On 11/5/06, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Turkish isn't too much like any other languages, is it?
but aren't there a large number of Turkic languages?
--
Jim Devine / "Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also
mortis." -- Robert Heilbroner
Actually, there is only one Turkic language but it has various dialects
outside of Turkey. For example, Azeris in Azerbaijan speak Turkish which is
quite understandable to a Turk, but the further away you get from Turkey,
the more difficult it is. There are actually Turkmen in China.
Financial Times (London, England)
September 3, 2005 Saturday
HEADLINE: Turkish delight Why doesn't the Turkic world add up to the sum of
its parts? Here is a full and fascinating answer
BYLINE: By DAVID GARDNER
SONS OF THE CONQUERORS: The Rise of the Turkic World
by Hugh Pope
Duckworth Pounds 20, 432 pages
Turkish is one of the 10 main linguistic families, its members scattered
across a score of states from the Balkans to the Great Wall of China.
Turkic peoples dominated the central Eurasian landmass for a good
millennium, with the Ottoman empire that collapsed just under a century ago
only the last of its imperial manifestations.
Yet the Turkic world today adds up to a good deal less than the sum of its
many parts. That is a puzzle, and Hugh Pope sets out to explain it.
Pope is a long-time foreign correspondent in Turkey and the Middle East,
whose fluency in Turkish (as well as Arabic and Persian) has enabled him to
range across the Turkic world in a way few others could. Already the
co-author of Turkey Unveiled, an acclaimed study of modern Turkey, this
latest book, Sons of the Conquerors, is the product of deep and wide
experience and long reflection. It is beautifully written, with a
journalist's eye for the telling detail, a raconteur's ear for the resonant
anecdote, all held in place by a fine weave of history and judicious analysis.
The whole notion of a Turkic world is a bit of a chimera, like the
orientalist legend of the Silk Road dreamed up by the German geographer
Ferdinand von Richtofen in the late 19th century. As Pope points out, while
Chinese chronicles from the 2nd century BC indeed record a price of 40
bolts of silk for each "blood-sweating, heavenly horse" from central Asia's
Fergana valley, and the Romans too probably exchanged gold for Chinese
silk, the trade is just as likely to have been sea-borne: "Overland
east-west trade and travel rarely prospered through the lands that came to
be dominated by Turkic peoples. Distances were too great, slave-snatching
brigands too prevalent and rival khanates waged too much war against each
other."
Rather than trade, Pope argues, the "core genius" of the Turks has been
military organisation. The creators of more than a dozen empires across the
ages, from the elemental force of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane to the more
settled dominion of the Ottomans and Moghuls, the main contribution of the
Turks has been military and administrative. Tellingly, their high culture
of literature and the court tended to be essentially Persian while religion
and science was the domain of Arabic.
Even today the Kazakhs - the contemporary Turkic people closest to their
nomad roots - are divided into three tribes still known to outsiders as
"hordes", from the Turko-Mongol word ordu, or army.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Turkey, put together by military will from the
debris of the Ottoman empire, functioned as a key cold war buffer, its
generals behaving as lords of the marches separating Europe and the west
from the Soviets, as well as from the Middle East.
As the title suggests, the Turks were never conquered. The Austro-
Hungarians halted the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683, preventing
them from overrunning Europe and reaching the Atlantic, which became the
springboard for the next generation of imperial powers, while the Ottoman
empire started a long, two-century decline. Yet the subtitle of the book -
The Rise of the Turkic World - is less convincing.
Pope's excitement at encountering the living manifestations of a shared
Turkic culture over such a wide expanse of territory is clearly not
something the rulers of these countries share. And while he has occasional
stabs at suggesting a pan-Turkic resurgence - especially after the collapse
of the Soviet Union changed the terms of Russo-Turkish rivalry in the
Caucasus and Central Asia - his narrative tends to subvert this thesis,
which he himself appears to find unconvincing.
One can see why. Republican Turkey was built, Pope observes, by refugees
such as Ataturk, driven out of countries in the Balkans, south Russia, the
Caucasus or the Middle East where their people had been established for
centuries. While increasingly confident and self-sufficient, the political
and, above all, military culture they developed was essentially defensive.
Embedded in the national pysche is the trauma of how the Ottoman empire was
torn asunder by western countries that made and unmade states with casual
ease. Turkey may be a long-term Nato ally and European Union candidate, but
to this day its reflex action is not to trust western intentions. "Having
seen western intervention split Kosovo from Serbia in the Balkans and Iraqi
Kurdistan from Baghdad in the 1990s, the Turkish army was not convinced of
western commitment to the territorial integrity of states," writes Pope.
Little wonder, then, that the Turkish parliament voted against allowing the
US to open a northern front for the invasion of Iraq.
But, after successfully regrouping in Anatolia, why have the Turks done so
little to take advantage of the end of the cold war in central Asia or the
Caucasus? The short answer is that after 150 years of Tsarist and Stalinist
nationality-mixing and ethnic engineering in these Turkic heartlands,
pan-Turkism is for adventurers: Turkey's strategic interest trumps ethnic
ties every time. This book is full of the long, textured answer, and
fascinating it is too.
Pope visits the frontline of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia for
Nagorno Karabagh. In half a page he makes three observations about this
deeply mixed-up place. That nagorno is Russian for mountainous, kara is
Turkic for black, and bagh is Persian for garden or orchard. That from
Tsarist times onwards the Turkic Azeris were prevented from advancing in
the army. And this: "A 1950s Soviet-made armoured car stood guard at the
Azeri checkpoint, but it was pointing the wrong way and one of its tyres
was flat."
Later, having been duped by a Turkish diplomat into writing that Ankara
might come to the rescue of its Azeri brothers, Pope crosses Azerbaijan's
border at Nakhichevan.
"I crossed the bridge that is the only physical connection between the
Anatolian Turks and the Turkic world to the east. Officially, the Turks and
Azeris had blessed the 100-yard-long steel construction with the name Umut
Koprusu, or Bridge of Hope, amid plentiful slaughtering of sheep in 1992.
Their hopes were not fulfilled. After a few years, local people went back
to the name it had earned during its years of construction: the Hasret
Koprusu, or Bridge of Longing."
This is a rich book. Above all, as Turkey and Europe measure each other up
with suspicion, it gives a compelling sense of how the Turkic world, like
Russia, bestrides east and west.
David Gardner is a leader writer for the FT.
--
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