Uyghur Text Research Articles

About el2d2m on Line 4 of the E-45 Köžeelig-Xovu Inscription

For a more accurate interpretation of the Yenisei Inscriptions, Uyghur texts are as important a source of reference as the Khaganate Inscriptions. Especially in the analysis of words that do not appear in the inscriptions or are rare, the vocabulary of Uyghur can be a determining factor. For instance, in this article, I will focus on the word M𐌗Le el2d2m, which occurs in the E-45 Köžeelig-Xovu inscription but has been interpreted in different ways since its first publication. In order to read and interpret the word correctly, it will be reconsidered together with its examples in Old Uyghur texts.

Maitrisimit Nom Bitig Üzerine Yapılan Çalışmaların Kronolojik Kaynakçası (1907-2023)

As a result of the expeditions organised to East Turkistan in the 20th century, the scientific community became acquainted with Old Uyghur texts. The first studies on Old Uyghur texts were carried out by individuals such as Le Coq, Müller, Bang-Kaup, Gabain and Arat, after which research in this field gradually expanded. Among the Old Uyghur texts, certain works stand out due to differences in volume, content, vocabulary, etc. As a result, these texts have attracted more attention from researchers, leading to an increase in the number of studies compared to other texts. One such notable work is the Maitrisimit Nom Bitig. The studies on the Maitrisimit Nom Bitig are extensive, which has led to the creation of this bibliography to assist and streamline the efforts of researchers working on this work. The bibliography includes various types of studies such as books, introductions, theses, articles and papers on the Maitrisimit Nom Bitig, presented in chronological order.

Collaborative Encoding Method for Scene Text Recognition in Low Linguistic Resources: The Uyghur Language Case Study

Current research on scene text recognition primarily focuses on languages with abundant linguistic resources, such as English and Chinese. In contrast, there is relatively limited research dedicated to low-resource languages. Advanced methods for scene text recognition often employ Transformer-based architectures. However, the performance of Transformer architectures is suboptimal when dealing with low-resource datasets. This paper proposes a Collaborative Encoding Method for Scene Text Recognition in the low-resource Uyghur language. The encoding framework comprises three main modules: the Filter module, the Dual-Branch Feature Extraction module, and the Dynamic Fusion module. The Filter module, consisting of a series of upsampling and downsampling operations, performs coarse-grained filtering on input images to reduce the impact of scene noise on the model, thereby obtaining more accurate feature information. The Dual-Branch Feature Extraction module adopts a parallel structure combining Transformer encoding and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) encoding to capture local and global information. The Dynamic Fusion module employs an attention mechanism to dynamically merge the feature information obtained from the Transformer and CNN branches. To address the scarcity of real data for natural scene Uyghur text recognition, this paper conducted two rounds of data augmentation on a dataset of 7267 real images, resulting in 254,345 and 3,052,140 scene images, respectively. This process partially mitigated the issue of insufficient Uyghur language data, making low-resource scene text recognition research feasible. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative encoding approach achieves outstanding performance. Compared to baseline methods, our collaborative encoding approach improves accuracy by 14.1%.

Budist Uygur Metinlerinde Dinî Bir Terim Olarak ünüş = Skr. niḥsaraṇa İfadesi

The article discusses the Old Turkic religious vocabulary and its association with belief systems such as Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Islam. It highlights the role of Uyghurs in embracing Buddhism and creating an extensive body of literature through translation. The Uyghur monks played a crucial role in translating Buddhist concepts into Turkish, carefully selecting terms that corresponded to source languages like Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. This effort was not limited to Buddhism but also extended to conveying Islamic religious terms using Buddhist terminologies. A central concept in Buddhist teachings is saṃsāra, which refers to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth within the Indian philosophical framework. The article discusses the Sanskrit term niḥsaraṇa, which signifies ‘escape from saṃsāra’. This term carries various meanings in Sanskrit, such as ‘departure, death, path, solution, and ultimate happiness.’ In the Old Uyghur religious vocabulary, the corresponding term for niḥsaraṇa is ünüš (yol), which directly translates to ‘path’ in Old Turkic. This term is distinctively used within the Buddhist context of the Old Turkic religious vocabulary and is found in various combinations within Buddhist Uyghur texts. The article aims to analyze the thematic interpretations of this expression aligned with Buddhist philosophical systems. It seeks to elucidate how the term is used within Buddhist Uyghur texts, shedding light on its significance within the context of those writings.

