ON THE ISSUE OF TRANSCRIPTION IN HISTORICAL TURKIC TEXT STUDIES IN CENTRAL ASIA

Abstract

After the acceptance of Islam by Turkic people, the Arabic script was introduced and became prevalent in the region of Turkestan. From the time of the Karakhanid dynasty, the first Turkic-Islamic state, numerous works were composed and transcribed using the Arabic script. These works now serve as valuable historical texts for scholars and researchers. Arabic script remained in use in Kazakhstan until the 1920s. Despite sporadic research efforts to uncover and analyze Turkic texts transcribed in the Arabic script, these works received limited attention during the Soviet era. However, since Kazakhstan gained independence, there has been a surge in studies aimed at exploring these historical texts. In such studies, the transcription of the texts is typically conducted using Cyrillic or Latin script, and in some cases, both are employed. Following the initiation of Kazakhstan's transition to the Latin alphabet in 2017, there has been renewed interest in transcribing Turkic texts written in the Arabic script. This study aims to re-evaluate the transcription alphabet employed in previous research on historical texts in Kazakhstan and propose a new transcription system that is suitable for the new Latin script. The proposed alphabet will be applied to the Chagatai manuscripts of Divān-i Hikmet, Qıṣṣa-i Sulṭān Ḥubbı̇̄, Destūr'ül-‘ilāj and Durruʾl-ʿacāyib, located in Kazakhstan. The last two works, which have significant historical and linguistic value, have not yet been extensively studied by scholars. Destūr'ül-‘ilāj is a medical book on Central Asian herbalism and medicine, written in Chagatai, a language with Classical Period features. Durruʾl-ʿacāyib is a collection of 66 chapters that narrates hadiths and belongs to Chagatai's Post-Classical Period.