“Le nostre lettere sono greche, ma parliamo il turco”. «Karamanlidika» e altri casi di sincretismo grafico in ambiente ottomano

“Karamanlidika” is the conventional denomination for a vast group of printed and manuscript Turkish texts written in Greek characters and produced mainly between the eighteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in Asia Minor, Istanbul and other cities of the Ottoman Empire. In the present contribution the terms syncretistic writing and graphic syncretism (borrowed from the term syncretism in religious studies) are proposed for a comprehensive labelling covering not only “Karamanlidika”, but also “Aljamiado Greek” (i.e. Greek in Arabic characters) and other writing forms resulting from a symbiosis of languages with non-conventionally correlated alphabets. The article aims to present the salient features of “Karamanlidika” production from a historic and typological point of view, concluding with a comparative outlook on “Aljamiado Greek”.