Chagatai language


Chagatai, also known as Turki, Eastern Turkic, or Chagatai Turkic, is a Turkic language that was once widely spoken across Central Asia. It remained the shared literary language in the region until the early 20th century. It was used across a wide geographic area including western or Russian Turkestan, Eastern Turkestan, Crimea, the Volga region, etc. Chagatai is the direct ancestor of the Uzbek and Uyghur languages. Kazakh and Turkmen, which are not within the Karluk branch but are in the Kipchak and Oghuz branches of the Turkic languages respectively, were nonetheless heavily influenced by Chagatai for centuries.
Ali-Shir Nava'i was the greatest representative of Chagatai literature.
File:Chengde summer palace writings.jpg |thumb|right|300px|Lizheng Gate at the Chengde Mountain Resort. The second column from the left is the Chagatai language written in Perso-Arabic Nastaʿlīq script which reads Rawshan Otturādaqi Darwāza.

Etymology

The word Chagatai relates to the Chagatai Khanate, a descendant empire of the Mongol Empire left to Genghis Khan's second son, Chagatai Khan. Many of the Turkic peoples,
who spoke this language claimed political descent from the Chagatai Khanate.
As part of the preparation for the 1924 establishment of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Chagatai was officially renamed "Old Uzbek", which Edward A. Allworth argued "badly distorted the literary history of the region" and was used to give authors such as Ali-Shir Nava'i an Uzbek identity. It was also referred to as "Turki" or "Sart" in Russian colonial sources. In China, it is sometimes called "ancient Uyghur".

History

In the twentieth century, the study of Chaghatay suffered from nationalist bias. In the former Chaghatay area, separate republics have been claiming Chaghatay as the ancestor of their own brand of Turkic. Thus, Old Uzbek, Old Uyghur, Old Tatar, Old Turkmen, and a Chaghatay-influenced layer in sixteenth-century Azerbaijanian have been studied separately from each other. There has been a tendency to disregard certain characteristics of Chaghatay itself, e.g. its complex syntax copied from Persian.
Chagatai developed in the late 15th century. It belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family. It is descended from Middle Turkic, which served as a lingua franca in Central Asia, with a strong infusion of Arabic and Persian words and turns of phrase.
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü divides Chagatay into the following periods:
  1. Early Chagatay
  2. Pre-classical Chagatay
  3. Classical Chagatay
  4. Continuation of Classical Chagatay
  5. Decline
The first period is a transitional phase characterized by the retention of archaic forms; the second phase began with the publication of Ali-Shir Nava'i's first divan and is the highpoint of Chagatai literature, followed by the third phase, which is characterized by two bifurcating developments. One is preservation of the classical Chagatai language of Nava'i, the other the increasing influence of dialects of the local spoken languages.

Influence on later Turkic languages

and Uyghur, two modern languages descended from Chagatai, are the closest to it. Uzbeks regard Chagatai as the origin of their language and Chagatai literature as part of their heritage. In 1921 in Uzbekistan, then a part of the Soviet Union, Chagatai was initially intended to be the national and governmental language of the Uzbek SSR. However, when it became evident that the language was too archaic for that purpose, it was replaced by a new literary language based on a series of Uzbek dialects.
Ethnologue records the use of the word "Chagatai" in Afghanistan to describe the "Tekke" dialect of Turkmen. Up to and including the eighteenth century, Chagatai was the main literary language in Turkmenistan and most of Central Asia. While it had some influence on Turkmen, the two languages belong to different branches of the Turkic language family.

Literature

15th and 16th centuries

, which Central Asian Turkic authors regarded as superior, was deliberately imitated and emulated in the creation of Chagatai literature. The most famous of Chagatai poets, Ali-Shir Nava'i, among other works wrote Muhakamat al-Lughatayn, a detailed comparison of the Chagatai and Persian languages. Here, Nava’i argued for the superiority of the former for literary purposes. His fame is attested by the fact that Chagatai is sometimes called "Nava'i's language". Among prose works, Timur's biography is written in Chagatai, as is the famous Baburnama of Babur, the Timurid founder of the Mughal Empire. A attributed to Kamran Mirza is written in Persian and Chagatai, and one of Bairam Khan's was written in Chagatai.
The following is a prime example of the 16th-century literary Chagatai Turkic, employed by Babur in one of his ruba'is.

Islam ichin avara-i yazi buldim,
Kuffar u hind harbsazi buldim
Jazm aylab idim uzni shahid olmaqqa,
Amminna' lillahi ki gazi buldim

I am become a desert wanderer for Islam,
Having joined battle with infidels and Hindus
I readied myself to become a martyr,
God be thanked I am become a ghazi.
Uzbek ruler Muhammad Shaybani Khan wrote a prose essay called Risale-yi maarif-i Shaybāni in Chagatai in 1507, shortly after his capture of Greater Khorasan, and dedicated it to his son, Muhammad Timur. The manuscript of his philosophical and religious work, "Bahr ul-Khuda", written in 1508, is located in London.
Ötemish Hajji wrote a history of the Golden Horde entitled the Tarikh-i Dost Sultan in Khwarazm.

