You have a document, a defter or a whole fonds, and someone else is reading it for you. That is workable for one page and untenable for a project — you cannot follow a footnote you could not have found, and you cannot judge a reading you cannot check.
Online, one to one. Send a photograph of what you are working on and I will tell you what it is before we talk about lessons.
We start with printed Ottoman, because a hand you cannot read is a hand you cannot learn from. Matbu texts give you the alphabet, the orthography and the vocabulary while the letterforms stay still.
Then we move to the hands, in the order they will actually reach you: rikʿa first because most late correspondence is in it, then dîvânî, then siyâkat when your material demands it. Siyâkat is a separate mountain and I will say so before you start climbing it.
Every lesson works on a real document. Preferably yours — a text you need is worth ten exercises you do not.
Some, yes. Ottoman is Turkish, and a reader with no Turkish is decoding letters into words they cannot understand.
You do not need to be fluent. If you can read a modern Turkish paragraph slowly with a dictionary, you have enough to begin. If you have none at all, we spend a short stretch on modern Turkish first, and I will tell you how long rather than quietly billing you for it.
No. The script is Arabic; the language is Turkish. Arabic helps with vocabulary and Persian helps with the compounds, and neither is a prerequisite.
If you do read Arabic, say so — we can move considerably faster through the first weeks.
Yes, and I would prefer to. Send a photograph and I will tell you the document type, the hand and how difficult it is.
That conversation is what makes an honest estimate possible. A legible single-page rikʿa letter is a few lessons; a siyâkat register is a different project entirely.
For a single document, ask me and we will talk about it. Beyond that, no — I teach, and I am not a transcription service.
If you have a body of material to get through, learning is cheaper and faster than commissioning every page, and it is the only route that lets you check the reading.
The teaching runs in Turkish, with the technical vocabulary in Turkish because that is what the secondary literature uses.
My English is workable rather than fluent. For this track that matters less than it might sound — we spend the hour looking at the same page, and the working language of Ottoman palaeography is Turkish anyway. I would still rather you knew before you booked.
Tell me what you are after and roughly where you are starting from. I answer within one working day with a price and two or three possible times.