Chaghatay is an elusive term generally used in scholarly literature to designate the language of all Central Asian Turkic texts produced between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries in a vast geographical area extending from Anatolia in the West to the Tarim Basin in the East and from the Volga region in the North to Northern India in the South. It is important to note here that native authors hardly ever applied the word Chaghatay as a linguistic term and when they did, the term was meant to refer to the language of the Persianate classical literary tradition Mīr ʿAlī-šīr Nawāyī (1441–1501) established in the mid-fifteenth century in the Timurid heartlands and it didn't mean the simple Turkic that for example the Khivan ruler Abū al-Ghāzī (r. 1644–1663/64) used for writing his historical works in the seventeenth century. The term Chaghatay as it is used today gained ground quite late in European scholarship after the publication of Ćagataische Sprachstudien (Leipzig, 1867) Arminius Vambery's (1832–1913) pioneering work on the subject. The inconsistencies in the use of the scholarly term Chaghatay can be assessed very well by the short summary of its history Éva Kincses-Nagy supplies the reader with in the general introduction to her book (pp. 16–17). Though the author fails to give her own definition of the term at this point, from the sources she consulted throughout her research it seems to be clear that she uses the term in a broad sense covering classical poetical texts composed in early-fifteenth century Khurasan to historical works written in simple Turkic in the late-seventeenth century in the Volga–Ural area.

Kincses-Nagy's aim is to collect words of Mongolic origin from an apparently huge corpus of Central Asian Turkic texts. Her research is an important one from two points of view. First, because Chaghatay is thought to be a Turkic language where “the influence of Mongolian was restricted to a number of loanwords from the domains of warfare and administration”Footnote ¹ and secondly because modern scholarly works on Chaghatay lexicography are not abundant. Students and scholars of Central Asian Turkic know quite well that one of the biggest problems is the lack of easy to use and reliable dictionaries like “the Redhouse” and “the Steingass” in Ottoman and Persian studies respectively. Without proper dictionaries those who study Chaghatay texts are forced to resort to native Chaghatay–Persian, Chaghatay–Ottoman vocabularies and nineteenth century general Turkic dictionaries that cannot always provide the data needed. In this situation any reliable modern work that can facilitate the reading of Central Asian Turkic texts counts as a welcome contribution to the field and Éva Kincses-Nagy's book is by all means one of them.

The book consists of four larger units, a general introduction (pp. 9–36), the lexicon (pp. 38–239), the finishing chapters containing the author's conclusions (pp. 240–261) and the bibliography (pp. 263–292).

The introductory chapters are short and they aim at supplying the reader with essential information on topics like the history of Turkic–Mongolic language contacts, the place of Chaghatay in the Turkic language family or the history of research previously done. This Introduction also lists the sources used, gives an outline of the theoretical framework for studying loanwords and describes the structure of the lexicon entries.

This chapter includes Kincses-Nagy's ideas on how Mongolic loanwords entered Chaghatay and her views raise a few questions. Kincses-Nagy appears to suggest that the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century resulted in a period of Turkic–Mongolic bilingualism that had an impact up until the fifteenth century when the Chaghatay literary language emerged. Even if the author's supposition is correct and the Mongolic linguistic presence in the Timurid heartlands in Central Asia and Khurasan was strong enough to influence the use of everyday Turkic two hundred years after the Mongols arrived, its impact on a literary language that was shaped to serve the purposes of a classical Persianate literary tradition couldn't have been significant. Classical Chaghatay as a literary language developed in a bilingual Persian–Turkic linguistic environment where being cultured was equal to being well-versed in Islamicate Persian literary culture.

There's no doubt that even the earliest known Chaghatay literary texts aimed at imitating Persian models and tried to comply with the rules of a rigid and conventional Persianate literary system. Most authors were not simple people constantly subjected to a supposed Mongolic influence; they were members of a highly cultured and educated Islamicate élite who were bilingual in Turkic and Persian rather than in Turkic and Mongolic. This world is very far from the world of Mongolic speaking nomads.

