New Evidence for Early Modern Ottoman Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems

The earliest descriptions of Latin finger alphabets were recorded in southern Europe between 1579 and 1589. New literary and visual evidence for sixteenth-century Ottoman Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sign systems are presented and analyzed in this article. AlJāḥ iẓ (d. 869), a famous author of Arabic literature and theology in Abbasid-era Iraq, counted signs (in Arabic, ishārāt) among the five methods of expressing oneself, the other four being speech, writing, monumental architecture, and finger reckoning (ḥisāb al-ʿaqd) (Pellat 1997). We know much about “literacy, orality and aurality in pre-print Middle Eastern societies” and the attendant cultures of reading, speaking, and writing (Hirschler 2012, 7). There is even a robust body of premodern and modern scholarship on ḥisāb al-ʿaqd. Far less is known about ishārāt, a category that would have included sign languages and finger alphabets, as well as sublinguistic elements such as physical gestures, but sixteenth-century urban centers around the Mediterranean provide fascinating starting grounds for an investigation.1 In several Mediterranean cities at this time, observers started documenting the social uses of local sign systems and sometimes even describing individual signs. Two Franciscan friars—one in Madrid in 1579 and the other in Venice in 1593—published descriptions of complete Latin sign alphabets. Significantly, both of these alphabets differed Early Modern Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems | 173 from a finger alphabet recorded by the Venerable Bede (d. 735), an early medieval English scholar. Until now, historians considered these three European specimens the lone detailed descriptions of premodern signed alphabets. Outside of Latin Christendom, we have more evidence of signing. At the Ottoman court in Istanbul, Sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520–66) popularized a sign language among his courtiers. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, European and Asian visitors to the Ottoman court marveled at the existence of this sign language, but not one of them produced drawings or textual descriptions of individual hand signs. Elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, a partial description of an Arabic sign alphabet was recorded in Aleppo in 1589 or 1590, and in this article I transcribe and translate that document and discuss its historical and linguistic relevance in the broader context of the three aforementioned sixteenth-century sign systems. Manual Signs in Medieval Christendom and Islamdom The significance of studying the history of arithmetic is vastly underacknowledged, though counting coins and weighing foodstuffs were perhaps more fundamental to most premodern lives than reading or writing. Remarkably, the same system for representing numbers with hand signs was used in ancient Rome, the medieval Latin West, the Byzantine East, and all of medieval Islamdom (Pellat 1997, 119–31). This system was first described in the seventh-century Romana computatio and more clearly elaborated in 725 by the Venerable Bede in De temporum ratione (Williams and Williams 1995, 604–8). Essentially, signers would use the last three fingers of the left hand to form numbers one through nine. The thumb and index fingers of the left hand formed the tens (10, 20, 30, etc.). On the right hand, the last three fingers formed hundreds, and the thumb and index finger made thousands. The ubiquity of this finger-number system is suggested by frequent, casual allusions to these signs in Roman, Greek, and classical Arabic sources. In the Arabic tradition, one can find references in the earliest Islamic sources. For example, one observer described Prophet Muhammad’s right-handed prayer gesture thus: “When the Messenger of Allah sat for tashahhud, he placed his left hand on his left knee and placed his right hand on his right knee, and he formed a ring 174 | Sign Language Studie s like so and pointed with his finger of attestation” (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim). The ambiguity of this statement and the importance of the Prophet’s religious practice have invited much interpretation from jurists and theologians, all of whom suggested number signs to best represent the intended hand position. The Damascene legal scholar Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1543) argued that the handshape for fifty-nine more accurately captured the Prophet’s gesture, and Ṭashköprüzāda (d. 1561) and Ḥājjī Khalīfa (d. 1657) both argued that the number indicated was fifty-five (Ibn Ṭūlūn, fol. 1b; Pellat 1997). Similar uses of number signs abound in medieval and early modern Arabic literature. Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, the protagonist of a series of twelfth-century picaresque tales, fell deathly ill “when he neared the [number of years indicated by the] clenched fist [ninety-three]” (Al-Ḥarīrī 1898, vol. 2, 69). Similarly, the author of a fifteenthor sixteenth-century Arabic archery treatise advised that making the handshape for the number thirty would form the best bow grip (Arab Archery 1945). Finally, in classical Arabic and Persian poetry the number ninety served as a euphemism for the anus, an allusion understandable only with knowledge of the handshape for ninety (Pellat 1997) (figure 1). The dactylonomic system common in both Europe and the Middle East inspired a key linguistic development in Europe that appears not to have occurred in the Middle East. Bede converted the finger-numbers into a finger alphabet; the sign for “A,” for example, was the sign for “1.” The entire alphabet could be represented thus: B = 2, C = 3, D = 4, and so on, but there is no evidence that Bede’s finger alphabet was ever used in medieval Europe. Stunningly, the next known description of a finger alphabet was given in Venice in 1579, when Friar Cosma Rossellio, an Italian Franciscan, published a book containing woodcut images of a finger alphabet, which he recommended using as a mnemonic device (Rossellio 1579, fols. 101v–105r). The next known finger alphabet was published in Madrid in 1593. The author, a Spanish Franciscan friar named Melchor de Yebra, recorded a finger alphabet in his Refugium infirmorum. This work was published only posthumously, but one can give the terminus ante quem for this alphabet as the author’s death date of 1586 (De Yebra 1593, fols. 172r–179v). De Yebra claimed that this alphabet had gained wide currency among the general Spanish population in his lifetime, though it Early Modern Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems | 175 existed principally to enable the very ill to communicate with others and for deaf people to communicate with their Catholic confessors (Bragg 1996; Plann 1997). The finger signs were important for Catholic theology, as dying parishioners could thereby participate in last rites and deaf people could confess their sins and be saved (Plann 1997). Rossellio’s claim of the alphabet’s ubiquity may find confirmation in Lois Bragg’s (1996) observation that, in various fifteenth-century portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer, his hands are unusually, but nearly identically, posed. These strange poses, she surmises, show Chaucer making the signs for the letters G and C, his initials. This visual evidence predates Rossellio’s statement by at least eighty years, but the gap may be explained by the typical lapse between the use of a word and its documentation. One need only consider the time lag between the introduction of a slang word into English and its eventual inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. The centralization of language is a process. Figure 1. Arabic dactylonomic chart. Source: Pellat, Textes arabes, 35. 176 | Sign Language Studie s Elsewhere in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, namely in Ottoman Istanbul and Aleppo, the systematization and documentation of manual communications appear unconnected to Franciscan influence. Though Franciscans had been in Istanbul since the thirteenth century, and a permanent Franciscan mission was established in Aleppo in 1560, there is no evidence of Franciscans in the Ottoman Empire using sign language with their parishioners (Girardelli 2010; Sauvaget 1941, 207). The so-called palace mutes (Ottoman dilsiz, literally “tongueless”) appeared on the court payrolls of Sultan Mehmet II (r. 1451–81) as early as the 1470s, and a system of signing was certainly in use at the court of Ottoman sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566) (Miles 2000; Necipoǧlu 1991). At court, sultans reportedly highly valued silence, which led to the use of a noiseless communication system. By the 1580s, the dwarves and dilsiz of the Ottoman