New books: Chagatay Grammar

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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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