Hmmm. That didn't take long. Still, since no-one actually *blogs* anymore, I don't suppose anyone noticed. Life has been busy, but I've become involved in a Wiki project based out of Harvard, established by my friend Eric (the man behind Who was Du Tong?, which aims to provide an online chrestomathy for Chaghatay Turki (and variants of).
Called nothing more grand than TurkicWiki, it's still in its early (Beta) stages, but we've already started posting texts online and slowly glossing them. For obvious reasons, we're initially focusing on printed texts in the public domain, which restricts our options somewhat, but we do have a sizeable chunk of the Baburnama posted, as well as a link to Ilminski's edition at Google Books.
Showing posts with label dictionary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dictionary. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Monday, 3 January 2011
Glossing Nawa'i (2)
As noted in an earlier post, for the student whose first language is English, the absence of dictionaries and lexicons defining and explaining Chaghatay Turki words and phrases is frustrating.
Another useful aide I've (re)discovered is Cagataische Sprachstudien: grammatikalischer Umriss und Chrestomathie, enthaltend zwoelf Original-Auszuege mit Uebersetzung, nebst Woerterbh dieser ost-tuerkischen Sprache und verwandten Dialekten (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867; repr. Amsterdam, Philo Press, 1975), by Arminius Vambery, the 19th-Century, Hungarian scholar/explorer/public nuisance who acquired a vast range of materials during his peregrinations in Central Asia.
As the title reveals, it is essentially a chrestomathy, featuring transcribed passages from various Chaghatay Turki texts accompanied by German translations, with a glossary at the back. It also comes with a helpful overview of basic Chaghatay grammar, which at least has the benefit of utilizing Arabic script, rather than the transliterated Latin script examples featured in works on Chaghatay grammar by inter alia Bodrogligeti and Eckmann.
Another useful aide I've (re)discovered is Cagataische Sprachstudien: grammatikalischer Umriss und Chrestomathie, enthaltend zwoelf Original-Auszuege mit Uebersetzung, nebst Woerterbh dieser ost-tuerkischen Sprache und verwandten Dialekten (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867; repr. Amsterdam, Philo Press, 1975), by Arminius Vambery, the 19th-Century, Hungarian scholar/explorer/public nuisance who acquired a vast range of materials during his peregrinations in Central Asia.
As the title reveals, it is essentially a chrestomathy, featuring transcribed passages from various Chaghatay Turki texts accompanied by German translations, with a glossary at the back. It also comes with a helpful overview of basic Chaghatay grammar, which at least has the benefit of utilizing Arabic script, rather than the transliterated Latin script examples featured in works on Chaghatay grammar by inter alia Bodrogligeti and Eckmann.
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
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).
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).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)