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

Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

> > I've always wondered about this too. Why was Anatolia turkicized when
> > Iran never was. One should note, tho, that there were alot of
> > graecophones in Anatolia up to that little population exchange project
> > after WWI.
>
> Well, Iran partly *was* Turkicized.  We just call that part of Persia
> "Azerbaijan".  (Azeri is so close to Turkish that it is mostly mutually
> intelligible.)
Yes, and fairly big chunks of modern Turkey are Kurdish-speaking. Doesn't change
the large picture that Iran remained mostly Iranian-speaking, while Anatolia
largely switched to Turkish.

The explanation I've heard for Azerbaijan being Turkicized while most of the
rest of Iran was not is that its terrain and climate was better suited to the
life-style of Turkic nomads. I suppose this suggests that the same was true of
(parts of) Anatolia.

                                                  Andreas