ON THE SIGNIFICATIONS OF THE TERM "THE TURKS." BY J. W. REDHOUSE, ESQ. [From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. xi. New Series.] AN incident has led me to suppose that the following observations as to various meanings attached to the words Turk and Turkish, by different classes of people, may prove of use. Fully to elucidate the terms, it is necessary to take a rather wide scope; for doing which the importance of the subject at the present juncture will perhaps be deemed a warrant. Without trenching on antiquarian considerations, it is necessary to go back a thousand years, satisfactorily to establish the correct meanings of these very ambiguous words-Turk and Turkish; the former commonly applied as a term of contumely by Ottoman Turks themselves to provincials and peasants of their own race, in the sense of clod-hopper, lout, clown boor. At the period above referred to, a thousand o eleven hundred years ago, leaving out of consideration any fragments and subdivisions of races settled down more or less permanently in countries west of the A Oxus and the Sea of Ural, from the shores of the Polar Ocean to the southern extremity of India, and which ethnologists might decide to class with the Turkish or Turanian race of mankind, there was a vast agglomeration of tribes, clans, septs, hordes, and families, inhabiting the countries that lie to the east and north of that great river, as far as the Polar Sea, almost to the Sea of Japan, and occupying the whole country thence to the mountains of China, Thibet, and Cashmere. These populations, at that time very numerous, it would appear, spoke dialects of a language then and still called Turkish-Turk-dili (tongue of the Turks)— by themselves and by their neighbours. The dialects did not differ from one another more than the local varieties of English are found to vary; though the extreme shades would probably have rendered it impossible or difficult for a native of the far north or east of that region to make himself easily understood to the inhabitants of the western or southern borders. Leaving those extreme members of the family, as also the Mongols or Moguls, out of consideration, we find three great branches of the Turkish-speaking race of that day, a thousand years ago-as at present, who, though they each called their own dialect Turkish, had taken to themselves distinctive national appellations, the Turks, the Tatars, and the Turkmans; so that the Turk and the Tatar designated the dialect of the Turkman by the name of Turkman-dili, (Turkman dialect), the Turk and the Turkman, styled the Tatar dialect, Tatar-dili (Tatar dialect), but the Tatar and the Turkman could not give a special name - |