court had their own living quarters in Topkapı Palace (Miles 2000). In 1583 or 1584 the German traveler Johannes Leunclavius heard from Turkish residents in Istanbul that the sultan’s dilsiz “open the soul with signs and are mutually intelligible with signs” (Leunclavius 1588, 170). Based on this testimony, Miles has concluded that “[t]he mutes used a signing system that was already well developed in 1583” (2000, 128). Other reports seem to support this conclusion. As early as 1605, the French statesman Henry de Beauvau said that this sign language was known as ixarette. In Ottoman Turkish, the word for “sign” is ișaret. Later testimonies confirm that older dilsiz taught the sign language to younger recruits and that sophisticated discussions could take place in this language (Miles 2000; Ögüt and Özcan 1994; Necipoǧlu 1991; Lewis 1991). In addition to these literary testimonies, I would like to focus on another late sixteenth-century description of dilsiz that has been largely overlooked but may allow historians to identify these figures in period illustrations. Iconography of the Dilsiz of Topkapı Palace On September 25, 1599, Thomas Dallam, an English visitor, observed 400 courtiers at Topkapı Palace. Of these, he estimated, 200 were Christian-born servants, 100 were “dumb,” and 100 were dwarves. His account reads as follows: The third hundredth were dumb men, that could neither hear nor speak and they were likewise in gowns of rich cloth of gold and Early Modern Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems | 177 Cordovan buskins; but their caps were of violet velvet, the crown of them made like a leather bottle, the brims divided into five peaked corners. Some of them had hawks in their fists. . . . I did most of all wonder at those dumb men, for they let me understand by their perfect signs all things that they had seen the present do by its motions.2 Dallam’s description of the “Dumb men” reveals three crucial details. First, their garments were sumptuously woven with metal threads, and their headgear was distinctive (i.e., a purple velvet cap with a crown resembling a leather bag and with a brim of five sharp corners). Second, some men carried falcons on their hands, and third, they signed with both hearing and nonhearing persons. When historians have cited Dallam’s description, they have removed the clothing details, perhaps finding them irrelevant for their purposes (Miles 2000; Scalenghe 2014). But reading this passage raises questions about Dallam as a witness to this scene. Is it possible that the crowd of attendants was more differentiated than Dallam could detect? Reading his passage alongside period iconography, one wonders whether the men Dallam saw bearing falcons were simply falconers who wore the same clothing and headgear as the dilsiz. Late sixteenthcentury Ottoman and European paintings and drawings depict male courtiers in caps with bulbous crowns and four drooping peaks of brim cloth. (Though Dallam mentioned five peaks, I know of no images of such a cap. Perhaps the fifth extends behind the head and is obscured from the painter’s vantage point.) In these images some of the attendants carry falcons, some are dwarves, and others are adult men of ordinary height who stand alone.3 These last may have represented the dilsiz. In a portrait of Sultan Selim II (r. 1566–74) dated 1570 or 1590, a beardless man in a red cap with a baggy crown and four peaks stands behind the ruler (figure 2). The man’s gaze is fixed on his raised left hand, which appears to be gesturing. His right hand is hidden in the folds of his gown. Falconers are consistently shown in Lokman’s 1588 Hünernâme miniatures wearing the same cap, though they also wear a leather glove on which a falcon sits. The social, though not sartorial, connection of falconers, dwarves, and the dilsiz also appears in the Englishman John Sanderson’s 1594 informal census of Istanbul. He estimated that “in Constantinople ar[e] resident . . . Falconers, dwarfs, and dome men 300” (Sanderson 1931, 82). Were these groups trained 178 | Sign Language Studie s Figure 2. Portrait of Sultan Selim II. Source: Aga Khan Museum, AKM219, Istanbul, 1570 or 1590, 44.2 × 31.2 cm. https://www.agakhanmuseum.org/collection/artifact /portrait-sultan-selim-ii#. Early Modern Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems | 179 together at the Palace School? If so, perhaps the baggy cap represented a certain