Words from Ottoman Turkish
9 words in Curio passed through Ottoman Turkish on their way into English.
About Ottoman Turkish
A standardized register of Turkish · an earlier stage of a language still spoken today
Where
The Ottoman Empire
When
Speakers
No reliable count
No census of its speakers exists.
Family path
- Ottoman Turkish
- FrenchItalianMiddle FrenchTurkish
- English
Where it came from
Ottoman Turkish was the standardized register of Turkish used in the Ottoman Empire, from roughly the 14th to the 20th centuries. Written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, it borrowed extensively from Persian and Arabic. Rural Turks, to whom it was largely unintelligible, kept using kaba Türkçe ('raw' or 'vulgar' Turkish), which had far fewer foreign loanwords and is the basis of modern standard Turkish.
Source: Wikipedia
The words, A to Z
- cafeteria
This word for a self-serve dining hall started life as a place to grab a cup of coffee.
- coffee
A word that traveled from Arabia to your kitchen counter by way of four different languages, picking up a new coat of spelling in each one.
- emir
A title for a ruler that quietly shares its roots with the word for someone commanding a ship.
- fatwa
A word for a legal opinion that, in one famous case, became a matter of life and death.
- harem
A word for a private household space traces back to the idea of something set apart and off-limits.
- jackal
This scavenging canine carried its name across four languages before slipping into English.
- ottoman
That low cushioned footstool got its name from an entire empire's idea of comfort.
- pasha
A title that once made Ottoman officials sit up straighter, its own origins as tangled as the empire it served.
- tulip
This flower's name once described what people wrapped around their heads, not what grew in a garden.