Chagatai language

History

In the twentieth century, the study of Chagatai suffered from nationalist bias. In the former Chagatai area, separate republics have been claiming Chagatai as the ancestor of their own brand of Turkic. Thus, Old Uzbek, Old Uyghur, Old Tatar, Old Turkmen, and a Chagatai-influenced layer in sixteenth-century Azerbaijanian have been studied separately from each other. There has been a tendency to disregard certain characteristics of Chagatai 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 Chagatai into the following periods:

1. Early Chagatai (13th–14th centuries)
2. Pre-classical Chagatai (the first half of the 15th century)
3. Classical Chagatai (the second half of the 15th century)
4. Continuation of Classical Chagatai (16th century)
5. Decline (17th–19th centuries)

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

Uzbek 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 set 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

Persian literature, 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 Chagatai and New Persian. 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 (or Tuska Babure) of Babur, the Timurid founder of the Mughal Empire. A Divan attributed to Kamran Mirza is written in Persian and Chagatai, and one of Bairam Khan's Divans 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

Translation:

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.

Muhammad Shaybani, ruler of the nascent Khanate of Bukhara, wrote a prose essay called Risale-yi maarif-i Shaybāni in Chagatai in 1507 shortly after his capture of Greater Khorasan. He 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 (Genealogy of the Turkmens) and Shajara-i Turk (Genealogy of the Turks). 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 Chagatay (!), 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 (1680–1702) was the author of a work on medicine, "Subkhankuli's revival of medicine" ("Ihya at-tibb Subhani"), which was written in the Central Asian Turkic language (Chagatai) 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 (1862–1877) in Xinjiang.

Dictionaries and grammars

The following are books written on the Chagatai language by natives and westerners:

• Vocabularium Linguae Giagataicae Sive Igureae (Lexico Ćiagataico)
• Muḥammad Mahdī Khān, Sanglakh.
• Abel Pavet de Courteille, Dictionnaire turk-oriental (1870).
• Ármin Vámbéry 1832–1913, Ćagataische Sprachstudien, enthaltend grammatikalischen Umriss, Chrestomathie, und Wörterbuch der ćagataischen Sprache; (1867).
• Sheykh Süleymān Efendi, Čagataj-Osmanisches Wörterbuch: Verkürzte und mit deutscher Übersetzung versehene Ausgabe (1902).
• Sheykh Süleymān Efendi, Lughat-ï chaghatay ve turkī-yi 'othmānī (Dictionary of Chagatai and Ottoman Turkish).
• 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 (1436/1437), 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, (transl. old script). 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 (though Uzbek, despite being a direct descendant of Chaghatai, notably does not ever since the spelling changes under the USSR; vowel harmony is present in the orthography of the Uzbek Perso-Arabic script). There are mainly eight vowels, and vowel harmony system works upon vowel backness.

The vowels [i] and [e] are central or front-central/back-central and therefore are considered both. Usually these will follow two rules in inflection: [i] and [e] almost always follow the front vowel inflections; and, if the stem contains [q] or [ǧ], 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.

Number

Plural is formed by adding the suffix -لار (-lar/lär). There are two pronunciations which exist due vowel harmony rules. If the vowel of the last syllable is a front syllable ([a], [o], [u]) -lar is used. If the vowel is a back vowel ([ä], [ö], [ü]) or [i] and [e], -lär is used. In rare circumstances -lar is sometimes written as -لر, though generally the suffix -لار is used for both the pronunciations /-lär/ and /-lar/. Or in the case of Kazakh and Kyrgyz /-ler/ and /-lar/.

Cases

Chagatai has six different cases. The nominative and sometimes the accusative does not have any special marking.

Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

There are seven Chagatai personal pronouns, as there are formal and informal forms of the second person singular form. Unlike other languages these pronouns do not differ between genders. Each of these pronouns have suffixes added to end of verbs as conjugation.

Punctuation

Below are some punctuation marks associated with Chagatai.