Europe now had respite, but not long; Timur died, and with him his empire fell to pieces, while the Osmanic army rallied again under Mahomet I. (1413), and re-attained its former power under Murad II. (1421). Successful in Asia, Murad sent his armies back to the Danube, and after long-continued campaigns, and powerful resistance from the Hungarians and Slaves under Hunyad, he at last gained two decisive victories; Varna in 1444, and Kossova in 1448. Constantinople could no longer be held, and the Pope endeavored in vain to rouse the chivalry of Western Europe to a crusade against the Turks. Mahomet II. succeeded in 1451, and on the 26th of May, 1453, Constantinople, after a valiant resistance, fell, and became the capital of the Turkish empire.

It is a real pleasure to read a Turkish grammar, even though one may have no wish to acquire it practically. The ingenious manner in which the numerous grammatical forms are brought out, the regularity which pervades the system of declension and conjugation, the transparency and intelligibility of the whole structure, must strike all who have a sense of that wonderful power of the human mind which has displayed itself in language. Given so small a number of graphic and demonstrative roots as would hardly suffice to express the commonest wants of human beings, to produce an instrument that shall render the faintest shades of feeling and thought;—given a vague infinitive or a stern imperative, to derive from it such moods as an optative or subjunctive, and tenses as an aorist or paulo-post future;—given incoherent utterances, to arrange them into a system where all is uniform and [pg 309] regular, all combined and harmonious;—such is the work of the human mind which we see realized in “language.” But in most languages nothing of this early process remains visible. They stand before us like solid rocks, and the microscope of the philologist alone can reveal the remains of organic life with which they are built up.

In the grammar of the Turkic languages, on the contrary, we have before us a language of perfectly transparent structure, and a grammar the inner workings of which we can study, as if watching the building of cells in a crystal bee-hive. An eminent orientalist remarked “we might imagine Turkish to be the result of the deliberations of some eminent society of learned men;” but no such society could have devised what the mind of man produced, left to itself in the steppes of Tatary, and guided only by its innate laws, or by an instinctive power as wonderful as any within the realm of nature.

Let us examine a few forms. “To love,” in the most general sense of the word, or love, as a root, is in Turkish sev. This does not yet mean “to love,” which is sevmek, or “love” as a substantive, which is sevgu or sevi; but it only expresses the general idea of loving in the abstract. This root, as we remarked before, can never be touched. Whatever syllables may be added for the modification of its meaning, the root itself must stand out in full prominence like a pearl set in diamonds. It must never be changed or broken, assimilated or modified, as in the English I fall, I fell, I take, I took, I think, I thought, and similar forms. With this one restriction, however, we are free to treat it at pleasure.

Let us suppose we possessed nothing like our conjugation, but had to express such ideas as I love, thou lovest, and the rest, for the first time. Nothing would seem more natural now than to form an adjective or a participle, meaning “loving,” and then add the different pronouns, as I loving, thou loving, &c. Exactly this the Turks have done. We need not inquire at present how they produced what we call a participle. It was a task, however, by no means so facile as we now conceive it. In Turkish, one participle is formed by er. Sev+er would, therefore, mean lov+er or lov+ing. Thou, in Turkish, is sen, and as all modificatory syllables are placed at the end of the root, we get sev-er-sen, thou lovest. You in Turkish is siz; hence sev-er-siz, you love. In these cases the pronouns and the terminations of the verb coincide exactly. In other persons the coincidences are less complete, because the pronominal terminations have sometimes been modified, or, as in the third person singular, sever, dropped altogether as unnecessary. A reference to other cognate languages, however, where either the terminations or the pronouns themselves have maintained a more primitive form, enables us to say that in the original Turkish verb, all persons of the present were formed by means of pronouns appended to this participle sever. Instead of “I love, thou lovest, he loves,” the Turkish grammarian says, “lover-I, lover-thou, lover.”

But these personal terminations are not the same in the imperfect as in the present.

PRESENT.IMPERFECT.
Sever-im, I love,sever-di-m, I loved.
Sever-sen,sever-di-ñ.
Sever,sever-di.
Sever-iz,sever-di-k (miz).
Sever-siz,sever-di-ñiz.
Sever-ler,sever-di-ler.

We need not inquire as yet into the origin of the di, added to form the imperfect; but it should be stated that in the first person plural of the imperfect a various reading occurs in other Tataric dialects, and that miz is used there instead of k. Now, looking at these terminations m, ñ, i, miz, ñiz, and ler, we find that they are exactly the same as the possessive pronouns used after nouns. As the Italian says fratelmo, my brother, and as in Hebrew we say, El-i, God (of) I, i.e. my God, the Tataric languages form the phrases “my house, thy house, his house,” by possessive pronouns appended to substantives. A Turk says,—

Bâbâ,father,bâbâ-m,my father.
Aghâ,lord,aghâ-ñ,thy lord.
El,hand,el-i,his hand.
Oghlu,son,oghlu-muz,our son.
Anâ,mother,anâ-ñiz,your mother.
Kitâb,book,kitâb-leri,their book.

We may hence infer that in the imperfect these pronominal terminations were originally taken in a possessive sense, and that, therefore, what remains after the personal terminations are removed, sever-di, was never an adjective or a participle, but must have been originally a substantive capable of receiving terminal possessive pronouns; that is, the idea originally expressed by the imperfect could not have been “loving-I,” but “love of me.”