An Introduction to Chaghatay: A Graded Textbook for Reading Central Asian Sources Eric Schluessel Copyright © 2018 by Eric Schluessel Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, California, 94042, USA. Published in the United States of America by Michigan Publishing Manufactured in the United States of America DOI: 10.3998/mpub.10110094 ISBN 978-1-60785-495-1 (paper) ISBN 978-1-60785-496-8 (e-book) An imprint of Michigan Publishing, Maize Books serves the publishing needs of the University of Michigan community by making high-quality scholarship widely available in print and online. It represents a new model for authors seeking to share their work within and beyond the academy, offering streamlined selection, production, and distribution processes. Maize Books is intended as a complement to more formal modes of publication in a wide range of disciplinary areas. http://www.maizebooks.org Cover Illustration: "Islamic Calligraphy in the Nasta`liq style." (Credit: Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/chengwfg/, licensed under CC BY 4.0) Contents Acknowledgments v Introduction vi How to Read the Alphabet xi 1 Basic Word Order and Copular Sentences 1 2 Existence 6 3 Plural, Palatal Harmony, and Case Endings 12 4 People and Questions 20 5 The Present-Future Tense 27 6 Possessive Pronouns and the Simple Past 34 7 A Legal Document 43 8 A Newspaper Story from Kashgar 55 9 Qasim Beg, “Events in Ghulja” 65 10 Craft Manual of the Blacksmiths 74 11 Babur’s Description of Ferghana 89 12 Abu ‘l-Ghazi’s Shajara-i Turk 106 13 Nawāʾī’s Seven Sleepers 124 14 The Tadhkira of Jalāl ud-Dī n Katakī , Part One 133 iv Contents 15 The Tadhkira of Jalāl ud-Dī n Katakī , Part Two 148 16 The Stories of the Prophets 168 Appendix A: Numbers 175 Appendix B: Common Units of Measurement 177 Key to Exercises 179 Chaghatay-English Glossary 187 Index of Grammar and Suffixes 249 About the Author 251 Acknowledgments The publication of this book was supported in full by a grant from the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. I am profoundly grateful for their support. Special thanks go to Pär Cassel, who has believed in the value of this project from the start, and to Douglas Northrup for writing in support of its publication. No one is creative in a vacuum. This book came about from a nexus of concern, love, prod- ding, and the recognition of certain needs. I have learned much from more experienced scholars, not least the inestimable Jun Sugawara, and from colleagues, particularly Nicholas Walmsley, Joshua Freeman, Noriko Unno-Yamazaki, Ildikó Bellér-Hann, Onuma Takahiro, Niko Konto- vas, Rian Thum, and Baihaiti. I must also thank my outstanding teachers of Uyghur, Gülnisa Nazarova and Erkin Qadir, both of whom taught me as much about Turkic linguistics as they did about language. Special thanks go to my own students and friends who were the test sub- jects for these lessons, including Marysia Blackwood, Eli Lee, Evangeline McGlynn, Ali Has- san, and David Porter. Devin Fitzgerald rightly told me to rewrite the section on the alphabet. Several others helped me untangle nasty linguistic and paleographic knots. None of this work would have been possible without the careful guidance of my teachers of Chaghatay. At Indiana University, Devin DeWeese introduced me to my first Chaghatay manuscripts, and most memorably to the weird world of Central Asian hagiography. The gen- eral sequence of this book’s chapters is derived from what we studied under his tutelage. Later, I spent some years on the sofa of Wheeler M. Thackston, retired from Harvard University, who patiently led a group of us through the Baburnama and the works of Navaʾi. He later consented to read with me the vulgar scribblings (though I love them) of Mullah Musa Sayrami, Shah Baba Mashrab, and numerous anonymous others. For this I am eternally grateful. I hope that this book reflects well on both of them. This book is dedicated to my partner Gwendolyn Collaço. Her scholarly brilliance and per- ceptive critiques of the institutions of knowledge production and language teaching inspired this experiment in radical Turkology. Introduction This book is an introduction to the premodern literary Turkic language of Central Asia that scholars have come to call “Chaghatay.” (This is also spelled “Chagatay” or “Chagatai.”) It is intended as a textbook for total novices with no experience in any Turkic language or the Arabo- Persian script, as well as those who have already learned a relevant language like Uyghur or Farsi. By the end of chapter 16, the learner should be capable of reading manuscript narrative sources in Chaghatay with the aid of a dictionary. There are narrow and broad definitions of the Chaghatay language. Narrowly, we can date the development of Chaghatay proper to the fifteenth century in the