 | This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(May 2019) |
| Armeno-Turkish alphabet | |
|---|---|
 Front page of the Old Testament written in Armeno-Turkish alphabet | |
| Script type | |
| Creator | Mesrop Mashtots |
| Languages | Ottoman Turkish language |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Armenian script
|
Sister systems | Latin Coptic Georgian Cyrillic |
The Armeno-Turkish alphabet is a version of the Armenian script sometimes used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet was introduced. The Armenian script was not just used by ethnic Armenians to write the Turkish language, but also by the non-Armenian Ottoman Turkish elite.[ citation needed ]
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An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 called the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish. [1]
This Armenian script was used alongside the Arabic script for official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish.[ citation needed ] For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 Akabi Hikâyesi , written in the Armenian script.[ citation needed ] In the early 19th century, American Evangelical missionaries began printing vernacular Turkish translations of the Bible written in the Armenian alphabet. [2]