Arabic is science, Persian is sugar, Hindi is salt, and Turki is art!

عربي علم فارسي شکر هندي نمک ترکي هنر

Quote given on the opening page of Robert Barkley Shaw's A Sketch of the Turki Language. The source was noted as 'Oriental saying'. When I first saw it, it immediately reminded me of a similar quote I saw in my Xinjiang travel guide. The difference is that in the version give by the travel book, Uyghur was mentioned instead of 'Turki'. Since Shaw's grammar is for the 'Turki language spoken in Kashgar and Yarkand' the ambiguity doesn't seem to have been clarified. More research should be carried out in order to know whether Uyghur was referred to as 'Turki' at that time. Shaw's book seem to suggest, however, that '... the Turkish of Káshgar and Yarkand which some European linguists have called Uïghur' was 'a name unknown to the inhabitants of those towns, who know their tongue simply as Túrki'. Today we know that the demonym of the people living in those areas is 'Uyghur' and this piece of historical evidence coming from a descriptive grammar book has shed light on the sense of racial belonging shared by the Turkic Uyghur people. There is a tendency for Turkic peoples to refer to their mother tongues as 'Turkish'; for purposes of specification, they usually add the name of their ethnicity: 'Azeri Turkish', 'Uzbek Turkish', even the national language of Turkey, which is known in the West simply as 'Turkish', is esoterically named 'Turkey's Turkish', which seems to be a tautology. It seems that there is an incredible sense of unity felt by Turkic peoples, an extreme example of which is known as Pan-Turkism, an ideology deemed controversial even by some Turkic people. If the word 'Turk' is employed to describe anyone that belongs to a Turkic ethnicity, so should the word 'Turkish' be used to describe their language: any Turk speaks a kind of Turkish, thus the Turks in Turkey speaks Turkey's Turkish, the Turks in Kazakhstan speaks Kazakhstan's Turkish (Kazakh) and so on. The whole Turkic world, in fact, already has a (dormant) collective nomenclature: Turkestan.

However, taking into account how people in the West conventionally use the word 'Turkish' and how Turkic peoples think it should be used, we have to admit that the signifié of the word will become confusing. The word 'Turki', here proposed by Shaw's grammar of Uyghur published in as early as 1878, presents itself as a solution. It should serve as a collective term for Turkic languages. Given the sense of unity among Turkic peoples and the curiously great degree of resemblance among their languages, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say they are one people speaking one same language with regional variations. In fact, the differences among Turkic languages should have been smaller in the past, which gave rise to the term 'Turki' adopted by some European scholars such as Shaw.

Revenons à la citation. If Shaw didn't make up the quote, which I'm sure he did't, it might have come from a homme de lettres with a good knowledge in at least the four languages. Which Turkic language would 'Turki' have been? Or was it rather used as a collective name for all Turkic langauges? Both are possible. If it's the first case, 'Turki' is most probably Ottoman Turkish or Uzbek, representing Western and Eastern Turkic languages respectively, both being well cultivated languages with a long oral and written literary tradition. Taking language evolution into account,it is probably Chagatay, the language of Ali-Shir Nava'i which Uzbek claims to be its predecessor, rather than Uzbek, that is being mentioned.

So why are Turkic languages, or Turki, regarded as an art? Surely the artistic values of Arabic, Persian and Hindi (here probably Urdu, but I won't go into a detailed discussion on the history of Hindi and Urdu) are not to be neglected. Why is 'Turki' singled out?