turkish military records.

A very sad business.

I will be writing an e-mail of questions on Ottoman Turkish to "William the Librarian" tonight. If anyone has a question or two to pose please let me know. I will hold the e-mail till say 10 AM tomorrow.

Perhaps Bill / Eceabat can tell us if some of us interested in research in the archives in question can assist such a trial in some fashion.

Bob Lembke