A Three-Stage Uyghur Recognition Model Combining the Attention Mechanism and Different Convolutional Recurrent Networks

Uyghur text recognition faces several challenges in the field due to the scarcity of publicly available datasets and the intricate nature of the script characterized by strong ligatures and unique attributes. In this study, we propose a unified three-stage model for Uyghur language recognition. The model is developed using a self-constructed Uyghur text dataset, enabling evaluation of previous Uyghur text recognition modules as well as exploration of novel module combinations previously unapplied to Uyghur text recognition, including Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (CRNNs), Gated Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (GRCNNs), ConvNeXt, and attention mechanisms. Through a comprehensive analysis of the accuracy, time, normalized edit distance, and memory requirements of different module combinations on a consistent training and evaluation dataset, we identify the most suitable text recognition structure for Uyghur text. Subsequently, utilizing the proposed approach, we train the model weights and achieve optimal recognition of Uyghur text using the ConvNeXt+Bidirectional LSTM+attention mechanism structure, achieving a notable accuracy of 90.21%. These findings demonstrate the strong generalization and high precision exhibited by Uyghur text recognition based on the proposed model, thus establishing its potential practical applications in Uyghur text recognition.

Eski Uygurca Uṣṇīṣavijayādhāraṇī Sūtra'nın Yeniden Kurma Çalışmaları İçin Yeni bir Metin Parçası

The article presents the edition of a newly identified Old Uyghur (OU) text fragment of the tantric Uṣṇīṣavijayādhāraṇī-Sūtra from the Berlin Turfan collection. The preserved text passage is part of the frame story in which the declaration of the dhāraṇī is embedded: in order to free the Devaputra Supratiṣṭhita and all beings from rebirth in the lower realms, Buddha explains to the god Indra the benefits of the Uṣṇīṣavijayādhāraṇī and the rituals associated with it and asks him to teach Supratiṣṭhita in the same way. The text of fragment U 2432 fills a textual gap that previously existed in the reconstructed OU version. The completion of the OU version may help resolve the outstanding question of the textual template for the OU translation. A brief survey of the transmission of Skt. Supratiṣṭhita in OU is also included.

Altun Yaruq Sudur’un Berlin Versiyonundaki Neşredilmemiş Yeni Parçaları Üzerine (Süü Kısmı ve IV., VI., X. Kitaplar)

Altun Yaruq Sudur, known in Old Uyghur as altun öŋlüg yaruq yaltrıqlıġ qopda kötrülmiş nom éligi, is a teaching book translated from Chinese to Old Uyghur by Şiŋko Şeli Tutuŋ. Altun Yaruq Sudur, which contains both linguistic and religious concepts of Mahāyāna teaching, is one of the most important works of Buddhist Uyghur Literature. Altun Yaruq Sudur studies, on which various studies have been made by many researchers, are progressing at the level of text studies, which mainly focus on newly unpublished fragments. In this respect, the present study consists of examinations of new unpublished fragments of Altun Yaruq Sudur, which have been transferred to electronic media within the scope of the KOHD project. In this study, which consists of new unpublished fragments of Altun Yaruq Sudur’s Part Süü and IV, VI, X. Books, first of all, brief information about the fragments is given, the parallel text in the St. Petersburg or Berlin version is shown in the footnote, followed by the place of the Uyghur text in the Chinese text immediately after the passage. In addition, information about some religious terms in these unpublished fragments is also given in the study.

Rylands Satıraltı Kuran Tercümesi ile Kırgız ve Türkiye Türkçesi Kuran Tercümelerindeki Söz Varlığı ve Tercüme Yöntemi

Bu çalışmada, ilk satıraltı Kuran tercümeleri arasında kabul edilen ve Çağataycadan daha önceki bir döneme ait olup Doğu Türkçesi özellikleri gösteren Rylands nüshası ile günümüz Türkiye Türkçesi ve Kırgız Türkçesiyle yayımlanan Kuran tercümelerindeki kelimeler ve terimler karşılaştırılmaktadır. Söz varlığı bakımından Kuran’ın satıraltı tercümesi (Rylands nüshası), gerek Uygur Türkçesi metinleri gerekse Kutadgu Bilig ve Divanu Lügati’t-Türk’le pek çok ortak kelime içermektedir. Bu kelimelerin birçoğu, elbette diğer Türk lehçeleriyle de (Kıpçak, Oğuz gibi) ortaklaşabilmektedir. Bu bakımdan söz varlığı karşılaştırmasına Türkiye Türkçesi de dâhil edilmiştir. Böylelikle bir görüşe göre 14 veya 15. yüzyıl, başka bir görüşe göre daha önceki bir yüzyılda yazılan Kuran tercümesinden değişerek veya aynı kalarak günümüze dek ulaşan ifadeler ve kelimeler tespit edilmiştir. Daha sonra bu söz varlığının alındığı dil ve anlamları ortaya konulmuş, Türkçenin dinî anlam ve kavramları hangi kelime, terim ve ifadelerle karşıladıkları (kavram alanı oluşturularak) tahlil edilmiştir. Çalışmanın sonunda istatistiklere de yer verilmiştir. Korpus üzerinden çeviri yöntemine dair tespitler de çalışmamızda bulunmaktadır. Buna göre dinî terim ve kelimelerde Türkçenin kullanım oranı ve bilinci, azımsanmayacak ölçüdedir.