status. The Rålamb Costume Book, acquired by a Swedish envoy in 1657, comprises 121 miniatures of Ottoman Turkish subjects. In these paintings a signing dilsiz and a falconer wear red caps that are similar in shape to the one depicted in the portrait of Selim II one hundred years earlier (figures 3 and 4). If Ottoman historians can now begin to identify the dilsiz in Ottoman and European paintings, then the material sources can complement textual sources about dilsiz. That Selim II was painted with a dilsiz would suggest the prominence of this group at his court, as well as the prestige of sign language. Would Ottoman subjects in Anatolia, Figure 3. Mute, seventeenth century. Source: National Library of Sweden, Rålamb Costume Book, fol. 94. http://ds.kb.se/?mapp=5&fil=draktbok/94. 180 | Sign Language Studie s the Balkans, and the Arab provinces have been aware of the Ottoman court sign language? Gotha MS Orient. A114: An Aleppan Notebook Sara Scalenghe, in her recent book on disability in Ottoman Syria, wondered whether one could speak of an Ottoman Syrian sign language. Though the question could not be answered definitively, she compiled numerous references to signed communications in biographical and juristic literature, which, taken together, suggest that deaf people had developed local signs to communicate among themselves and with hearing peers (Scalenghe 2014). Here I introduce a new Figure 4. Falconer, seventeenth century. Source: National Library of Sweden, Rålamb Costume Book, fol. 51 (http://ds.kb.se/?mapp=5&fil=draktbok/51). Early Modern Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems | 181 source, a silk weaver’s notebook that includes a partial description of a signed alphabet in Ottoman Syria. The entry is undated but, based on its placement in the notebook, can be traced to early 1590, which would make it the earliest known description of an Arabic fingerspelling system. Gotha MS orient. A114 is an untitled Arabic notebook comprising sixty-three folios written by a Muslim male silk weaver named Kamāl al-Dīn living in Aleppo.4 The folios measure 15 × 11 centimeters. The number of lines per folio varies. The entries comprise accounts of current events, anecdotes, obituaries, poems, hadith, certificates of transmission, and so on. The manuscript is missing leaves at its beginning and end, which deprives us of crucial information. On both sides of the first folio, one finds a description of handshapes for nineteen Arabic letters, from zāʾ (ز) to yāʾ (ي), including the lām-alif (ال). Although lām-alif is a ligated combination of two Arabic letters, lām (ل) and alif (ا), it is often considered the twenty-ninth letter of the Arabic alphabet. This alphabet is patently Arabic. It cannot represent an Ottoman Turkish or a Persian sign alphabet because it is missing the letters žā (ژ) and gāf (گ), which fall within the zāʾ (ز) to yāʾ (ي) sequence in Turkish and Persian. Descriptions of the signs for the alphabet’s first ten letters—alif (ا), bā’ (ب), tā’ (ت), thā’ (ث), jīm (ج), ḥā’ (ح), khā’ (خ), dāl (د), dhāl (ذ), and rāʾ (ر)—certainly appeared on the missing preceding folio. Perhaps contextualizing details, such as the precise date of transcription, the scribe’s source of this alphabet, and its uses in Ottoman Aleppo, also appeared in the missing pages, which may allow later historians to revise some of the theories and analyses contained in this article. Transcription and Translation of Gotha MS Orient. A114, fols. 1r–1v See figure 5 for an image of the manuscript pages. [fol. 1r] al-zā: tuqīm āl-bahām al-khinṣir wa-hiya farq bayn al-rā wa-l-zay (?) kaannahā nuqṭah ز : Raise the thumb, which is the difference between a rāʾand a zāʾ, just like a dot. 182 | Sign Language Studie s Figure 5. Ottoman Aleppan finger alphabet. Source: Gotha MS orient A114, fols. 1r–2r. Early Modern Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems | 183 al-sīn: tufarriq bayna sāʾir al-anāmil alladhīna hum ishārat al-rā maʿa ṭayy al-bihām taḥt س : Spread all the fingertips that make the sign of the rāʾ with the thumb folded underneath. al-shīn: tufarriq bayna sāʾir al-anāmil maʿa al-bihām fa-l-bihām fāriq sīmā mā qabluhu ش : Spread all the fingertips with the thumb, for the thumb differentiates this sign from what comes before. al-ṣād: waḍʿ baṭn al-bihām ʿalā baṭn al-sabbābah ص : Place the pad of the thumb against the pad of the index finger. al-ḍād: iqāmat al-sabbābah ʿalā ṭarf