17th and 18th centuries

In terms of literary production, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are often seen as a period of decay. It is a period in which Chagatai lost ground to Persian. Important writings in Chagatai from the period between the 17th and 18th centuries include those of Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur: Shajara-i Tarākima and Shajara-i Turk. Abu al-Ghāzī is motivated by functional considerations and describes his choice of language and style in the sentence "I did not use one word of Chaghatay, Persian or Arabic". As is clear from his actual language use, he aims at making himself understood to a broader readership by avoiding too ornate a style, notably saj’, rhymed prose. In the second half of the 18th century, Turkmen poet Magtymguly Pyragy also introduced the use of classical Chagatai into Turkmen literature as a literary language, incorporating many Turkmen linguistic features.
Bukharan ruler Subhan Quli Khan was the author of a work on medicine, "Subkhankuli's revival of medicine", which was written in the Central Asian Turkic language and is devoted to the description of diseases, their recognition and treatment. One of the manuscript lists is kept in the library in Budapest.

19th and 20th centuries

Prominent 19th-century Khivan writers include Shermuhammad Munis and his nephew Muhammad Riza Agahi. Muhammad Rahim Khan II of Khiva also wrote ghazals. Musa Sayrami's Tārīkh-i amniyya, completed in 1903, and its revised version Tārīkh-i ḥamīdi, completed in 1908, represent the best sources on the Dungan Revolt in Xinjiang.

Dictionaries and grammars

The following are books written on the Chagatai language by natives and westerners:
  • Vocabularium Linguae Giagataicae Sive Igureae
  • Muḥammad Mahdī Khān, Sanglakh.
  • Abel Pavet de Courteille, Dictionnaire turk-oriental.
  • Ármin Vámbéry 1832–1913, Ćagataische Sprachstudien, enthaltend grammatikalischen Umriss, Chrestomathie, und Wörterbuch der ćagataischen Sprache;.
  • Sheykh Süleymān Efendi, Čagataj-Osmanisches Wörterbuch: Verkürzte und mit deutscher Übersetzung versehene Ausgabe.
  • Sheykh Süleymān Efendi, Lughat-ï chaghatay ve turkī-yi 'othmānī.
  • Mirza Muhammad Mehdi Khan Astarabadi, Mabaniul Lughat: Yani Sarf o Nahv e Lughat e Chughatai.
  • Abel Pavet de Courteille, Mirâdj-nâmeh : récit de l'ascension de Mahomet au ciel, composé a.h. 840, texte turk-oriental, publié pour la première fois d'après le manuscript ouïgour de la Bibliothèque nationale et traduit en français, avec une préf. analytique et historique, des notes, et des extraits du Makhzeni Mir Haïder.

    Phonology

Consonants

Sounds /f, ʃ, χ, v, z, ɡ, ʁ, d͡ʒ, ʔ, l/ do not occur in initial position of words of Turkic origin.

Vowels

Vowel length is distributed among five vowels /iː, eː, ɑː, oː, uː/.

Orthography

Chagatai has been a literary language and is written with a variation of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. This variation is known as Kona Yëziq,. It saw usage for Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, and Uzbek.

Influence

Many orthographies, particularly that of Turkic languages, are based on Kona Yëziq. Examples include the alphabets of South Azerbaijani, Qashqai, Chaharmahali, Khorasani, Uyghur, Äynu, and Khalaj.
Virtually all other Turkic languages have a history of being written with an alphabet descended from Kona Yëziq, however, due to various writing reforms conducted by Turkey and the Soviet Union, many of these languages now are written in either the Latin script or the Cyrillic script.
The Qing dynasty commissioned dictionaries on the major languages of China which included Chagatai Turki, such as the Pentaglot Dictionary.

Grammar

Word order

The basic word order of Chagatai is SOV. Chagatai is a head-final language where the adjectives come before nouns. Other words such as those denoting location, time, etc. usually appear in the order of emphasis put on them.

Vowel and consonant harmony

Like other Turkic languages, Chagatai has vowel harmony. There are mainly eight vowels, and vowel harmony system works upon vowel backness.
Back vowelsauoi, e
Front vowelsäüöi, e

The vowels and are central or front-central/back-central and therefore are considered both. Usually these will follow two rules in inflection: and almost always follow the front vowel inflections; and, if the stem contains or , which are formed in the back of the mouth, back vowels are more likely in the inflection.
These affect the suffixes that are applied to words.
Consonant harmony is relatively less common and only appears in a few suffixes such as the genitive.