The process of creating a Turkic classical literary tradition and a language that would serve the purpose of producing quality content in Turkic was started by authors like Aḥmadī (fl. late 14^th/early 15^th c.), Yūsuf Amīrī (fl. early 15^th c.), Luṭfī (d. 1492). It was given a great push by Nawāyī (1441–1501) an educated intellectual statesman and administrator who wrote poetry both in Persian and Turkic. He composed Turkic texts in all the important classical genres of his age and created a textual canon that served as a model for oncoming generations of poets and writers even as late as the nineteenth century. The creation of a classical canon also meant the construction of a signifying universe that included a wide range of various rhetoric devices, poetic images and most importantly a heavily Persianised vocabulary. It is true that this poetic lexicon contained Mongolic loans as well. Nevertheless, the words of Mongolic origin present in the vocabulary of this emerging new literary language were not newcomers that entered the language as a result of a continuous Turkic–Mongolic language contact but rather they were part of the classical lexicon Chaghatay inherited from its Turkic predecessor languages or from Persian.Footnote ² Scattered remarks in the text of Kincses-Nagy's entriesFootnote ³ and contemporary Persian sources seem to confirm this hypothesis.

The example of the noun ayalghu ‘tone, melody’ illustrates this point well. Though according to Kincses-Nagy the first occurrence for the word are from the works of Nawāyī, it seems to have entered the vocabulary of Persian texts a bit earlier as the compound ayalghu-pardāz ‘musician’ makes its appearance in the description of a feast in Muʿīn al-Dīn Natanzī’s chronicle written in 1413.Footnote ⁴ The context of Natanzī’s account suggests that ayalghu wasn't used for ‘melody’ in a general sense but it had a special meaning and denoted a special kind of folk or Mongolian tune. A long list of military terms or words pertaining to falconry could also be mentioned here that made their appearance in Persian texts much earlier, in the Mongol period.

An important issue that could have been discussed in this part of the book is how frequently words of Mongolic origin appear in Chaghatay texts and which semantic fields are most heavily influenced by them. It can be supposed that even during the initial phase of Chaghatay the rate of Mongolic loans changed from author to author, from text to text and from genre to genre. A remark by Kincses-Nagy characterising one of her sources, the Tazkirat al-Awliyā an Islamic hagiographical work as a text not abounding in Mongolic loans (p. 20) suggests that she realised these differences but, as her results indicate, she failed to capitalise on this opportunity for a deep and thorough synchronic research.

As one of the early texts Kincses-Nagy also made use of suggests even contemporary authors were well-aware of the differences characterising the language use of various social or geographical groups and when they deemed it appropriate poets used dialectal words as a stylistic device. In Aḥmadī’s Debate of Stringed Instruments the tanbura an instrument used in classical music has an argument with the yatughan a folk instrument of Mongolic origin.Footnote ⁵ During their debate the yatughan tries to show himself as an educated gentleman and uses many Persian words and expressions in his speech. In his answer the tanbura aims at highlighting the yatughan’s ignorance and lack of educationFootnote ⁶ and while doing so he uses mostly Turkic words, three of which are included in Kincses-Nagy's list.Footnote ⁷

Besides the synchronic differences observable in the use of Mongolic loans in various registers of the vocabulary it can also be surmised that there can be chronological differences as well. It is possible that historical events, the coming of the nomad Uzbeks at the turn of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries or the Kalmuck invasion could have a bearing on the vocabulary of Central Asian Turkic and these changes are reflected by texts. It would be good to learn how history affected the language in the post-Nawāyī period and whether there are any chronological or regional differences in the number of Mongolic loans in Chaghatay texts. Though research done in the field in the past one and a half centuries resulted in a huge amount of text editions ranging from poetry and literary prose to historical, religious and medical texts that would make such analyses possible,Footnote ⁸ the range and the quantity of the textual sources Kincses-Nagy chose to use is not sufficient for these purposes.

