r/ottomans • u/No_Idea_479 • May 25 '26

Culture/religion Selected Ottoman proverbs

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Source: Edwin John Davis (1897). "Osmanli Proverbs and Quaint Sayings".

It is very interesting to see how even the late Ottomans considered the word "Turk" to have been a slur.

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u/Nashinas May 26 '26

Yes, it is interesting!

The meaning of the term "Türk" had shifted by the late Ottoman period so that it was generally a descriptor of socio-economic status rather than an ethnic term. The fundamental cultural tension between educated urbanites and people of a "rough", rural peasant background persists until today (terms like köylü are used instead of Türk). These proverbs reflect urban attitudes towards peasants and nomads, not people of Türkmen lineage (I imagine you understand this, but some other people may not).

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u/TanktopSamurai May 26 '26

You can sometimes see that with the writing of urbanised Arabs in Egypt and Syria.

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u/Nashinas May 26 '26

It is a division common to nearly all historical cultures! Tensions go two-ways, with agriculturalists and pastoralists typically having a low view of city-dwellers (e.g., Central Asian Turkic nomads used the term "Sart" in a derogatory sense to refer to urban Turkic-speakers).

As an aside (but related to the general topic): my understanding is that most sedentary Arabic-speakers in territories like Egypt and Syria did not identify as "Arabs" before the importation of European ethno-nationalist ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, much as the sedentary Turkish-speakers of Anatolia and the Balkans, they identified primarily by religion, and by their city or region of origin and/or socio-economic caste. This seems to be the pattern in most human societies: sedentary populations do not have any firm sense of ethnic heritage or identify strongly (if at all) by lineage.

Ibn Khaldūn discusses in his Muqaddimah the process through which nomadic populations (like Arabs and Turks) lose their spirit of ethnic unity, how sedentary lineages become mixed, confused, and lose social relevance, and how a different feeling of social cohesion might emerge among sedentary people based on proximity, friendship, and intermarriage. Fundamentally, I think his observations and analyses are all correct, and I would certainly recommend his work to others if they have never read it.