Comparison of the 1826 Turkish Bible in Greek Characters and the 1827 Turkish Bible in Arabic Characters in terms of Inflectional Affixes

Bible is a holy book that has been, throughout the history, translated several times to Turkish, as well as all other languages of the world. The history of the Turkish translations of the Bible into is nearly as old as the Bibles in English, French and German. It is known that the Bible, also referred to as the New Testament, was initially translated into Ottoman Turkish between the years of 1662 and 1665 by Ali Bey, the head translator of Sultan Mehmed the Fourth (Wojciech Bobowski). In the following years, also printed Turkish translations of the Bible can be seen. The oldest of these was based on the Translation of Ali Bey and was published in 1819, Paris. Besides the translations of the Bible into Ottoman Turkish with Arabic characters, there are also less known translations made with Greek characters. In this study, at first a Greek characters Turkish Bible of 1826 and an Arabic characters Turkish Bible of 1827 were introduced. Then, the two texts were compared in terms of the inflectional affixes in the First Part of the Gospel of Marcos. At this stage the inflectional affixes in both of the texts were compared and it was tried to set forth the case with the provision of sufficient examples. At the end of the study the translations and the facsimiles of the related part of the Bible are presented. Although there are a few number of researchers conducted on the linguistic of the Turkish translations of the Bible, it is reported in some sources that the Bibles in Greek characters exhibit the same linguistic properties with the Bibles written in Ottoman Turkish with Arabic characters. However, in consequence of the research conducted within the scope of the present study, it was determined that this is not correct and despite the fact that there is only one year difference in printing, the two Turkish Bibles have significantly different linguistic characteristics. With the consideration of this point, it was determined that the Bibles in Greek characters should be accepted to be written in Karamanli Turkish language, as it is the case for many texts with Greek characters.

Keywords

Karamanli Turkish Language, Turkish with Greek Characters, the Bible, Inflectional Affixes