Kincses-Nagy's Chaghatay sources can be divided into three groups: original texts, native dictionaries and ninteenth century lexicographical works. As far as textual sources are concerned the early period of Chaghatay is represented fairly well. Though the subchapter introducing Kincses-Nagy's sources doesn't mention them but from the bibliography it is clear that the most important texts were checked. Still, a work much quoted in native dictionaries, Haydar Tilbe's (d. early 15^th c.) Makhzan al-asrār is unfortunately missing from the list.Footnote ⁹

The classical period that abounds in texts is treated in a surprisingly disappointing way. Kincses-Nagy used only one text, a short though famous pamphlet by Nawāyī, the Muhākamat al-Lughatayn. In this short treatise Nawāyī does his best to extol the virtues of Turkic compared to Persian endeavouring to convince his fellow poets to use Turkic for poetic purposes. It is a pity that Kincses-Nagy singled out only one text out of Nawāyī’s enormous literary output because it would have been interesting to see how Nawāyī himself implemented the principles he advised his contemporaries to follow and how often he used the Turkic words of Mongolic origin he advertised in the Muhākamat. Kincses-Nagy's decision to leave almost the whole of Nawāyī’s oeuvre untouched means an exciting opportunity left unused because the twenty volume edition of Nawāyī’s works published in Tashkent is available online in a searchable form on the homepage of the National Library of Uzbekistan.Footnote ¹⁰

For the post-Nawāyī period Kincses-Nagy selected only four historical works, Bābur's autobiography, Abū al-Ghāzī’s chroniclesFootnote ¹¹ and the Daftar-i Chingis-nāma, an anonymous seventeenth-century text from the Volga–Ural region. Kincses-Nagy's choices for this period are rather problematic. Though it is true that Abū al-Ghāzī’s works on the history of Turks and Turkmens are usually categorised as Chaghatay, Abū al-Ghāzī’s statement that in order to make his text understandable even to a five year old child he used plain Turkic and avoided Chaghatay, Persian and Arabic expressions seems to refute this categorisation.Footnote ¹² The inclusion of the Chingis-nāma poses an even greater theoretical problem as the editors of the text, Mária Ivanics and Myrkasim A. Usmanov think that the language of the text is “sixteenth and eighteenth-century literary Volga Tatar”Footnote ¹³ and not Central Asian Turkic.

The second group of sources Kincses-Nagy made use of are native dictionaries written between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. These lexicographical works can be divided into two groups and should be treated separately. The first group consists of Nawāyī dictionaries. Scholars working on Chaghatay tend to view these lexicographical works as Chaghatay dictionaries. This classification however is true only if the term Chaghatay is meant in a narrow sense referring to the classical Turkic Nawāyī used as the Badāyiʿ al-Lughat (late 15^th/early 16^th c.), the Abushqa (16^th c.), the Sanglakh (18^th c.) and the Bahjat al-Lughat (19^th c.) were compiled with the intent of facilitating the reading of Nawāyī’s work for a readership in Iran or the Ottoman Empire that due to the differences between Turkic languages had difficulties in understanding some parts of the texts. The authors of these dictionaries as Mahdī Khān (d. between 1759 and 1768) writes “had an insurmountable drive … to collect difficult words from his works and compile a dictionary of them”.Footnote ¹⁴

With the exception of the Abushqa Footnote ¹⁵ the published versions of the works belonging to the first group are not easy to use. The original Persian text of the Badāyiʿ al-Lughat and the Sanglakh were published in a not easily legible facsimile which scares scholars and induces them to use the various word lists prepared by the editors instead of the full text. These word lists however do not contain all the information available in the entries’ texts and relying solely on the lists can lead to serious misunderstandings.

In her entry on the word abaġa (‘uncle’) for example Kincses-Nagy refers to Borovkov's facsimile edition of the Badāyīʿ al-Lughat. However, she fails to inform the reader that the noun is not contained in the dictionary part but in a word list added to the original text of the early-eighteenth century manuscript by a later hand should greatly influence the evaluation of the data concerned.

It's not mentioned by Kincses-Nagy either that several of the entries in the Sanglakh contain an important notice: “in Mongolic it means… (bi-lughat-i Mughūlī … buvad) and she treats them as Chaghatay words. In his entry on the word möŋän ‘silver’ for example Kincses-Nagy writes that “it's a hapax in Chaghatay” in spite of the explicit statement found in the Sanglakh that “bi-lughat-i Mughūli nuqra buvad … (In Mongolian it means silver)”.Footnote ¹⁶ An exception of Kincses-Nagy's usual treatment of such words is found in the entry doġolan ‘lame’ (p. 99) where she writes that it's “a foreign word in Sanglakh”. It is hard to understand the inconsistencies in the treatment of words termed Mongolic by Mahdī Khān and it's difficult to explain why foreign words that are not part of the vocabulary of Chaghatay are added to the list of Mongolic copies in Chaghatay.Footnote ¹⁷

