Re: question - Turco-Japanese (a thought experiment for the group here)

Quoting Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>:

> Andreas wrote:
>
> (I wrote:)
> > > Something that has always intrigued me about Anatolia-- what happened to
> > > all
> > > the Greek- (and perhaps other-)speaking people who were there before the
> > > Turks came? Did their languages have no effect on Turkish??Only the
> > > Armenians seem to have survived.
> >
> > I've always wondered about this too. Why was Anatolia turkicized when Iran
> > never
> > was.
>
> I don't know either. But wasn't Persia fairly powerful in those days?
During some periods, yes, but then under Turkic rulers - chiefly the Seljuqids,
the self-same dynasty under which the Turkicization of Anatolia started - or
under the Turco-Mongol Ilkhanids.

> Compared to that, the Byzantine homeland probably looked like easy pickins
> (decadent infidels etc.); and perhaps the Turks had scruples about attacking
> fellow Moslems? Wouldn't be kosh.... umm, halal :-)
You might have hit on something here. I don't think the Turks had any much
aversion to killing fellow Muslims - one of the reasons medieval Islamic rulers
liked Turkish slave-soldiers was supposedly that they were less prone to such
inhibitions than Arabs and Persians - but while it will have been very easy to
be assimilated by culturally superior Muslim Persians in Iran and Arabs in
Iraq/Syria/Egypt, the religious devide will have made it hard to be assimilated
by Christian Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia.

                                         Andreas