ABSTRACT
In a celebration of Robert Dankoff's immense contribution to the study of the Seyahatname, few subjects are more appropriate than the study of Evliya Celebi unique approach to the representation of Ottoman Turkish. The expanded resources of Persian and Ottoman usage, Arabic script is a very inadequate way of representing spoken Greek and it is further hampered by adherence to Arabic syllabification. Greek is quite comfortable with consonant clusters, and Turkish allows almost none. Greek, which has at last been recognized as the national spoken language since April, 1974, tends to be quite free about eliding unstressed vowels in prose and poetry, where Turkish may be required to insert vowels to escape the effect of consonant clusters. As a result, Evliya was forced to stretch his interpretation of the letters of Arabic to the point where they became somewhat difficult to recognize. It is difficult to imagine any other Ottoman author who would have entered into this effort so enthusiastically.
