What We Talk About When We Talk About Armeno-Turkish

Abstract

What We Talk About When We Talk About Armeno-Turkish Aram Ghoogasian (bio) KEYWORDS Armeno-Turkish, Armenian literature, Turkish literature, late Ottoman Empire, hybridity In the last decade or so there has been a heightened interest in Armeno-Turkish (hayataṛ t'rk'erēn/Ermeni harfli Türkçe), or Turkish written in the Armenian alphabet.1 The Armeno-Turkish written tradition was a rich one, comprising myriad genres in both manuscript and print, and lasting roughly six centuries alongside Karamanlıca, Judeo-Arabic, and other such literary forms in the Ottoman Empire. Over an even longer period, there are many examples of the Armenian script being used to write other languages—such as Kipchak, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Kurdish, Georgian, and Latin—but Armeno-Turkish is the best-studied and most culturally significant of these, at least for the early modern and modern periods. As observers have pointed out since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the Armenian alphabet rendered Turkish clearly, with less ambiguity than the Arabic script.2 This was in fact what first attracted scholars, namely American missionaries, to Armeno-Turkish, given its potential as a tool for proselytizing among Turcophone Armenians. In the twentieth century, academics writing in Armenian, Turkish, French, German, and English showed some interest as well, but this was for the most part sporadic and, on the whole, descriptive. [End Page 319] Armeno-Turkish studies picked up steam in the early 2000s, and we can observe something of a boom in research on the topic over the last ten years. What sets this newest academic literature apart from that which preceded it is a new vocabulary for talking about Armeno-Turkish. This dominant paradigm is best condensed to one term: "hybridity." This has become the most widely accepted way for understanding and contextualizing Armeno-Turkish cultural production, to the point that it has become ubiquitous.3 The term "hybrid" is commonly deployed to describe Armeno-Turkish as a medium, the texts written in it, and the people who used it. This is done primarily in reaction to nationalistic scholarship. The argument goes that Armenian and Turkish literary historiography are ill-equipped to account for the existence of Armeno-Turkish, unsure of whether to claim it for themselves or to reject it as foreign. The framework of hybridity is the supposed solution to this problem. Armeno-Turkish is neither solely Armenian nor solely Turkish, proponents of hybridity say, but occupies a space "in-between" the two cultures. Armeno-Turkish thus becomes evidence of "cross-cultural encounter" or "interaction," a "meeting place" between two cultures or even, in some cases, between two "worlds."4 These arguments are all well and good as correctives to Turkish literary studies, which is largely silent on Armenian writers' role in the development of modern Turkish letters.5 But hybridity discourse comes up against its own limitations. In short, the scholarship of the 2010s has reproduced the errors of [End Page 320] the past historiography, albeit in subtler ways. By focusing on the supposed liminal space between Armenian and Turkish culture, the most recent iteration of Armeno-Turkish studies has left these categories intact. "Hybridity" and its associated key terms—"in-between," "cross-cultural," and so on—already imply the existence of defined cultural forms that overlap in an Armeno-Turkish textual space. The use of Armeno-Turkish by Armenians, in this schema, is sometimes described as appropriation, while Turkish is also referred to as their mother tongue.6 This contradiction—that one could appropriate or borrow from their own mother tongue—is not recognized as such, reifying again the fundamental separateness of Armenian and Turkish cultures. This gets to the heart of the issue with Armeno-Turkish studies' fixation with hybridity as a panacea. Armeno-Turkish, I argue, does not constitute an in-between space. It is not, in other words, a place where Armenian and Turkish cultures overlap or meet. Rather, Armenophone and Turcophone cultures—at least in the late Ottoman literary world—already existed in a milieu where the boundaries between ostensibly separate cultures blurred to the point that speaking of them in isolation obscures a clearer understanding of that literary-historical moment. Instead, it is more...