Coming back to Mahdī Khān's recurring remark it suggests that he was well aware of the fact that words he termed Mongolic were not part of Turkic vocabulary.Footnote ¹⁸ In the Mabānī al-Lughat a short summary of Turkic grammar meant as a preface to the Sanglakh Mahdī Khān mentions that he included several Rūmī (Ottoman Turkish) and Mongolic words in his dictionary as well.Footnote ¹⁹ Though he doesn't say where he collected these words the text makes it clear that his main sources for Ottoman words were Fuzūlī’s (d. 1556) poetic oeuvre and Saʿd al-Dīn's chronicle.Footnote ²⁰ As far as the source or sources for Mongolic words are concerned it is possible that these he came across in historical works from the Mongol period, perhaps in Vassāf's chronicle. Mahdī Khān was a historian himself and wrote two chronicles covering the rule of Nādir Shāh. One of them titled Durra-yi Nādira was written with the intention of surpassing the florid style of Vassāf's work a text considered one of the greatest achievements of Persian narrative prose so it's not without reason to believe that Mahdī Khān knew Vassāf's work and other chronicles from the period very well and he was familiar with the foreign words included in them. The entry čumča ‘shirt’ where Mahdī Khān included a reference to the fourth volume of Vassāf's chronicle seems to support this theory.Footnote ²¹

Speaking of Nawāyī dictionaries it's a pity that Kincses-Nagy didn't check the Budapest manuscript of the Bahjat al-Lughat that would have been easily accessible for her at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of SciencesFootnote ²² and used only a list of selected words included in an article by József Thúry a previous owner of the manuscript because she would have been able to see that in a lot of cases Fath ʿAlī Qājār Qazwīnī simply repeated what he read in the Sanglakh.Footnote ²³

The other group of native dictionaries and word lists used by Kincses-Nagy were compiled in Mughal India from the late-sixteenth century onwards.Footnote ²⁴ Since they targeted language learners who wished to study Turkic for practical purposes the vocabulary contained in them can be considered as a snapshot of the basic vocabulary of contemporary everyday Turkic as it appeared in Mughal India where besides standard Central Asian Turkic other Turkic languages, Özbek, Iranian Turkic and Ottoman were also present.

The case of the word bökä ‘wrestler, hero’ illustrates this point well.Footnote ²⁵ Kincses-Nagy's entry makes it clear that Bābur considered the noun an Özbek word which means that for him it wasn't an ordinary Central Asian Turkic word and he considered it part of the vocabulary of the Turkic speaking nomadic Özbek tribes brought with them from their original South-Western Siberian homeland. Özbek nomads originally spoke a Qipchaq language quite different from the Central Asian Turkic Bābur and Nawāyī used. It seems though that, by the time Abū al-Ghāzī’s chronicles were written in the second half of the seventeenth century the word bökä had become part of the vocabulary of Central Asian Turkic and the fact that the Kelür-nāma contains the word reflects this situation. It's interesting to note here that in the case of bökä Kincses-Nagy refers to a passage in Abū al-Ghāzī’s text where the word appears together with another Mongolic loan märgän ‘sharpshooter’ as üčünçisi taqï märgän ve bökä erdi (‘the third one of them was a sharpshooter and a strong man’).Footnote ²⁶

In the entry čidär ‘hobbles for horses’ (p. 81) Kincses-Nagy refers to “the so called Calcutta Dictionary”. This Turkic–Persian dictionary was compiled by Fazl Allāh Khān Barlas for the use of a Mughal prince perhaps during the reign of Aurangzeb.Footnote ²⁷ Though the sources of the dictionary are not mentioned in the short preface, entries like čamghur ‘rain’, judruq ‘fist’, danïp “knowing”, demür “iron” suggest that the words contained in the dictionary are from various Turkic languages and dialectsFootnote ²⁸ which would mean that words appearing in the dictionary are not necessarily part of the vocabulary of the Chaghatay literary language.

