The Thematic Vocabulary of the Nouns in Masdar-nāme-yi Turkī

Abstract

The Mughal Empire, which rapidly expanded its borders to encompass much of
India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, possessed a cosmopolitan structure in
which a variety of languages - such as Persian, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu were spoken.
While Arabic retained its authority as the language of religion, from the late 16th century
onward Persian became a key instrument of administration, culture, and power in
the Mughal Empire. Chagatai Turkish, which the founder of the empire, Babur Shah
(1483–1530) (AH 888-937), designated as the official language, gradually turned into
a vernacular known only by the court elite and the military. In an effort to preserve
their ancestral language, court officials and administrators promoted the teaching of
Turkish and supported the production of instructional materials such as grammars and
dictionaries. One of these is the Masdar-nāme-yi Turkī, written by Mîr Îsâoğlu Hâcı
Şâşî in 1090 AH / 1679 CE upon the order of Bahadur Shah I. Prepared bilingually in
Chaghatay Turkish and Persian, the work functions as both a dictionary and grammar,
and while listing nouns it partially employs a thematic method The first part of the
study introduces the Masdar-nāme-yi Turkī, while the second part provides a thematic
classification and content analysis of nouns in the work through document analysis.. The
aim of the study is to draw attention to the vocabulary and thematic structure of the work,
which provides information about the daily life and cultural contex of the period in which
the work was written, and to provide data for research on identifying the shared lexicon of
dictionaries compiled in the Mughal Empire, comparing these dictionaries thematically,
and for lexicoglogical and sociolinguistic studies.