A Grammar of Chagatay

Description

Lincom Europa, 2001. — 437 p. — ISBN: 978-3895865633.An acrolect of the Central Asian Turks from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century, the Chagatay language was a multilayered literary idiom employed in Transoxiana, Khorasan Fergana and East Turkistan, especially in cultural centers such as Samarkand, Bukhara, Herat, Khiva, Kokand and Kashghar. Chagatay was also used in India in the court of the Great Moghuls, in Kazan, and even in the Ottoman Empire. Presently it is regarded as the Classical phase of Modern Uzbek although the scope of Chagatay, especially of the lexion was much broader than what the term Classical Uzbek would imply. Orthography: Chagatay works were written in Arabic script with generous use of matres lectionis: a criterion that makes Chagatay different from Ottoman and allows the reader an easier identification of graphemes. Text publications mostly use transcription with alphabets using modified characters of the Latin, or Russian writing systems. Morphology operates with suffixes, prefixes, postpositions, prepositions Izafet markers, composition and coordination. Suffixes have a definite hierarchy of sequence. Chagatay nouns and pronouns have no grammatical gender. They have singular and plural forms. By their final phoneme we distinguish light and heavy nouns; by the behavior of their last consonant or their second vowel under certain conditions we distinguish weak and strong nouns. There are ten cases of nouns and pronouns. There are no definite or indefinite articles.