A linguistic study on the Ottoman interrogation documents of the 19th century: Analysis-transcription text-index-facsimile

In this study, Ottoman interrogation documents belonging to the second half of the 19th century are discussed. İnterrogation protocols are interrogation reports. Their content is related to the event subject to questioning. They are documents arranged in the form of question-answer. In the thesis, twenty-one documents written between 1847 and 1881 were selected from the interrogation protocols in the Presidential Ottoman Archives and these documents are seventy-four leaves. In the selection of documents, attention has been paid to the fact that the subjects of the inquiries are different, such as illegal entry without passports and visa, counterfeiting, murder, assault, theft, negligence and delay of duty, embezzlement and fraud, that the socio-cultural levels of the defendants involved in the interrogation are different and that the texts of different lengths are included in terms of their volumes. Thus, it aimed to reflect the different linguistic levels of the examined texts. The descriptive and comparative methods were used in handling and analyzing the mentioned documents. The analyzed texts reflect the Ottoman Turkish of Tanzimat era with their vocabulary and language features. In the introduction section, the terms such as "interrogation" and "interrogation protocols", were explained, and information was given about the language and stylistic features of the texts after studying the topics of interrogation protocols. In the first part, the language of the documents was examined, the orthographic properties of the texts, phonetic and morphological issues were discussed. In the second part, transcribed texts of the interrogation protocols were given, and in the third part, a grammatical index covering all the words in the texts has been prepared. In the index, the meanings of the words in sentences were taken into account. The proper names in the texts were given in a separate directory. Facsimiles of the texts are also added to the end of the thesis. Keywords: Interrogation, interrogation protocols, 19th century Ottoman Turkish, writing characteristics, phonetics, morphology, vocabulary.