An Effective Method for Detection and Recognition of Uyghur Texts in Images with Backgrounds

Uyghur text detection and recognition in images with simple backgrounds is still a challenging task for Uyghur image content analysis. In this paper, we propose a new effective Uyghur text detection method based on channel-enhanced MSERs and the CNN classification model. In order to extract more complete text components, a new text candidate region extraction algorithm is put forward, which is based on the channel-enhanced MSERs according to the characteristics of Uyghur text. In order to effectively prune the non-text regions, we design a CNN classification network according to the LeNet-5, which gains the description characteristics automatically and avoids the tedious and low efficiency artificial characteristic extraction work. For Uyghur text recognition in images, we improved the traditional CRNN network, and to verify its effectiveness, the networks trained on a synthetic dataset and evaluated on the text recognition datasets. The experimental results indicated that the Uyghur text detection method in this paper is robust and applicable, and the recognition result by improvedCRNN was better than the original CRNN network.

Scene Uyghur Text Detection Based on Fine-Grained Feature Representation.

Scene text detection task aims to precisely localize text in natural environments. At present, the application scenarios of text detection topics have gradually shifted from plain document text to more complex natural scenarios. Objects with similar texture and text morphology in the complex background noise of natural scene images are prone to false recall and difficult to detect multi-scale texts, a multi-directional scene Uyghur text detection model based on fine-grained feature representation and spatial feature fusion is proposed, and feature extraction and feature fusion are improved to enhance the network’s ability to represent multi-scale features. In this method, the multiple groups of 3 × 3 convolutional feature groups that are connected like the hierarchical residual to build a residual network for feature extraction, which captures the feature details and increases the receptive field of the network to adapt to multi-scale text and long glued dimensional font detection and suppress false positives of text-like objects. Secondly, an adaptive multi-level feature map fusion strategy is adopted to overcome the inconsistency of information in multi-scale feature map fusion. The proposed model achieves 93.94% and 84.92% F-measure on the self-built Uyghur dataset and the ICDAR2015 dataset, respectively, which improves the accuracy of Uyghur text detection and suppresses false positives.

A Study on the Hapax Legomenon ‘yogun yolpa’ Hendiadys in Old Uyghur

In Turkic, hendiadys has an important place as a method that is used for the emphasis of an expression. In addition to Old Turkic inscriptions, hendiadyses, which are often used in Old Uyghur texts, still survive in contemporary Turkic languages. In this article, the hendiadys of yogun yolpa i.e. ‘unmannerly, cumbersome, rude, ugly’ which appears only once (hapax legomenon) in Old Uyghur texts, and never in works from other periods, will be studied in comparison to examples from contemporary Turkic languages. The etymology of the two words yogun and yolpa which form the hendiadys will be investigated. The first element of the hendiadys, yogun, ‘intense, rude, rough, ugly’ has already been the subject of various studies. The other element of the hendiadys, the word yolpa, which does not appear in any other text, is analysed in this article.

