Abstract
In this article, I am concerned with certain aspects of the language use in ANDREWS and KALPAKLI’s The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (2005). More specifically, I show how the authors tend to use distinct sets of words to describe a particular kind of practice depending on whether it occurs in the Ottoman Empire or in some western European city, even though they claim that the practices are equivalent. Typically, the practice in question involves an adult male, a young dependent boy, a sexual act between the two, and some kind of payment for the boy. This kind of practice is more often than not referred to in terms of activities of love when it occurs in the Ottoman Empire, but in terms of sexual debauchery involving boy prostitutes when it takes place in some western European city. Thus, in the article, in which I draw on certain insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (see, e.g., REISIGL and WODAK 2001), I show, by means of several quotations, that the vocabulary used to describe the practices is quite frequently euphemistic when the Ottoman Empire is concerned and correspondingly dysphemistic when cities in Western Europe are concerned. The subtitle of the work represents an exception to this pattern.I conclude the article by pointing out two issues that might shed some light on the authors’ choice of words.Keywords: evaluative language in academic discourse, euphemism, dysphemism, Ottoman lyric poetry, Ottoman Turkish language, early-modern cultural studies
Highlights
Like modern Turkish, Ottoman Turkish is a grammatically gender-neutral language
A case in point is where what is described in terms of activities of love when it is manifested in the Ottoman Empire is characterized as sexual debauchery involving boy prostitutes when it is instantiated in Europe
I will provide examples of how ANDREWS and KALPAKLI (2005) tend to use two sets of vocabularies to refer to a given practice depending only on whether it occurs in the Ottoman Empire and involves Ottomans, or takes place somewhere in Europe and involves Europeans
Summary
Like modern Turkish, Ottoman Turkish is a grammatically gender-neutral language. Translating Ottoman Turkish into a language such as English, we will have to look at the context to find out how to render, for example, the third-person singular personal pronoun, o(l)— with ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’. In cases where the referent is male, he may represent a woman, since honourable women were not portrayed in this way in the relevant time period (ANDREWS and KALPAKLI 2005: 43). On this interpretation, the focus of the poet’s attention is a female. A case in point is where what is described in terms of activities of love when it is manifested in the Ottoman Empire is characterized as sexual debauchery involving boy prostitutes when it is instantiated in Europe (see ANDREWS and KALPAKLI 2005: 70). I sum up the article in section 8 and point out some implications of this kind of language use
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