Glossing Nawa'i (1)

In the absence of a Chaghatay-English dictionary/lexicon/glossary and so on, the reader of Mir 'Ali Shir is forced to consult a number of different reference sources to make either head or tail of his works which, transgressing on the territories of religion and poetry, often contain a lot of oblique or obscure words and phrases, many of them loans from Arabic and Persian.

A good starting point is that old warhorse, the Redhouse's [Ottoman] Turkish Dictionary. The English-Turkish/Turkish-English version is available in two editions (1856 & 1880), both out of copyright and both downloadable via Google books. The obvious advantage of Redhouse is that the Turkish is rendered in the Perso-Arabic script.

Good Arabic and Persian dictionaries are also a must. I have thus far relied on a compact paperback edition of The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (4th edn, repr. 1994) and Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (repr. 1975). Hans Wehr is arranged alphabetically by root, so a little knowledge of Arabic morphology is essentially because you often come across a word in Chaghatay that literally screams 'Arabic!'; words beginning 'muta-' fall into this category. Steingass is particularly useful when perusing Sufi texts inspired or based on Persian works.

Some Turkic works may be really archaic or obscure, so it's necessary to have one of Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-thirteenth-century Turkish (1972) or Mahmud al-Kashgari, Diwan-i Lughat al-Turk (Compendium of the Language of the Turks) (Harvard, 1982-85) close to hand.

That's just the English-language materials. There are a couple of 19th Century French dictionaries by Abel Pavet de Courteille, Dictionnaire Turk-oriental (1870) and C. Barbier de Meynard, Dictionnaire turc-francais (1881). The former can be found on Google books and downloaded in its entirety.

A Russian curio is Budagov's Comparative Dictionary of Turco-Tatar Dialects (1869) and readers of Turkish, Uzbek, Uyghur and other Turkic languages may find contemporary dictionaries for those languages useful as well.

References

G. Clauson (Sir), An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-thirteenth-century Turkish (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

Abel Pavet de Courteille, Dictionnaire Turk-oriental (Paris: 1870) [download].

Mahmud al-Kashgari, Diwan-i Lughat al-Turk (Compendium of the Language of the Turks) trans. and ed. by Robert Dankoff and James Kelly, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: 1982-85).

C. Barbier de Meynard, Dictionnaire turc-francais (Paris: 1881-86).

J. W. Redhouse, An English and Turkish Dictionary, in Two Parts, English and Turkish, and Turkish and English, (London: Quaritch, 1856) [download].

J. W. Redhouse, An English and Turkish Dictionary, in Two Parts, English and Turkish, and Turkish and English, 2nd edn (London: Quaritch, 1880) [download].

F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, repr. 1975 (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1975).

H. Wehr, The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern written Arabic, ed. by J. M. Cowan, 4th edn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994).