The third group of sources Kincses-Nagy used consists of dictionaries written with the exception of Suat Ünlüs's work by nineteenth-century authors who as far as Chaghatay words are concerned based their dictionaries on almost exactly the same native lexicographical works and texts and thus they often repeat the same data. Though Kincses-Nagy lists the sources Abel Pavet de Courteille (1821–1889), Julius Theodore Zenker (1811–1884), Lazar Zakharovich Budagov (1812–1878) and Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff (1837–1918) used she didn't compare the data contained in their dictionaries and in the list of sources given in the entries it often appears as if they were independent pieces of evidence.

The largest unit and the main part of Kincses-Nagy's book contains a lexicon of approximately 300 headwords of Mongolic origin arranged in alphabetical order. The entries are well-structured. Headwords are followed by essential pieces of information (transliteration of the Arabic script forms, meaning(s), list of sources, Mongolian etymon). The first two paragraphs list all the Mongolian and Turkic languages where the word occurs and give all available forms together with references to the sources. The third paragraph provides the reader with further information on the word's first occurrence in Turkic texts and includes a short account of the history of research. All entries are finished with a list of references to relevant items in scholarly literature.

It has already been mentioned that Éva Kincses-Nagy seems to have relied on various word lists prepared by the editors of the printed versions when it came to native lexicographical works and she didn't check the original text of the entries. This method resulted in failing to find essential pieces of data.

Out of the many examples a few should be highlighted here. The earliest source mentioned by Kincses-Nagy for the noun šïralġa ‘a piece of the meat of the prey’ (p. 201) is the Bābur-nāma. Nevertheless, the Sanglakh, a source also contained in the entry's list, gives a reference to an earlier source, Nawāyī’s Mahbūb al-Qulūb finished in 1501 where it occurs in the 35^th chapter, a section on falconers and hunters.Footnote ²⁹

Atalay's edition of the Abushqa, a sixteenth-century Chaghatay–Ottoman Nawāyī dictionary is the first in the list of sources for the verb bürke- ‘to cover’ (p. 73). The entry in the Abushqa however contains a reference to an earlier text, Nawāyī’s divan titled Fawāyid al-Kibar compiled between 1492 and 1498.Footnote ³⁰ The poem containing the word is also included in the Nawādir al-Nihāya an earlier redaction of Nawāyī’s lyrical poems copied in Herat in 1487 which would put the date of the first appearance of the word in a text a few decades earlier than it was previously thought.Footnote ³¹

It's the Abushqa again appearing first in the list of sources referred to in the entry dapqur ‘row of troops’ (p. 93) and Kincses-Nagy writes that the noun's “first occurrence is in early 16^th century Chaghatay”. However, a short glance to the editon of the Abushqa is enough to see that the text quotes two works by Nawāyī, Farhād wa Shīrīn composed in 1484 and Sadd-i Iskandarī finished one year later.Footnote ³² Both are naturally earlier than the Abushqa.

The case of bürke illustrates how important it is - to use texts instead of simply relying on dictionaries. While “Chaghatay” dictionaries usually give only the meaning of a given word, texts provide a historical context and through a series of data the career of a word could be drawn. A thorough analysis of a corpus of Chaghatay texts can help to determine when a word first appeared in the written language and how frequently it was used. If a scholar relies only on dictionaries and doesn't compare their data with pieces of evidence supplied by texts, the research can necessarily lead to misunderstandings. Though the list of sources given for bürke- ‘to cover’ in Kincses-Nagy's book would suggest that it was a common everyday verb there seems to be the only one piece of evidence for its use in written Chaghatay. The source in question is Nawāyī’s poem mentioned above. It should be noted here though that bürken- the reflexive form of bürke- also occurs once in Chaghatay texts, in a poem composed by Husayn Bayqara a contemporary and friend of Nawāyī.Footnote ³³ Besides these two pieces of data the research done on a wide range of sources from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century hasn't yielded more results.

The third unit of the book contains the results of the linguistic analyses Kincses-Nagy has done on words of Mongolic origins she found in her sources. This part of the book contains sub-chapters on the phonology of these words, on issues pertaining to semantics, on the various types of loanwords and on the characteristics of the Mongolic language the loans were borrowed from. The book finishes in a comprehensive bibliography that could still be enriched with several important items like several more articles by Zuhal Kargı Ölmez written on the subject.Footnote ³⁴

As a conclusion it can be said that though Kincses-Nagy's book can be seen as a book of missed opportunities for reasons explained above it is still a useful volume and a welcome contribution to the field of Chaghatay studies.