al-bihām ض : The index finger is positioned on the thumbnail. al-ṭāʾ: tuḥalliq al-sabbābah fī aṣl al-bihām min qibal ḥarfihi min nāḥiyatihā ط : Make a circle with the index finger on the base of the thumb on the palmar surface. al-ẓāʾ: iqāmat al-sabbābah ʿalā aṣl ẓahr al-bihām fī ishārat mā qabluhu ظ : Place the index finger on the back of the base of the thumb, in showing the front [of the hand]. al-ʿayn: ishāratuhā ka-naʿl turīh mā bayna al-bihām wa-l-sabbābah aw ka-hilāl ع : Its sign is like a horseshoe that is visible between the thumb and the index finger, like a crescent. al-ghayn: radd ishārat al-ʿayn bi-ʿaks al-madhkūrah غ : Repeat the sign for ʿayn in the opposite direction. al-fāʾ: tukhrij ṭarf al-bihām min bayn al-sabbābah wa-l-khinṣir wa-l-wusṭā ف : Take out the side of the thumb from the space between the index and the middle fingers. [fol. 1v] al-qāf: tukhrij al-bihām min bayna al-wusṭā wa-l-khinṣir ق : Take out the thumb from between the middle and the ring fingers. al-kāf: tumidd al-sabbābah wa-l-wusṭā ʿalā munḥarifāt wa-tuqīm al-bihām ك : Bend the index finger and the middle finger, and raise the thumb. 184 | Sign Language Studie s a[l-]lām: tuqīm al-sabbābah ka-ʾannaka tashhad wa-tumidd al-bihām wa-lbāqī maḍmūmīn ل : Raise the index finger as though you were reciting the profession of faith. Extend the thumb, and the rest of the fingers are clenched. al-mīm: taqbiḍ ṭarf ẓufur al-bihām taḥta sāʾir al-anāmil maḍmūmūn م : Take the side of the thumbnail under all the fingertips, which are clenched. al-nūn: tumidd baṭn al-anāmil wa-taksir al-bihām fū uṣūlihim min baṭn al-kaff ن : Extend the fronts of the fingertips, then bend the thumb into their bases, in the palm. al-hāʾ: taḍumm sāʾir al-anāmil qāʾimāt lam yabin ḍawʾ illā taḥta al-bihām ه : Join the raised fingertips, with light shining only under the thumb. al-wāw: tumidd al-sabbābah wa-l-wusṭā wa-l-bihām ʿalā munṭabiqatay alkhinṣir wa-l-binṣir bi-l-ḍ[idd] و : Extend the index finger, the middle finger, and the thumb perpendicular to the pinky and the ring finger, which are tucked under. al-lām alif: tuṣallib al-sabbābah wa-l-wusṭā ʿalayh ال : Cross the index and the middle fingers. al-yāʾ: tumidd al-anāmil sāʾiruhunna ka-ʾannaka tushīr li-ḍarb raqabah ي : Extend the remaining fingertips, as though you were indicating the striking of a neck. Comparing Sign Systems As mentioned earlier, using hand signs to represent numbers was a ubiquitous practice in the premodern Arab world, but this Ottoman alphabet does not appear related to the popular number signs. Unlike the finger alphabet imagined by the Venerable Bede, these do not correlate with their place in an alphabetical sequence. So, the sign for ṣāḍ, the fourteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, does not correspond to the number sign for fourteen. This one-to-one correspondence does not appear to have been common in the Arab world. Rather, the assignment of numerical values to letters—a system known as abjad Early Modern Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems | 185 numerology—was the more usual association (see table 1). In the sixteenth century two abjad systems existed—western and eastern— with slight differences between them, but no apparent relation exists between the Ottoman Aleppan finger alphabet and the number signs for their western or eastern abjad values. For example, the letter wāw (و) has the value of six in both abjad systems, but the sign described in the Aleppan notebook does not accord with the number sign for six. In the same vein, there is no evidence of continuity between this sixteenth-century finger alphabet and the modern Arabic one. Today, many national and local Arabic sign languages exist, some based on European sign languages, as with Tunisian Sign Language, which derives from Italian Sign Language. There are “almost as many as Arabicspeaking countries, yet with the same sign alphabets” (Abdel-Fattah 2005, 212, emphasis mine) (figure 6). Some local Arabic sign languages, such as the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which developed spontaneously in southern Israel within the last century, show no clear connection to national alphabets. Our sixteenth-century finger alphabet appears similarly disconnected from modern fingerspelling systems. Table 1. Western and Eastern Abjad Numerological Values Arabic Latin Western Eastern Arabic Latin Western Eastern ا alif 1 1 ض ḍād 90 800