Wowsa! How do you know all this Bill?Clapping Happy2

Here is one Astrosoniq just bought...

http://www.cymbalholic.com/forums/showthread.php?44474-Very-heavy-old-K-19-Constantinople-couldn-t-resist.

That man is Wicked Schmaat...........:)

:Santa:

That paragraph Bill posted appears verbatim in Wikipedia. Here is the reference if you want to see more about this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_language

Ottoman Turkish language or Ottoman language (Turkish: Osmanlıca or Osmanlı Türkçesi, Ottoman Turkish: لسان عثمانی‎ lisân-ı Osmânî) is the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire. It contains extensive borrowings from Arabic and Persian languages and was written in a variant of the Arabic script. As a result of this process, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less-educated lower and also rural members of Turkish society, who continued to use kaba Türkçe or "rough Turkish", which was much purer and which is the basis of the modern Turkish language.

But this is only a partial answer to you question.

Now concerning the part about the Latin script. The Turkish alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, a certain number of which (Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş, and Ü) have been adapted or modified for the phonetic requirements of the language. So this is the reason for unreadable writing under the bells.

And finally about the French that can be found in the Constantinople trademarks as well as their official company documents. Owing to the pre-eminent cultural and political role of France in 17th and 18th century Europe and up until the 19th century it was widely used in Europe.

Part of the post by Bill above:

may have come from wikipedia. Further references can be found in the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet although part or all of the above fragment appears in many other places on the web. If you want to know more you can consult the Wikipedia article.

The short answer is that the writing is using the Latin alphabet not the Latin language. English uses the Latin alphabet as well. And if you think about French or Spanish the desire to "adapt" the vowels isn't unusual as well.

Post WWI but probably not newer than 1930's.

Basically the same thing. Of course the company consisted of more than just family, but the owner and the owners to be of the future were the core. So hence the way it was named. And that might also be the traditional way in was done in Armenia to name their companies in that style. I've noticed that the Armenian carpet people do it the same way.

By the way that K. Zildjian & Cie. was the trademark name post circa 1865. Prior to that it was called A. Zildjian & Cie. So if any of the ancient Constantinoples can be found, and they have a trademark stamp, I would expect them to say A. Zildjian & Sons in Arabic script, with the signature under the bell saying the same thing in Latin script.

This is a very rare and cool find. I wonder if he ever got it?

"Cie" on the die stamp is short-form French for "compagnie". In the late 1800s, French was the language of commerce in Europe.

The ampersand holds the same value in French as it does in English; it means "and".