AB-LaBSE: Uyghur Sentiment Analysis via the Pre-Training Model with BiLSTM

In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to text sentiment analysis, which has gradually become a research hotspot in information extraction, data mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and other fields. With the gradual popularization of the Internet, sentiment analysis of Uyghur texts has great research and application value in online public opinion. For low-resource languages, most state-of-the-art systems require tens of thousands of annotated sentences to get high performance. However, there is minimal annotated data available about Uyghur sentiment analysis tasks. There are also specificities in each task—differences in words and word order across languages make it a challenging problem. In this paper, we present an effective solution to providing a meaningful and easy-to-use feature extractor for sentiment analysis tasks: using the pre-trained language model with BiLSTM layer. Firstly, data augmentation is carried out by AEDA (An Easier Data Augmentation), and the augmented dataset is constructed to improve the performance of text classification tasks. Then, a pretraining model LaBSE is used to encode the input data. Then, BiLSTM is used to learn more context information. Finally, the validity of the model is verified via two categories datasets for sentiment analysis and five categories datasets for emotion analysis. We evaluated our approach on two datasets, which showed wonderful performance compared to some strong baselines. We close with an overview of the resources for sentiment analysis tasks and some of the open research questions. Therefore, we propose a combined deep learning and cross-language pretraining model for two low resource expectations.

Manichaeism in the Uyghur written monuments

The article is devoted to the study of Manichaeism in Uyghur written monuments. Manichaeism is a religious belief that emerged in the Middle East in the 3rd century AD. Manichaeism contained Zoroastrian, Christian, Judaic, Mithraic and Buddhist elements. However, it is a holistic, complex religious system based on the dualistic philosophy of the struggle between good and evil, darkness and light, bright and dark. After the demise of the Old Turkic Khaganates, the Uyghur Begyu Khagan made Manichaeism the state religion of the Uyghur Khaganate. One of the reasons for the adoption of Manichaeism by the Uyghurs was the Begyu Khagan’s desire to establish relations with the Sogdians, the missionaries of Manichaeism, who were trying to spread it in East Turkestan, China and Mongolia.The spread of Manichaeism among the ancient Uyghurs is attested by Chinese and Arabic sources, but especially by several Uyghur monuments. Among these monuments is the Karabalgasun inscription, found by N.M. Yadrintsev in 1889 during an expedition to Mongolia, Ordu-Balyk (Karabalgasun). The author of the article analyzes the content of the Karabalgasun inscription and other Uyghur texts, explores the essence of the ideas of Manichaeism and reveals its origin, spread and close connection with Buddhism

Abhiseka Ritual in Buddhist Uyghurs

This study, consists of evaluations about the concept of abhiṣeka, which is the ceremony in which a student or Bodhisattvas enters a Buddhist community or the Buddhahood status by applying various techniques (dhāraṇī, mantra, mudrā, homa and samādhi, etc.) under the guidance of a religious master. Abhiṣeka is a ritual of ‘blessing’ the victory of the person who enters a sacred path as a practice of ‘pouring/sprinkling’, historically similar to the baptism ceremony of Christians. Peculiar to the Buddhist thought system, the Sanskrit abhiṣeka is a level that Bodhisattvas will achieve through various stages as a practice of ‘blessing’. It also corresponds to the expression Sanskrit bhūmi. Abhiṣeka, of which we have information about Mahāyāna and Esoteric Buddhism teachings, is one of the important concepts in the Buddhist religious life adopted by Uyghur Turks. In Uyghurs who adopt different religions (Manichaeaism, Buddhism etc.) they come into contact with the influence of various cultures, Sanskrit abhiṣeka was taken from the Tocharian A/B, and adapted to Turkish texts based on the Buddha religion as abišek, abıšık or abišik. Accordingly, this article aims at the reflections of this term in the Buddhist Uyghurs on the basis of the conceptual value of the concept of abhiṣeka in the Buddhist thought system. In these evaluations centred on the teachings of Mahāyāna and Esoteric Buddhism, the Uyghur text in which the concept of abhiṣeka is mentioned and the translation of this text, the conceptual value of abhiṣeka expression has been tried to be shown within the framework of terms related to Buddhist terminology.

A Scholar of the Silk Road. On the 120th Anniversary of Annemarie von Gabain on 4 July 2021

Annemarie von Gabain was an eminent scholar in many fields of Central Asian studies, her main interest was research of the Old Uyghur texts from Turfan. The paper illustrates shortly her life and some of her research areas and works.

Buddhist Monastic Life in Central Asia — A Bilingual Text in Sanskrit and Old Uyghur Relating to The Pravāraṇā Ceremony

Bilingual texts in Old Uyghur and Sanskrit in Brāhmī script are essential for the understanding of how the Indian Buddhist tradition came to be appropriated by the Uyghurs in general, but especially during the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368 CE). Some manuscripts represent Vinaya related materials which are missing altogether in monolingual Old Uyghur texts. The article introduces a bilingual fragment (Sanskrit and Old Uyghur) in Uyghur script housed in the Turfan Collection in Berlin which belongs to the Karmavācanā literature and deals with the pravāraṇā ceremony. This monastic ritual was celebrated after the annual retreat of three months during the rainy season (Skt. varṣā). In the Sanskrit part the fragment corresponds well with the Sanskrit Karmavācanā literature from Central Asia, whereas the Uyghur instructions on the recto are quite unique.

