Turkish, Hungary, Avars etc.

[Cristian Mocanu]

I'll try to answer here - to the best of my knowledge-several questions by
several distinguished contributors.

1. The language used at the Ottoman court was Ottoman Turkish (osmanli). It
co-existed there, of course, with Persian, Arabic and even Greek. Incidentally,
all the correspondence of the Sultans with the Moldavian and Wallachian
princes, between the 15-th and the 19-th century, that is, all the documents
preserved in both Turkish and Romanian archives is in Osmanli, and not Greek,
as might have been expected, if one would think of the fact that the adresses
were Orthodox Christians.

2. In the regions formerly under Turkish rule, Turkish is nowadays spoken as
follows:

-Bulgaria: there is a large Turkish speaking minority, apart from the
Bulgarian-speaking Muslim population. I wouldn't hazard mentioning a percentage
here, as I do not know the results of the latest Bulgarian census. But Turks do
have a daily newspaper and a sizeable political party.

-Yugoslavia: there is a large Turkish minority in Kosovo, especially in the
urban areas. Before the conflict, they used to have schools, publications and a
daily radio broadcast. There may be scattered Turkish speakers left in Southern
Serbia.

-(Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia: there is a sizeable Turkish minority
whose situation may be compared with that of the Kosovo Turks.

-Dobrudja (i.e. South Eastern Romania, between the Danube and the Black Sea
Coast): there is a Turkish minority of about 10 to 15 thousand. They have
primary school educatiion, one secondary school, one weekly publication.

-An interesting Turkish speaking enclave was the island of Ada Kale on the
Danube in the far Southwest of Romania. The Ottomans established a garrison
there, made up of (mainly) Anatolians. When the Austrians took hold of the town
of Orsova, the Turks were asked to leave peacefully; uinstead, they surrendered
their weapons and chose to stay. This 100% Turkish community stayed on until
1967 when the island was flooded at thed construction of a huge hydro power
station. It was tried to re-settle them in Turkey, however, some came back and
are now scattered in several places in Romania.

3. Related to the previous point, the Gagauz were indeed Seldjukid Turks who
adopted Orthodox Christianity at some point during the 14-th century. Their
mainstay region now is the south of the Republic of Moldova, where they even
established an autonomous region, Gagauz Yeri. They are also to be found in the
Odessa region in the Ukraine and in some parts of Russia. The speakers reported
in Romania are originally also from what is now the Republic of Moldova (part
of Romania until 1940). Fearing Soviet repression, some fleed westwards with
the withdrawing Romanian administration. To the best of my knowledge, however,
there are no active speakers left among their descendants.

4. About Hungary: Dr. Fosse is absolutely right in what he writes about pre-and
post-Trianon Hungary. However, I think the original question referred to the
1-st millenium A.D. If this is the period we are discussing, the accuracy of
the mentioned figure (22 languages), largely depends on whether or not we
consider the Slavic languages as already separated at that time (actually, 1000
years is quite a lot, isn't it?). Again to the best of my knowledge, apart from
the Slavs, the following language groups were represented in the Pannonian
plains (roughly post-Trianon Hungary) at some stage during the period between
300 and 1000 A.D.:

-Turkic and other Altaic languages:Avaric (see below), Bulgar,Cuman, Hunic,
Pechenegue.

-Germanic languages: Eastern Gothic, Gepidic, Baiuvaric (, questionable)

-Uralic languages:Hungarian

-Romance languages: Old (or Common) Romanian (Urrumaenisch, according to the
terminology used by Puscariu,1916).

The actual fact of the possible co-existence of some (or most) of these
languages on a small territory should not , in my opinion, be judged by
comparison with some or another American state. Rather, we should think that
the period we are discussing is that of the great migration of peoples:some of
the above cited populations were just "passing through", others stayed for
smaller or longer periods of time, some others wandered back and forth in
search of better grazing fields etc. Furthermore there was no question yet of a
centralized state, standardized languages etc.

Concerning the linguistic situation in post-Trianon Hungary, here are the
linguistic minorities recognized as such by the present Hungarian
government:Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, German, Greek, Romanian, Romany,
Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian and Yiddish. I would've had my doubts about
Bulgarian and Greek before reading these data; however, somebody introducing
himself as the spokesperson for the Bulgarian minority in Hungary gave an
interview for the BBC in that capacity as recently as May 2000.

5. Finally a quick word about the Avars.The F&W reference quoted by Mr. Mc.
Callister is a classical instance of the confusions the glossonymic
similarities can sometimes induce: the Avars known to us from early Middle Age
history, were-according to all-admittedly scarce- infomation we have, a Turkic
population.

The Avar language that is spoken now in the Authonomous Republic of Dagestan
(Russia) is part of the Caucasian language family; as such it is undoubtedly
related to Lesgin or Lesgian. But it is not a Turkic language. As for Arabic,
the speakers of Avar are mainly Muslim, so their language may have quite a few
Arabic loanwords,but that's hardly enough to postulate any genetic
relationship.

6. I have already been too long, for which I apologize, but I cannot help
myself to add another example of such a confusion, an example which is intended
only to bring a smile on your face. In one of the Lord's Prayer collections
published by the British Bible society back in the 19-th century, a confusion
between "lingua Wallica" (Welsh) and "lingua Wallachica" (Romanian) resulted in
two slightly different Romanian versions of the Lord's Prayer being published
in the same collection, one of which was listed under "Welsh". The Hungarian
historian and Protestant theologian Samuel Koleseri came across this collection
and concluded that Welsh sounded so Romanian, that necessarily the Welsh must
be descendants of the Roman legions in Britain!

Best regards,
 Cristian