Tatar Lexicography and Tatar Lexicon

Abstract

Tatar, which has a deep-rooted heritage as a written language in the northwest of the Turkic World, has been under Russian sovereignty since 1552. In the beginning of the XVIIIth Century, the Russian Tsar Petro founded the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724 and due to defining the East as a research area, orientalism and Turcology became a valuable discipline. During the tsarist era, for commercial and religious reasons, Tatar language became a prime subject of learning and research. The Tatar manuscript dictionaries, prepared from the late 17th century, are much more developed, especially in the 19th century: In Kazan University, which was founded in 1804, it is clearly observed that both language studies and Turcology have developed very much. Among the Tatars, in which modernism began to develop in the 19th century, bilingual dictionaries for Russian are much more comprehensive and qualified than the previous examples. Tatarian encyclopedists such as S. Helfin and K. Nasiri, and Russian lexicographers, as well as A. Voskresensky, made extensive contributions to this field. Thus, the good examples of Tatar lexicography, which began to develop in the 19th century, increased in the early 20th century. Famous Turkologist N. F. Katanov also participated in the field of these bilingual dictionaries, writers such as M. Kurbangaliyef, R. Gezizof and J. Kuliyef appeared. ForTatar language, which began to develop as a language of education in the Soviet period, lexicography studies gave brought results especially in the 1950s, as intralinguistic encyclopedic dictionaries and bilingual dictionaries along with Russian. Thus, Tatar lexicography, which is about two centuries old, has a varied repertoire ranging from terminology to etymology.