Abstract:

This article has been located among the articles published for the sixtieth birthday of Omeljan Pritsak. These articles had been written by his colleagues and students. This translated article was written by Tibor Halasi-Hun and was published in this book. Halasi Kun has pointed out one of the literary works as Seyahatnâme, which is an enlightener about Turkish history, language and Ottoman geography in his article. Besides, Evliyâ Çelebi can reflect phonetic features just like a linguist. As known, Evliyâ Çelebi wandered the territories of the Ottoman Empire for more than fifty years and compiled his experiences in his work. Therefore, Evliyâ Çelebi has been one of the most prominent figures of Ottoman Literature and the 17th century for both local and foreign scholars. This period, which is attributed to Evliyâ Çelebi, stems from his work, Seyahatnâme, which he penned patiently and determinedly while travelling around the Ottoman territories. Evliyâ Çelebi not only transferred the geographical properties of the places he travelled but also gave information about many other things including the histories, people, plants, foods, clothes, traditions and customs, narratives, and local dialects of these places. This fact made the content of the work come into prominence, thereby the content of the work has been examined in many academic researches. Because the content of Seyahatnâme came into prominence, the work has been ignored in terms of linguistic features. Beyond any doubt, one of the most striking features of Seyahatnâme in terms of Turkish language is its language and wording. Seyahatnâme was written in a language which does not share any parallelism with the other texts, written in Ottoman Turkish language. Although each writer had his/her own wording, generally a syntactical pattern was used as a convention in the texts, written in Ottoman Turkish language. Considering this notion, Evliyâ Çelebi is definitely a writer, who is far from being a stereotype especially in terms of language. It is observed that Evliyâ Çelebi specified the features of the language he used while informing about the traits of the places he visited, did not acquiesce in the general tendency, in short, he made up his own rules. Though a variety of researches about history, art, folklore, and geography has been done by referencing to Seyahatnâme by both local and foreign scientists, the studies about its value as well as its qualifications in terms of language are not sufficient in amount, as aforementioned. Taking the historical development of Turkish language into account, the properties of all the periods, which are assorted through different methods, are manifested clearly. However, researchers, surveying on Turkish language, have constantly ignored the period between the 16th and 19th centuries, which they named as Ottoman Turkish language. Therefore, language features of this period, particularly the vocal and consonant systems, are evaluated within a large corpus and are specified clearly. Beside his

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