[diminish]

> Turkish people cant write in Turkish during Ottoman era because of the alphabet limitations. Then, millions of Ottoman manuscripts would deny

This would falsely imply that Turkish people in Ottoman era read/wrote millions of manuscripts (pages). The literacy level was very low indeed < 1%. The Ottoman's took over the palace staff initially from the Selchuks (Persian influence), then from Memluks (who also took Arab influence) and then from East Romans. Also a lot of dewsirhme's in Istanbul used the Persian/Arabic words as the written language of the state.

Interesting enough, During the westernization movements, sultan Abdulhamit was one of the earliest to think moving to latin alphabet to make it easy for the people to read and write [1] as written in his personal autobiography. His powerful Enver Pasha apparently opposed and prevented his reform movement.

The palace's Arab/Persian and the people's oral Turkish culture was in sharp contradiction. What's funny is it's very easy to read Yunus Emre (1238–1320) and many other's poems now in Turkish than late 19th century poetry.

[1] https://www.turktarihim.com/Abd%C3%BClhamit_Hanin_LatinAlfab...

[mda]

Where did you get that <1% number? It was low but I think you are 1 order of magnitude off.

[bluesign]

for literacy you are right, should be around 10%, for Turkish literacy I think OP is closer, around 1%

[diminish]

totally 1% for turkish from 1400-1800s, it increased a lot from 1800 to 1915.

christians west and muslims/christians in marmara and balkans have up to 30% literacy. also western missionary schools became abundant everywhere in the ottoman empire after 1800s. big city administrative staff (non-turkish muslims) also had higher than turks which were farmer.