There's a website, a dictionary site. It does Ottoman Turkish - Turkish translation. I have some things to say about this.
I didn't want to give the name of the site, to be honest. I mean, if you ask why, I was hesitant. Because for some reason, I expect almost malicious things behind such structures. I don't know, it could go as far as threats. In the past, conservatives could be criticized like other democratic fractions, but now they claim to be uncriticizable. I don't know - Israel, homeland, nation, foreign powers, religion - they've started not to take criticism against them very well. And here I am writing with my real name and surname. Is there another "Emrecan Şuşter" in Turkey? No. So if they catch me, I can't even say "It wasn't me, it was the other one."
Anyway, since I don't want to pick a fight with anyone out of the blue, I used to visit this site whose name I don't want to mention to find new words most of the time. They generally have unfortunate explanations that are laughable. When I looked recently, they had shifted to their ideological side, but now they seem to have cleaned up their ideological distortions bit by bit, because things had gotten completely out of hand. Probably due to some guy they brought into their ranks.
Now... I'm telling this because there's an "Ottoman Turkish - Turkish dictionary" out there and it has this kind of political background. It's obvious. But then, is Ottoman Turkish a separate language?
Of course, the palace elite used a narrative style in bureaucracy and art that is incomprehensible to today's people - we call this Ottoman Turkish. Some find it aesthetic, I respect that. I also like it, but the aesthetics of clear expression are much more striking for me. But now, is this narrative style a separate language? No.
But it's somelike like Plaza Turkish. The Turkish we hate. It's broken and ugly Turkish, certainly. It's a Turkish mixed with English nonsense, it belongs to people beg to use English but can't speak or write English properly. It's valspeak of Turkish. But the community of programmers talks to each other exactly like this. Can we declare this a new language just because English words are sprinkled in between?
The distance of Ottoman Turkish from today's Turkish is not far from Karamanlidika. Karamanlidika is a Turkish with some mixed Greek words and written in Greek letters. This is a different variety of Turkish spoken among Orthodox Turks in Karaman. Can we create a Karamanlidika - Turkish dictionary? At most, we can ask for a translation of Karamanlidika into today's Turkish. But we can't claim it's a different language. We're debating how different Azerbaijani is, after all.
That was all I wanted to say. There seems to be a recent enthusiasm for deriving an alternative to the "Turkish" we speak. A friend heard this on the metro. A girl in a black chador, around 20 years old, while talking on the phone, after saying "We'll discuss this topic later," goes "oh dear" and shifts to a more florid expression saying "We'll have a münakaşa (discussion)." I sense something purely ideological in this "Ottoman Turkish" emphasis, I mean it seems like Turkishness isn't actually what's important. But this point is beyond me.