Mahmūd al-Kāshgharī

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Al-Kāshgharī's east-facing map of the world from his Dīwān lughāt at-turk shows a selection of countries, cities and peoples, mountains, rivers and lakes of the world known to him, which is surrounded by an ocean, around the Karakhanid residence city of Balasagun .

Mahmūd ibn al-Husain ibn Muhammad al-Kāshgharī ( Arabic محمود بن الحسين بن محمد الكاشغري, DMG Maḥmūd bin al-Ḥusain bin Muḥammad al-Kāšġarī ; * 1008 ; † 1105 ) was a Turkish scholar and lexicographer of the 11th century.

Mahmud al-Kashgari should Barsghān from the southern shore of Issyk-Kul , from a noble, the Qarakhanid have originated knit family, but the information is obtained about his life fragmentary and exclusively in his own works. Neither the year of birth nor the year of death are certain.

Dīwān lughāt at-turk

Al-Kāschgharī's main work, the "Collection of the Languages ​​of the Turks" ( Dīwān lughāt at-turk ), was written in Baghdad between 1072 and 1094 . It is a particularly important work for the study of Turkish languages , culture, and the history of the Middle Ages . The facts communicated, however, always require a critical review today; Al-Kāshgharī, for example, adopted legendary origin myths. This is how he described a progenitor, Türk , who was a son of Japhet and grandson of Noah .

The “Collection of the Languages ​​of the Turks” is the most important work of the Central Turkish period along with the Kutadgu Bilig . Al-Kāshgharī dedicated his work to the caliph al-Muktadi in Baghdad. Baghdad was part of the Seljuk Empire since 1055 . In addition to the function of a Turkish-Arabic dictionary, the work offers numerous historical, folkloric and geographical details as well as a world map. The work also lists 22 Oğuz Turkish tribes and is one of the historical sources on the Oğuz. Most of the Oğuz tribes can be found in Ottoman Anatolia centuries later. In the introduction to his work, al-Kāshgharī states that, according to credible informants, the Prophet Mohammed declared: "Learn the language of the Turks, because their rule will last a long time!"

The pride or feeling of superiority of the nomads over the settled (which was the other way around) emerges from al-Kāshgharī's writings. The purity of the spoken Turkish, especially in terms of pronunciation and the absence of external linguistic influences, was considered elegant. Al-Kāshgharī explains the pronunciation of those who speak only one language as the most elegant of all dialects. Those who speak two languages ​​or have mixed with the urban population would have a slurred pronunciation.

literature

  • Mahmūd al-Kašgarī: Compendium of the Turkic dialects (Dīwān Lugāt at-Turk) , edited and translated with introduction and indices by Robert Dankoff and James Kelly. Turkish Sources VII. Part I – III. Harvard: Harvard University Printing Office, 1982-1985
  • Ömer Faruk Akün : Kâşgarlı Mahmud. In: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi , Vol. 25 (2002), pp. 9–15 ( online , PDF, 6.31 MB) (Turkish).
  • Carl Brockelmann : Middle Turkish vocabulary: According to Maḩmūd Al-Kašgaris Dīvān Lugāt at-Turk . Bibliotheca Orientalis Hungarica 1, Budapest 1928.
  • Ingeborg Hauenschild: The animal names in Mahmud al-Kaschgari. An investigation from a linguistic and cultural-historical perspective . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-447-04721-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Claus Schönig: Fictional genealogies in the Dīwān Lugāt at-Turk of Mahmūd al-Kašgarī (PDF; 206 kB)
  2. Klaus Kreiser, Christoph Neumann A Little History of Turkey , 2009, pp. 33–35
  3. ^ Peter B. Golden An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples , p. 5