XVII Century Ottoman Chronic “Tarih-I Naima” in Corpus Comparison

Abstract

An Ottoman prose work (Naima's Histor y) for a long time has been the subject of special interest for literary critics, historians and linguists due to its stylistic features. The general comparison of the chronicle frequency lexical parameters with other Ottoman prose texts by corpus approach demonstrated that it had been created according to the canons of Ottoman Prose Literature and rules of its language norm. Yet at the same time differs from other t exts in some obscure, inexpressive form which let the annalist work stay quite famous in Ottoman Literature for two centuries and not be forgotten aswas the chronicle Seyahatname of the famous traveler Evliya Chelebi. Corpus approach enables an exact idiolect analysis due to its broad comparison with other texts in synchronistic and diachronic perspective. The comparison is usually based on the data of texts frequency vocabularies and syntax. At the same time, the correlation analysis between frequency vocabularies rank parameters can be used for the sample validation while compiling electronic documents collection (Prohorov, 2002). Such collection (corpus) in total of 21Ottoman prose texts was created for our research on idiostyle of the 18th century Turkish chronicle Tarihi Naima (Naima's History), or in the full name:The Garden of Husayn in the Summary of the Chronicles of Eastand West (Ravḍatu'l�Ḥuseynfi ḫulāsati aḫbāri'l�ḫāfiqa yn), written by the first vakanuvis (state chronicler) of Ottoman Empire Mustafa (1655�1716).While researching his idiostyle, we proceeded from the linguistic view of this phenomenon as deviation from language norm and tried to fix it in empirical statistical way. In our case, the calculation of the Pierson correlation coefficient (R) between rank parameters of electronic documents vocabularies verified the sampling adequacy for created corpus. However, the analogical computation between frequency vocabularies of researched text and documents collection demonstrated lexical deviation of Tarihi Naima from other Ottoman chr onicles. Meanwhile lexicon of selected documents in the view of their common frequency dictionary and according to high lexical closeness between them can be considered as hypothetical language norm of Ottoman chronicles. Method