Adamantios Korais and His Turkish Notes

Abstract:The existing scholarship on Adamantios Korais has rightly placed him at the center of the debates on the Greek Enlightenment and the Greek language controversy, yet there is a lacuna regarding Korais's preoccupation with the numerous other languages that he studied. Among them, Turkish presents a peculiar case. Some scholars have formed a certain image of Korais by correlating his anti-Ottoman stance with his linguistic program for the purification of the Greek language, defining that program primarily as the elimination of Turkish words from Greek. Other scholars have carefully refrained from associating Korais's views on politics and language, and yet they, too, have not adequately explained his position regarding the Turkish language. An unpublished and miscatalogued manuscript discovered among Korais's personal papers in Chios now enables a more accurate and complete vision of his conception of the Turkish language. This manuscript, which attests to Korais's studies of Turkish vocabulary, suggests that he approached Turkish in a neutral and professional fashion. The manuscript, particularly in view of the potential motivations for preparing it, also sheds light on Korais's general methods for studying languages other than Greek.