This is a dumping ground for my general observations.
Freeborn Muslim Names
Name frequencies: As in contemporary Europe, a small number of names were borne by a large number of people, with a significant long tail of less common names.
Name origins: The Turkish Muslim name pool was drawn from Arabic, Turkic, and Persian to the near-total exclusion of all other ethnicities. The exclusion is so complete that if I hadn’t found an article about a single name that may have been from elsewhere, I would have thought there were no other influences at all. Because of this neat division into three languages, each with its own cultural associations, Turkish scholars routinely analyze the percentage of names in each category within a given area.
Turkic vs. Turkish: There are formal definitions of these words, and Turkish is properly called Ottoman Turkish. However, in the name of simplicity and speed, I’m going to make a hash of the nomenclature.
Turkic is a language family that spans Central Asia. The branches share a significant portion of their name pool, and many of the names have remained so similar across time and space that they’re as easy to connect as Pedro and Pietro. This similarity is sufficiently pronounced that scholarly articles on, say, modern Uyghur have helped me understand 16th-century Turkish names.1 When I say something is Turkic, I mean it derives from the common, often ancient, name pool shared by the Turkic languages.
Turkish is a branch of Turkic, specifically the branch spoken by the majority of the population in Anatolia in the 16th century. At the time, Arabic and Persian were the languages of scholarship, religion, law, and the arts; Turkish was the uncultured language of the streets. The more educated and elevated you were, the more your speech was larded with Arabic and Persian. The only people who spoke relatively pure Turkish were the working classes–which is to say, the vast majority of the populace–and even their Turkish had Arabic and Persian influences. When I say something is Turkish, I mean it’s a word that would be used by a common person in ordinary conversation.
There’s overlap. For example, arslan/aslan was the ordinary Turkish word for “lion,” and also a Turkic name with deep and ancient roots.
Arabic names: The Arabic names in use were all drawn from the standard Arabic name pool, as far as I can tell. People didn’t coin new names by repurposing an Arabic word that wasn’t already used as a name. The names in use were also a subset of the Arabic name pool; plenty of Arabic names don’t appear in Turkey. Without knowing more about the names popular in Arabic-speaking parts of the empire, I can’t say whether Turkish Muslims were following the lead of their Arab contemporaries, or rejected names in common use elsewhere.
Cross-Cultural Names
There were very few names shared between religions, or even between different sects of the same religion. Muslims used Arabic, Persian, and Turkish names; Greek Christians used Greek names, plus the occasional Turkish name; Armenian Christians used Armenian and Persian names, plus the occasional Turkish name; and Jews used the name pool of their ethnic background. The few shared names were from two main classes:
- Names that appear across the Bible, Torah, and/or Quran (Meryem, Sara, Ismael, Abraham/Avraham, etc.). Non-Muslim groups sometimes spelled their names differently from the Arabic (or Turkicized Arabic) version that was the standard spelling throughout the empire.
- Turkish names.
Because Turkish was the common language and was not associated with any religion, it was safe to share across religious and linguistic boundaries. For example, men of all ethnicities had the name or nickname Karagoz, Turkish for “black eyes,” and women of all ethnicities bore the name Sultan, Turkish “princess” or “imperial.” Jewish men named Aryeh, “lion,” might translate their names into Turkish Arslan.
The percentage of Turkish names varied by ethnicity. While I haven’t done a formal comparison, my impression is that Muslims led the pack (naturally), with different regions varying widely in Arabic vs. Turkish vs. Persian names. Turkish-born Armenians in the Kayseri region also used a significant number of Turkish names, enough that Ronald C. Jennings used it as an index of assimilation. At the far end, Greek Christians rarely bore names that weren’t Greek, to the point that even their Biblical names were in Greek, not Arabic, form; their use of Turkish names was sparing.
The information on Jews is partial and fragmented. Native-born Jews made at least occasional use of Turkish names, but the flood of Jews from Europe arrived bearing names from a variety of backgrounds, and I don’t have information about whether or how quickly they assimilated and adopted names common in Turkey.