What is this?
This is a tool to write Spanish, Malay, and Turkish in their historical Arabic scripts. These historical Arabic scripts are:
- For Spanish, the Aljamiado script used first during Muslim rule of Spain, and then secretly for some time after the Reconquista.[][] (In Spanish, the script itself is called aljamía; aljamiado is an adjective.[])
- For Malay, the Jawi script widely used in the Malay Archipelago from the 15th century until the 20th century, and still used occasionally.[]
- For Turkish, the Ottoman Turkish script used during the Ottoman Empire and then Republican Turkey until 1928.[][]
Although the Arabic script plays an important role in the history of each of these languages, it was not always used the same way. Conventions differ between authors and time periods. In addition, these languages all had a tendency to keep Arabic loanwords spelled the same, even if it wasn't phonetic. For these reasons and more, you might find some transcriptions that are not completely faithful to historical manuscripts.
The Ottoman Turkish script is especially likely to have mistakes because of the large number of Arabic and Persian loanwords, the many variations in spelling, and the difficulty of using the script for the Turkish language.
If you like this tool, you might also like Classics Converter and Futhorc.
Historical Background
Romance languages like Spanish (Castilian) were first written in the Arabic script in the 14th century, towards the end of Muslim rule in Spain. This was known as Aljamía.[]
After the Christians reconquered Spain in 1492, they put an increasing emphasis on Christianity and worked to erase Arab and Islamic culture from the peninsula. By 1526, Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity or leave Spain. By 1564, the Spanish crown had ordered Arabic books to be burned, and banned the Arabic language entirely, giving the former Muslims just three years to learn Spanish.[]
Although the Arabic language — which was widely used in Spain during Muslim rule — gradually died out, the remaining Muslims, now called Moriscos, continued to practice Islam in secret. They increasingly wrote their Romance languages in the Arabic script as a form of resistance. Thus, Aljamía was not restricted to the Islamic period at all: most Aljamiado manuscripts actually come from the 16th century, when Arabic was banned, and served as a way for Moriscos to practice Islam and Islamic culture in secret. Aljamiado manuscripts were often hidden in ceilings and walls, and were only discovered centuries later.[]
Aljamía fell out of use hundreds of years ago, and Aljamiado texts were archaic even for their time: 16th-century texts often use language closer to the 13th or 14th centuries.[] Therefore, the language used is not actually modern Spanish, but Old Spanish, Old Aragonese, and other Romance languages. In this tool, you can choose between Old Spanish and Modern Spanish: the two have different sounds and different spellings, but I've tried to keep the Modern Spanish spellings as close as possible to what they would be in Old Spanish.
Arabic has only three written vowels, while Spanish has five. Aljamía came up with an unusual solution: the vowel E is written with the Arabic alif, which in Arabic is used for a long A sound. A, I, and O are written with vowel markings that are almost never used in written Arabic. U is written the same as O.[]
The Jawi script has been used for Malay for over 700 years. It emerged in the 14th century, replacing earlier Indian-derived scripts. Although it was replaced by the Latin script during British and Dutch colonial rule, it is still co-official in Brunei and parts of Malaysia.[]
Unlike the earlier scripts for Malay, Jawi was adopted by all classes of society, not just the rulers and monks. It also added new letters to effectively represent Malay sounds not found in Arabic. Combined with its association with the spread of Islam, these factors quickly made Jawi the primary script for Malay and allowed it to develop a rich literature.[]
While the Latin script is now the most common script for Malay, Jawi is still used in religious and cultural contexts in Malaysia, Brunei, and parts of Indonesia and Thailand. The script has continued evolving, and became standardized over the course of the 20th century, with the most recent reform in 1986.[]
During the Ottoman Empire, from 1299 to 1928, Turkish was written in the Arabic script. In particular, the Ottomans used a Persian origin version of the Arabic script, with extra letters to represent Persian words. A peculiar feature of Ottoman Turkish is that when writing words from Arabic and Persian, the consonants used in those languages affected the spoken vowels; and when writing Turkish words, variations in vowels were sometimes represented by choosing different consonants with the same sound. This was one factor that made the Ottoman Turkish alphabet quite difficult.[]
Today Azerbaijani, closely related to Turkish, is still written in the Arabic script in Iran. However, vowel diacritics now help distinguish between Azerbaijani vowels, making it easier than the Ottoman Turkish script.[]
On the other hand, Turkey took the approach of completely replacing the Arabic script with a Latin-based one. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the President of Turkey, believed the new alphabet would help create a secular, literate, and modernized Turkey. He led the development of a new phonetic Latin script for Turkish which became official in 1928.[][]
It's debatable how much the script itself held back literacy in Turkey — poor education, cultural attitudes, and differences between spoken and written Turkish were important underlying issues. Regardless, promotion of the new system did help raise literacy. The literacy rate in Turkey was just 8% in 1927 and increased to 30% by 1945 thanks to state-sponsored education. Mustafa Kemal personally promoted the alphabet by traveling to towns in Anatolia and teaching the letters on blackboards.[]
References
The rules applied in the converter code, while not necessarily referenced in the main article, mostly came from:
- For Spanish: , , , , , and from manuscripts referenced by these.
- For Malay: , , .
- For Turkish: , , .
The GitHub for this project is at crackalamoo/classics-converter.
- English Wiktionary ^
- Aljamiado (Wikipedia) ^
- Morisco alphabet (Omniglot) ^
- Jawi script (Wikipedia) ^
- Malay (Bahasa Melayu / بهاس ملايو) (Omniglot) ^
- Ottoman Turkish alphabet (Wikipedia) ^
- Poem about Rumi in Ottoman Turkish (Wikimedia) ^
- Turkish (Türkçe) (Omniglot) ^
- La aljamía: una voz islámica en Aragón (Alberto Montaner, University of Zaragoza, 2003; in Spanish) ^
- Poema de Yuçuf (Wikipedia; in Spanish) ^
- Aljamiado (Wikimedia) ^
- Uses and Written Practices in Aljamiado Manuscripts (Nuria de Castilla, Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic script in 12 manuscript cultures, 2019) ^
- An Aljamiado Translation of the ‘Morisco Qur'an’ and its Arabic Text (c. 1609) (Nuria de Castilla, Journal of Qur'anic Studies, Volume 22 Issue 3, 2020) ^
- Learning to Read (Again): The Social Experiences of Turkey's 1928 Alphabet Reform (Hale Yılmaz, Cambridge University Press, 2011) ^
- Ataturk-September 20, 1928 (Wikimedia) ^
Footnotes
- The text in Old Spanish reads:[]
Dixo un alim [=ulema] d'este rreyno hablando de nuestro
^
encerramiento: «Yo bien conozco que somos en una temporada
de grande espanto, mas no por eso dexara Allah de darnos cautori-
çada [=castigo] si dexamos el pro'o [=el pro, la ventaja] de nuestro poderío en lo que toca al pre-
çeptado mandamiento. ∴ ∴ Y a quanto l'amonestança [=el disimulo, la taqiyya], todos la podemos
usar por la bía p[]r[]ebile[ji]yada? ∴ y con los cantares ajenos por donde
los christianos hazen salva, pues todo cabe debaxo de buena
disimulança, ∴ porque la buena doctrina no la puede bedar ninguna ley
por inumana que sea ∴».