The program is indeed one of the Marshall/Fulbright/Rhodes tier, so your answer is quite useful. That these programs are typically considered grounds for deferral is especially helpful. Thank you!

@Davidmh While admittedly PhD students have little leverage other than (in some cases) competing offers, nearly every resource for prospective graduate students I have read suggests appealing funding amounts if necessary. Additionally, in this case the external funding is not towards the PhD, but rather towards a non-affiliated MA program.

One difficulty with this approach, for Turkic languages in particular, is that use the dotless-i can confuse search engines, leading to blank returns when users of non-Turkic keyboard layouts substitute this character for a dotted-i. For this reason, I have often seen names with this letter 'Anglicized' pragmatically.