I mediatori dei ‘testi in trascrizione’ (Transkriptionstexte) turchi tra Levante ed Europa

The so-called ‘Turkish transcriptional texts’, i.e. Ottoman texts in non-Arabic scripts, are important sources for the knowledge of the historical grammar, especially phonology, of the Ottoman language. The term was created by Turkologists specifically for texts written between the 16th and 18th centuries in Latin alphabet. The texts were usually written by European travellers with no or little knowledge of Turkish, relying on information from native speakers The contribution focuses on how the authors of the text got their linguistic material. Detailed linguistic analysis of some selected passages will show that mediators were often of Greek origin.