In the foreword* Lewis' Teach Yourself Turkish (1968), it is mentioned that in an earlier learner's grammar of Ottoman Turkish, 161 pages were devoted to Arabic and Persian, whereas 215 were devoted to actual Turkish.
Naively, this might sound like a weird thing. You want to learn Turkish when reading a book about Turkish, you don't want that and a taster course for Arabic and Persian. However, at the time, the Turkish spoken by educated Turks was heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian, both a heavy amount of loans and actual code switching wildly present - speaking decent Turkish required some level of mastery of Persian and Arabic.
This is a level of detail that could be cool in a conlang!
* Every time I write that word, I wish I were unaware of the fact that some write 'forward' - there's even some quality printed works that suffer from it! - and every time my fingers itch to replicate the mistake.
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