Ottoman diplomatic prose often degenerated into obscuring bombast

Evidence

The language is Ottoman Turkish, the already not inconsiderable difficulties of which are increased, in the diplomatic documents, by the use of a complex and intricate chancery style, full of allusion and artifice. At its best, as in some of the imperial letters, it can produce magnificent and resounding prose; but all too often, in the hands of inferior manipulators, it degenerates into mere bombast—vast expanses of contorted syntax and swollen verbiage where the thin rivulet of meaning is lost in the endless wilderness of words. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1994