ABSTRACT
The surviving firmly datable Turkish works to which an Anatolian provenance can be confidently attributed belong to the thirteenth century and clearly predate the emergence of an Ottoman principality. As a linguistic term, ‘Ottoman’ denotes the form of Turkic that became the official, literary language of the Ottoman Empire. The application of the essentially dynastic and political term ‘Ottoman’ to the official language of the state was an innovation of the period of reform known as the Tanzimat, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when deliberate attempts were being made to foster a sense of Ottoman identity as the basis for a modernized Ottoman state. On scientific grounds also many scholars have questioned the appropriateness of Ottoman as a linguistic denomination. The phonology and morphophonology of Old Ottoman show several clear differences from modern Turkish. Old Ottoman appears to have possessed a number of phonemes that are absent from standard modern Turkish and that gradually disappeared during the Middle Ottoman period.
