Paper abstract:

In the late 17th century, the Russian Empire started its colonial expansion into the Qazaq steppe, thus bringing Russians into direct, extended contact with the Qazaqs for the first time. Some records of this encounter have been preserved in the Russian imperial archival record. These include diplomatic correspondence, written in Chagatay from the Qazaqs to the Russians, as well as manuscript dictionaries and other unpublished sources written in Cyrillic and Arabic scripts. Today, many of these materials are kept in the archive of the Academic of Science in St Petersburg.

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of an 18th century’s Russian-Qazaq dictionary manuscript, one of the earliest such manuscripts, which can be dated to 1774. The dictionary manuscript is in good shape and most of it is in Cyrillic, with only a small portion in Arabic. It is essentially a list of words, phrases, and simple sentences with Qazaq equivalents, translations of the Lord’s Prayer, and a few other miscellaneous inserts. This linguistic data, dating back to the eighteenth century, represents the earliest available record of spoken Qazaq. It is also distinguished by its linguistic characteristics, which display phonological, morphosyntactic features unique to the 18th century Qazaq language. By developing a synchronic linguistic analysis of these historical materials, we are able to explore the phonological and morphosyntactic information that they contain and highlight their value as a source of natural linguistic data. This paper will discuss briefly the historical context in which the dictionary manuscript was produced then provide an introduction to the physical and paleographical characteristics of the manuscript. It also will discuss some of the major phonological and morphosyntactic properties of the Qazaq language recorded in the Arabic writing system, with emphasis on the challenges posed during the morphophonemic transcription and transliteration process.