The Turkish Language in the Poetry Collection Compiled by Miho Martelini from Dubrovnik

Abstract

In the library of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo there is a manuscript poetry collection compiled by Miho Martelini from Dubrovnik. The collection was compiled in Dubrovnik in 1657 and consists of two volumes containing poems composed in Croatian, Turkish, and Italian. All of the poems were written down in Italian Latin script, except for one poem in both Croatian and Turkish, which was written down in Bosnian Cyrillic script. The eighteen Turkish poems in this collection all belong to the genre of Turkish folk poetry. This paper analyses the characteristics of the Turkish language in the poems from Martelini's collection. Since the poems were compiled in Dubrovnik, which had strong and lively ties with the Ottoman Empire, three linguistic layers could be expected in them: (1) the Ottoman language, or the language of the upper, educated classes of society in the Ottoman Empire; (2) West Rumelian Turkish, or the dialect of Turkish that we may expect to have been present on the territory of Dubrovnik; and (3) the so-called Bosnian variety of the Turkish language, which had developed under the strong influence of a South Slavic substratum, and which may also be expected to have been present in Dubrovnik, due to its geographical proximity to Ottoman Bosnia. This linguistic analysis of Turkish poems from Martelini’s collection complements the image we have of the linguistic, cultural, and societal conditions in the city of Dubrovnik, as well as the larger territory of southeastern Europe in the 17th century.