Mongolic Copies in Chaghatay

摘要

Chaghatay is an elusive term generally used in scholarly literature to designate the language of all Central Asian Turkic texts produced between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries in a vast geographical area extending from Anatolia in the West to the Tarim Basin in the East and from the Volga region in the North to Northern India in the South. It is important to note here that native authors hardly ever applied the word Chaghatay as a linguistic term and when they did, the term was meant to refer to the language of the Persianate classical literary tradition Mīr 'Alī-šir Nawāyī (1441-1501) established in the mid-fifteenth century in the Timurid heartlands and it didn't mean the simple Turkic that for example the Khivan ruler Abū al-Ghāzī (r. 1644-1663/64) used for writing his historical works in the seventeenth century. The term Chaghatay as it is used today gained ground quite late in European scholarship after the publication of Cagataische Sprachstudien (Leipzig, 1867) Arminius Vambery's (1832—1913) pioneering work on the subject. The inconsistencies in the use of the scholarly term Chaghatay can be assessed very well by the short summary of its history Eva Kincses-Nagy supplies the reader with in the general introduction to her book (pp. 16—17). Though the author fails to give her own definition of the term at this point, from the sources she consulted throughout her research it seems to be clear that she uses the term in a broad sense covering classical poetical texts composed in early-fifteenth century Khurasan to historical works written in simple Turkic in the late-seventeenth century in the Volga—Ural area.