The Story of Shunzi in Old Uyghur

ABSTRACTThis paper identifies three manuscript fragments from Turfan as an Old Uyghur version of the story of Shunzi 舜子, a medieval Chinese narrative about Emperor Shun acting as a filial son. In China, the story was part of the lore of filial sons (xiaozi 孝子), popular throughout most of the dynastic period. Early versions of the Chinese story survive in Japan and Dunhuang, and these display obvious parallels with the Uyghur text. While this allows a positive identification of the content of the three Turfan fragments, the differences reveal that none of the known Chinese versions could have served as the source text for the translation. The Old Uyghur version, therefore, represents an otherwise unattested version of the story, which may have developed among the Uyghurs.

Features of translation into Uigur languageof children's fairy tale "Shuburshun" by A. Karlyukevich

“Shuburshun” is the work of the Belarusian writer A. Karlyukevich and its figuratively and metaphorically is replete with an abundance of tropes with elements of national irony. The text is structurally complex, spiritually rich and elegant. The translator was able to show in translation the national color, spirit and ideal of the fairy tale, he felt the literary world behind the text that inspired the author and sought to recreate it in a holistic way. A significant amount of literary and aesthetic information is encoded in the work as well. Moreover, some words, in particular: “Shuburshun”, “Svisloch’”, etc., appear as the dominant units of the Uighur text. Authors lexemes and glossaries “entered” into the Uyghur text make the work mysterious, because of it they have a reverse effect. The Uygur translation of “Shuburshun” as a new independent aesthetic phenomenon, due to the interpenetration of various contents and forms, is experiencing internal implicit conjugation changes that rigidly interlink textual connections at a new level. This is how the principles of aesthetic interferences work and interact in any literary translation that acts as the dominant feature of bicultural aesthetics. It is about the emergence of a “different”literary and aesthetic reality in translation. In particular, we are witnessing an objective process of “entering” (or “invasion”) of Belarusian words into the Uyghur text, which affect the aesthetic consciousness of the reader.

A Syllable-Based Technique for Uyghur Text Compression

To improve utilization of text storage resources and efficiency of data transmission, we proposed two syllable-based Uyghur text compression coding schemes. First, according to the statistics of syllable coverage of the corpus text, we constructed a 12-bit and 16-bit syllable code tables and added commonly used symbols—such as punctuation marks and ASCII characters—to the code tables. To enable the coding scheme to process Uyghur texts mixed with other language symbols, we introduced a flag code in the compression process to distinguish the Unicode encodings that were not in the code table. The experiments showed that the 12-bit coding scheme had an average compression ratio of 0.3 on Uyghur text less than 4 KB in size and that the 16-bit coding scheme had an average compression ratio of 0.5 on text less than 2 KB in size. Our compression schemes outperformed GZip, BZip2, and the LZW algorithm on short text and could be effectively applied to the compression of Uyghur short text for storage and applications.

Eski Uygurlarda Mani Yazısının Gelişimi

Manichaeism and Manichean texts are important fields of study for the researchers of both Ancient Iranian and Turkic languages. During the first half of the 20th century, numerous extremely valuable manuscripts and archaeological items from the Old Uyghur Kingdom period were found in the Turfan oasis located in east of Uyghur Autonomous Region in China especially in expeditions by German archaeological teams. Most of these works were brought to the museums and research centers in Europe. Today, the largest archives of Manichean texts are located in the Turfan Studies department of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. In these large archives of various works, there are many manuscripts containing both religious and non-religious texts belonging to the Manichaean Iranian and Turkic corpus. In our article, the origin of Manichean script, the appearance of Manichean letters, numbers and the other signs in the texts are explained in general. Furthermore, how the tradition of writing had developed and changed was comparatively explained with examples taken from both Middle Iranian and Old Uyghur texts. The texts studied in this study are mainly from the collection of Turfan Studies department of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In this paper the following texts were analyzed: M17, M172, M47, Shapuragan text, M473, M475, M477, M482, M472, M470 (in Middle Persian); M5, M6, M47 (in Parthian); M178, M172 (in Sogdian); U74, London and Berlin fragments of Xwastwanift (in Old Uyghur).