Talk:Constitution of the Ottoman Empire

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:49, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

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Kanun-ı Esasî → Ottoman constitution of 1876 – per WP:COMMONNAME & WP:USEENGLISH.

Cf:

• Ottoman "Constitution of 1876" -Llc 2,440 results
• "Ottoman constitution of 1876" -Llc 501 results
• Ottoman "Kanun-i Esasi" -Llc 95 results

Takabeg (talk) 02:00, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Capitalization

If the title is going to use lowercase "constitution", then certainly all references to "the Constitution" throughout the article should use lowercase, as well, no? Or should the title be capitalized, too? - dcljr (talk) 19:25, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Syntax!

So many issues in this article as it stands now. Every other sentence is practically unintelligible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.2.90.230 (talk) 08:32, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Not the "first modern constitution in the world outside Europe and the Americas"

This was not "the first modern constitution in the world outside Europe and the Americas". There were many other constitutions before this, including in the Australasian colonies and Southern Africa.Royalcourtier (talk) 20:37, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

And it is not outside Europe either, Istanbul is in Europe. Ottoman Empire had possessions in Asia and Africa, but so did other European empires at the time. I am removing that unsourced claim.--Orwellianist (talk) 13:59, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Or rather half of Istanbul is in Europe, but either way it was a good edit to remove the claim: Istanbul (as Constantinople in French and English) was the capital of the Empire. WhisperToMe (talk) 23:44, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Whether the Ottoman Turkish original used Konstantiniyye or Istanbul

@Future Perfect at Sunrise:

Interesting that the Modern Turkish version is a transliteration and not a working into modern Turkish vocabulary and grammar. Anyway I do wonder if the Ottoman Turkish original used "Konstantiniyye" or "Istanbul" for the city now known in English as Istanbul. I know the French and Greek versions (yep, someone found a PDF of that!) use Constantinople, as did the older English translation I found (it was rendered "Istanbul" in the newer one) WhisperToMe (talk) 16:50, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

I checked both the original Arabic-script and the transliterated Latin-script version in the two PDF files cited in the article. I can confirm that the transliteration (at least of the sentence in question) is faithful to the original. The sentence transliterated as "Madde 2 – Devleti Osmaniyenin payıtahtı İstanbul şehridir" is found in the original on page 4 of the PDF. You can identify the string "Istanbul" (استانبول) near the middle of the third line of text on that page. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:14, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for finding that! I wonder if that meant the capital had to be in the old Ottoman city walls (as at the time "Istanbul" often meant only the old city). I just requested on Wikipedia:RX a copy of a book chapter about the translations of this document, and that might shed light on the differences and similarities of these versions. WhisperToMe (talk) 17:55, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

I wouldn't make too much of that purported distinction between the inner old town and the larger city. This distinction would hardly have been fixed and formalized, any more so than with all the large European cities that spread from their inner cores into the surrounding areas during the 19th and 20th centuries. There's no reason to assume the meaning of "Istanbul" as opposed to whatever other names were common in Turkish was any more clearly defined or any less ambiguous than that of "London" or "Paris". Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:22, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

It would be interesting to see if this issue was written about more in works about the late Ottoman Empire, which would clarify the specifics or how precise/imprecise it was. I got the information from Turkish author Eldem Edhem, who wrote about the distinction in: Edhem, Eldem. "Istanbul." In: Ágoston, Gábor and Bruce Alan Masters. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. Infobase Publishing, May 21, 2010. ISBN 1438110251, 9781438110257. Start and CITED: p. 286. (author named, on p. 290)

• "Originally, the name Istanbul referred only to the walled city and excluded all suburbs (including Galata, Üsküdar, Eyüp). To describe the whole city, the Ottomans continued using the Byzantine name Constantinople (Kostantiniyye), along with a number of metaphorical terms[...] For the duration of Ottoman rule, western sources continued to refer to the city as Constantinople, reserving the name Stamboul for the walled city. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, all previous names were abandoned and Istanbul came to designate the entire city."

It makes sense though that the usage wasn't fully formalized and there had to have been some period where people were already using Istanbul to mean the whole city, even if it wasn't codified into law/official practice.

WhisperToMe (talk) 20:27, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

Yep, Tillman Röder confirms it's Istanbul on page 341 of Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity. WhisperToMe (talk) 05:10, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Versions on Commons and versions needed

•  Done Ottoman Turkish, Modern Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, French, English
• C Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Ladino

WhisperToMe (talk) 12:05, 8 October 2019 (UTC)