New book: Chagatay

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Chagatay
ANDRAS J. E. BODROGLIGETI
University of California, Los Angeles

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.

CONTENTS OF THE GRAMMAR:
        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.
        Adjectives have no special class marker. Some of the means of
derivation may signal that the derivative is an adjective. There is no
strict boundary between adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives often occur
as nouns and can take case endings and plural signs. Adjectives have
three degrees: positive, comparative, and superlative. The superlative
also serves as the absolute degree. Intensive forms are created by
morphological and analytic means. Stems: weak and strong, light and
heavy, simple  and derivative. Primary stems: positive, negative,
possibilitive, impossibilitive. Secondary stems: Active, passive,
reflexive, reciprocal, adjutative, cooperative, causative, desiderative,
similative, transitive, ditransitive, intransitive. Coordinated
[serialized] stems. Compound stems.
        Finite forms: person (first, second, and third), number (singular and
plural). Structure: stems, particles, themes, personal signs.
Tenses: Present, future, past. Moods: imperative, voluntative,
indicative, optative,  conditional, temporal. Aspects:  perfect,
imperfect, progressive.
        Negation: Negative stems, and negative particles are used. Affirmation
by affirmative particles and adverbs. Traces of an honorific system:
lexical, suffixal means.
        Nonfinite forms: Verbal nouns (agent nouns, action nouns infinitives).
Gerunds (imperfect, antecedental, inceptive, purposive, resolutive,
terminative, compensative, copulative, negative. Participles (past,
present, aorist: positive, negative, necessitative, agental, resultative
and status-related).
        Adverbs have no special category markers. There is no strict class
boundary between adverbs and adjectives. There are simple, derivative,
and phrasal adverbs.
        Six types of noun phrases. Sentence structure: Simple [nominal,
verbal], expanded and compound sentences. Clause structure: finite,
nonfinite. Clause chaining: coordination by juxtapositon, connective
gerunds, and  conjunctions. Subordination: The main sentence. Relative
clauses, completive clauses.

3 89586 564 8.
     Languages of the World/Materials 340.
     Ca. 300pp. USD 70 / DM 138 / # 48. Sept. 2001.


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