On the Transliteration Problems of Two Different Japanese Alphabets Written in Sultan Abdulhamid II Era

Abstract

The first official contacts between the Ottoman Empire and Japan started around the 1870s, and after the Ertugrul Disaster in 1890, relations continued increasingly. In 1890, the Turkish frigate Ertugrul sank off Japan and survivors brought back to Istanbul by Japanese cruisers. It is known that the Japanese journalist Noda Shotaro, who came to Istanbul with the survivors, started living in Istanbul at the request of Sultan Abdulhamit II. He studied Turkish while teaching Japanese to Turkish officers in Mekteb-i Harbiye-i Sahane. In the mean time, he continued to write his column in the Japanese newspaper Jiji Shinpo. Until January 2018, there was no data from the teaching and learning activities of Noda and his students except for 4 letters that could be deemed as the educational output of Japanese education in the Ottoman Empire. In 2018, after Prof. Dr. Ali Merthan Dundar's introduction of his work titled Mecmua-i Lugat to the world of science, a significant part of the work of Noda and his students' works came to light 125 years later. In this study, the Hiragana alphabet in Mecmua-i Lugat (1893) was compared to the Japon Elifbasi (1908), which was known as the first Japanese publication in the Ottoman Empire until the introduction of Dundar's, but it was not related to Noda and his students. In our qualitative study, as a result of the comparison of the two works, it has been determined that there are significant differences between the Turkish transliteration of these alphabets written fifteen years apart.