.12-13 Century Central Asian Qur'an Notes Language

The Central Asian version Al-Tafsir of the 12-13^th centuries was animportant classic composed in the Turkic language in late QarahanDynasty (840-1212), a local power of the Song Dynasty. After theIslamization of the Qarahanid, a commentary on the Quran wasprepared in the Turkic language so as to facilitate the Central AsianTurkic peoples of that time to understand the Islamic teachings.Representing the literary language of that time, this literature is not onlyvery important to the study into the history of the medieval Turkiclanguage, but also especially invaluable to the study into the history ofthe Uyghur language, whose speakers constituted the main body of theQarahanid.This dissertation, based onЛексикасреднеазиатскоготефсираⅫ－ⅩⅢвв(Lexicon of Central Asian Al-Tafsir) collated and published inRussian by the former USSR Turkologist A. K. Borovkov, intends toconduct analysis into commentary glossing and illustrating sentences ofthe give work, and in light of these glossing and sentences compose alinguistic monograph focusing on synchronic description whilesimultaneously paying some attention to comparative study whereversuch necessity arises.This dissertation is divided into four chapters, and contains anintroduction and six appendixes. In the introduction, the authordescribes the characteristics of the literary language as represented inthis Al-Tafsir, addresses the connections of the literary languages asrepresented respectively in Al-Tafsir, in Qutad u Bilik by Yüsuf Has adip,in Divan Lu at at-türk by Mahmud al-kasgari, and in Hibatal-haqa'iq/atebetu'l Haqa'iq by Ahmet Yüknek, and reviews brieflyprevious studies on this topic. Chapter One presents the phonologicalsystem of the literary language in Al-Tafsir, including the vowel and consonant inventories, vowel harmony, the syllabic structures, and thecomparative study of the phonological systems. Chapter Two dealswith the word classes, describing nouns, adjectives, numerals, classifiers,pronouns, adverbs, verbs, conjunctions, postpositions, particles,interjections, onomatopoeias as well as the grammatical categories.Chapter Three takes up the syntax, including phrases, sentences andstructural types. Chapter Four handles the lexicon, including lexicalcomposition and word formation. Appendix One provides the index tothe grammatical forms of the language in Al-Tafsir. Appendix Two is anindex to the lexicon, indicating the etymology of loanwords. AppendixThree contains the proper nouns of the language. Appendix Fourcompares the translated Turkic version with the Chinese version (basedon the translation by Ma Jian) of Quran. Appendix Five is dedicated tothe original text of Al-Tafsir. Appendix Six is concerned with a translationof the Introduction contained in A. K. Borovkov's work mentionedabove.It is discovered through preliminary study that some conspicuousmorphological changes have take place in the literary language asrepresented by the Central Asian Al-Tafsir of the 12-13^th centuries, whichare even highly different from those in the languages as represented byQutad u Bilik and Divan Lu at at-türk, both composed in the 11thcentury in Qarahanid. In the following some examples are cited toillustrate morphological differences between ancient literary Turkiclanguage of the 7-11th centuries and that of the 12-13th centuries. 1)There had been two series of nominal accusative markers in 7-11thcenturies, viz. -IG(-(I|¨)/-u/-ig/-(u|¨)g)and -NI(-n(I|¨)/-ni), with the former seriestaking the dominant place, while in Al-Tafsir, the latter one began toprevail. 2) Nominal directional case marker series -GARU(-aru/-qaru/-g(a|¨)r(u|¨)/-k(a|¨)r(u|¨))and dative case marker series -GA (-a/-qa/-g(a|¨)/-k(a|¨))had been two distict series of case markers,whereas the directional case markers basically disappeared in thisliterature, with its semantic function loaded by the dative case marker–GA. 3) The conditional markers of verbs had been -sar/-s(a|¨)r, while in thisliterature the consonant - (sa/s(a|¨))r began to suffer a loss. Thesecharacteristics of the 12-13th centuries were inherited by the literarylanguage of the Chaghatai documents. As far as the modern Turkiclanguages are concerned, there is left only one series of the accusativecase marker–NI, while–IG series and the directional case marker–GARU have totally disappeared, and the conditional marker of verbs is-sa/-s(a|¨). In the ancient Turkic literary language of 7-11th centuries, theconjuctions had been underdeveloped, hence syntactically complexsentence types had been few in number, while with the borrowing ofthe Arabic-Persian conjuctions Al-Tafsir was rich in such sentence types.Lexically, under the influence of the Arabic and Persian written literature,this document included quite a number of Arabic and Persianloanwords (excluding the special religious terms). Up till now, theseloanwords not only remain but also are widely employed in modernTurkic languages, though to varying degrees from language tolanguage. It is to be noted that due to the limitation of the scope ofstudy, no systematic discussions concerning the above-mentionedchanges are presented in this dissertaion.Methodologically, this study follows the theoretical framework ofstructuralism, focusing on synchronic description, while simultaneouslyattending to comparative study when necessary. According to theapproaches of corpus linguistics, a database of original texts is set upfor this dissertation. Through computerized programs the literarylanguage is automatically parsed and the grammatical attributes aretagged. Thus a further processed database is obtained, and the textsare interlinearized, containing a literal word-word Chinese translation. On this basis, this dissertation conducts an exhaustive synchronicdescription and comparative study of all linguictic information. Differentfrom spoken languages, literary languages are closed and static, andconsequently the corpus linguictic approach helps thoroughly avoidleaving out any language information in descriptive analysis.