former realm of Cha- ghatay Khan (r. 1226–1242), son of Chinggis Khan, and his descendants. There such notables as the poet ʿAli Sher Navaʾi (1441–1501) elevated the speech of the Turkic peoples of the Timurid realm to the station of a common literary language alongside Persian. Around the same time, Ẓahir ud-Din Babur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal dynasty, wrote a mainly autobiographical work in Chaghatay, the Baburnama, which remains a classic of Islamic and world literature. No small number of other poets and prose writers followed them in places ranging across Central Asia from present-day Xinjiang, China, to the Ottoman Empire. “Cha- ghatay” in this sense points to a realm of literary production engaged with Turko-Persian high culture. Broadly, “Chaghatay” encompasses writing in Arabo-Persian script along a continuum of Eastern Turkic varieties from the 1400s through the 1950s. In this sense, we can think of Cha- ghatay as a lingua franca for Central Asia that in most places functioned alongside Persian, and in some areas was much more prevalent. The written language, like the spoken, varied significantly across the region, but it was mostly intelligible to different readers and listeners across time and space. That broad continuity is reflected in how people talked about the lan- guage: When people wrote and spoke, they referred to “Turki,” “the language of the Turks,” as opposed to “Farsi.” Turki as a spoken language interacted with the literary legacy of Navaʾi and the clerical legacy of Timurid scribes and so provided people with a common idiom for writing all sorts of texts for centuries. We can thus speak not only of Chaghatay poetry and prose but also of Chaghatay documents of every genre. We might also define “Chaghatay”—or “Turki”—negatively, according to the boundaries of its mutual intelligibility and differences with other Turkic varieties. Chaghatay is not Ottoman or Tatar. These Western Turkic languages have a distinct grammar, different rules for structur- ing speech sounds, and their own general habits of representing those sounds on the page. Nev- ertheless, some Chaghatay writers borrowed forms that we associate with Western Turkic, and in the nineteenth century, intellectuals across Eurasia frequently incorporated these forms into their writing in Eastern Turkic. In Central Asia proper, we can find many examples of written Kazakh that are even more obviously distinct from “Turki,” as the sound rules and grammar of Kazakh are also highly divergent from Eastern Turkic. Introduction vii This textbook uses the broader definition of Chaghatay for three reasons: 1 Students approaching Central Asian sources will not want to limit themselves to the texts that remain from the Timurid period. Scholars increasingly study social and economic documents from later centuries, the archive of which appears to be expanding rapidly. Most of the available archives are comprised mainly of later documents and a broad range of nar- rative sources. 2 This approach will emphasize flexibility in reading. Insofar as students are learning to read “Turki,” they will find it useful to read a variety of texts from a range of times and places, each of which engages with earlier texts in different ways. The grammatical and vocabulary differences between early and late Chaghatay are slight, but orthographic con- ventions are sometimes extremely inconsistent. No textbook can teach you simply to read Chaghatay, but this one will help you learn to parse a sentence—break it into its component parts—and work independently from there. As such, I believe it is pedagogically sounder to begin with simpler, more straight- forward texts, rather than the more elevated, flowery, and Persianate prose of “Classical Chaghatay.” 3 This textbook is intended in many ways for scholars of China and Inner Asia, and the Qing (1636/1644–1911) in particular. These scholars already have access to introductory text- books for reading Manchu, Mongol, and Tibetan, and there is growing interest in reading Chaghatay in its Eastern Turkestani context. Not coincidentally, the bulk of Chaghatay manuscripts available in digital format also come from this region and time period, which makes practicing with them and conducting research relatively easy. I have in mind as my audience a Sinologist or, perhaps, Mongolist who would like to dig into Ming, Qing, and Republican-era Chaghatay petitions, deeds, and local histories for research purposes. Therefore, we will begin with very late Chaghatay from turn-of-the-century Xinjiang in the form of what many linguists then called “Eastern Turki.” The first third of the book intro- duces this late, relatively easy-to-learn variety through exercises in grammar, vocabulary, and translation through a series of progressive and cumulative lessons.