The master linguist(s)

“[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, cross-grained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.”

- Aristophanes, The Knights

It is truly fascinating that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan keeps on lecturing on a language that he does not understand, speak, read or write. “We once had a language [Ottoman] perfectly suitable for science,” Mr. Erdoğan lamented, “Then it disappeared overnight [referring to Atatürk’s alphabet revolution].” How sad. In 1923, only 2.5 percent of Turks were literate, and only a fraction of them could speak Ottoman.

Mr. Erdoğan’s passionate longing for a dead language is both ideological and Orwellian: “The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect,” (George Orwell, 1984). He must be dreaming of the days when Ottoman will be a lingua franca, not only in Turkey, but also throughout the world.

In his most recent lecture, Mr. Erdoğan, the master linguist, who unfortunately does not speak a language other than his native Turkish, said that it was impossible to “do philosophy” with the Turkish vocabulary. Only Ottoman, English, German and French are suitable for philosophy, he argued.

Ironically, the few people in the Ottoman bureaucracy who were fluent in Ottoman are not mentioned in the history of science for any notable achievement, although Mr. Erdoğan thinks “Ottoman is perfectly suitable to science.” In his ideological blindness, Mr. Erdoğan in unable to see that scientific achievement is almost totally irrelevant to language and alphabets.

In the medieval times, Arab scientists were noted for their creative studies in a number of...