Correction Offers on Kutadgu Bilig and its Index

Abstract

Attempting to read a text with historical and philosophical depth, such as Kutadgu Bilig, is a challenging task. This work, one of the most extensive historical texts, bears witness to the words, expressions, and idioms of the Turkish language. Therefore, R. Rahmeti Arat’s work on the text and the prepared index are valuable. However, identifying the cultural elements or values related to which words exist in such a historical and profound work is often quite difficult. While tracing the words and context in the text, you may encounter surprisingly complex examples of problem clusters. Some of the reading and understanding problems in the text may arise from misreading words with the same spelling, failure to identify idioms, or unnoticed language structures. Some problems may also stem from the difficulty in tracking the context and meaning, or they may be related to the poetic nature of the work. In poetic works, language elements may be rearranged or omitted/abbreviated due to the requirements of meter, unlike in prose. Additionally, the structure you encounter in the text may sometimes be used differently or not found in other texts. To correctly read and understand a language structure that does not appear in other texts, the most reliable key is, of course, the context. Historical texts in Turkish are few and quite limited in scope. It cannot be expected that a work will witness all the words, language structures, and meanings of the language used during its time of writing. Different reading problems in such an extensive and historical text are possible. This article proposes corrections to the index prepared based on Arat’s text and notes, focusing on the intralingual transfer.

Ethical committee approval is not required for this research.

The author declares no conflicts of interest in this study.

This research received no external funding.