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Zato što je Termin Turčin naslijedio titulu "Vlah, Latin, itd.." evo pročitaj čitavu problematiku:Originally Posted by Vožd
Quote: Professor of Istanbul University (Uğur Dinç, Graduate student on modern Ottoman intellectual history)
From a demographic (i.e. genetic, biological) and cultural viewpoint, the Ottomans were the Romans themselves. The people whom we call the Ottoman Turks now were actually called the Rumis, that is, the Romans, in most parts of the world including the Ottoman Empire itself until the 19th century or its latter half. Intellectual Ottomans would almost never call themselves Turkish; they were the Rumis, the Romans. Until the late 19th century, in which the word Türk was defined in the way it is defined in European languages, Türk had these two major meanings: 1. A nomad or a nomad-like sheep-herding villager who is seen as a sort of semi-barbarous individual. Such people had long been a minority even among the Turkish speaking Muslims in the Ottoman core lands in Anatolia and the Balkans. 2. any non-Arab Muslim including, for instance, Sub-Saharan African Muslims or a convert to Islam in England.
The Turkic conquerors from Inner Asia were a small ruling elite, who later became culturally and demographically submerged within the local population. The majority of this local population gradually converted to Islam. It is well known that in most parts of the Roman Empire to which the Ottomans were the heir in almost every sense of the term, the population had never ever liked or heartily adopted the official Graeco-Roman culture or the official Graeco-Roman interpretation of Christianity. This facilitated their conversion to Islam and their adoption of the Turkish language, the new lingua franca of the (Eastern) Roman lands.
True, the language was Turkish, that of the Turkic conquerors, but it evolved in such a way that it became the next imperial Roman language after Latin and Greek. Their language was (and is) Turkish, just as English is the language of Americans, but only the nomadic or nomad-like minority of the population were called Turkish (Türk) before the latter half of the 19th century. Things started changing in the latter half of the 19th century only because of the influence of the Europeans who for some twisted reason thought that somehow the Mediterranean-looking Ottomans were Turks like the slanted eyed real Turkic people in Inner Asia. Even when the Ottoman populations called themselves Turkish, they meant it just to mean Muslim, as in the expression “to turn Turk” in English which actually means conversion to Islam. For instance my mother, a traditional “Turkish” woman, would ask me whether the Nigerians are Turks or unbelievers (Türk mü gavur mu). I would reply to her that half of Nigerians are Türk i.e. Muslim and half are Christian. The current ethnic and national identity of Turkish was only adopted in Turkey in late 19th and early 20th century under Western influence and under the newly developing bizarre ideology of European-style nationalism. Türk had various meanings during the Ottoman times until late 19th century, and none of them until that time was in the current ethnic and national sense.
All in all, the Ottoman Turks and the Turks of Turkey are the (East) Romans themselves. They are the real heirs to the Roman Empire, since the Western half of the Empire lost its Roman quality more than a millenium ago but the eastern half maintained much of its Roman character until 1923, when Atatürk, a young military officer around the age of 40, and his military comrades dismantled the Empire and began rebuilding it as a minor Third World power to the pleasure of the Western powers. Today, under the Atatürkist education, the Rumis or the Muslims of the Roman Empire think of themselves as the Turkish nation. But their ancestors had assigned very different meanings to the word Türk until recent times. As I explained above, even my mother, born in 1948, still thinks of the word Türk in a very different sense and not in the current ethnic or national one.
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