Turkish

[Anthony Appleyard]

  Someone wrote:-
> How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900?

  "David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:-
> The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of
> Armenian-speakers ... and a large number of Greek-speakers along the
> Aegean coast, almost all of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war.

  And Kurdish.
  Re Greeks in Anatolia, in the 1960's or 1970's I read a UK scuba diving
magazine article about Turkish sport scuba divers, and one of them was called
Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover".

?  Dawkins(1916) is a study (mainly) of Cappadocian Greek ...

I read that book or a similar book, about Pontus etc. Some of those Greek
dialects had many loanwords from Turkish, e.g. a verb {du"su"ndo} from Turkish
{du"su"nmek}. Turkish vowel harmony had also got in.

> [Turkish is] dominant in European Turkey, not surprisingly ...

Some history books seem to say that Turkish Thrace spoke largely Greek and
Bulgarian right up to the suburbs or walls of Constantinople, until a big
exchange of populations in the 1920's.

On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw
road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for
{Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what?

> The Bulgarian perfect has apparently been remodeled as an inferentional
> through Turkish influence. ... This is, I think, difficult to explain if
> Turkish was not at one time more common in Bulgaria than it has been more
> recently.

Likely many Bulgarians knew enough Turkish for necessary dealings with the
Ottoman Turkish authorities, until Turkish authority and Islamic rule were
slung out of Bulgaria bag and baggage in the Russo-Turkish War in the 1880's.
For more information about those events and their causes, see a history book.
Likely afterwards very many bilingual Christian Bulgarians totally rejected
all things Turkish including the language, and the Bulgarian government seems
to have systematically renamed nearly every place with a Turkish-looking name,
e.g. Hasi-ko"y -> Khaskovo, except for a few large towns such as Kazanl#k (# =
the hard-sign), and Eski Dzhumaya, which (I think) was renamed to Dimitrovgrad
in Communist times.