VATICAN VERSION OF THE DICTIONARY «ASH-SHUZUR AL-ZAHABIYYA»: RESEARCH, VARIANTS, STRUCTURE

In 1619, Ibn Muhammad Salih created the work “Ash-Shuzur al-Zahabiyya fi-l-Lugha al-Turkiyya” (The Golden Nugget of the Turkic Language) in Egypt, which is the last linguistic and lexicographic work written in the Mamluk-Kipchak language. This dictionary was first translated in 1949 by Besim Atalay, and for a long time, no further research was conducted. Only in recent years have Turkish researchers Sami Başkın (2012), Raghed Muhammad (2013), and Mustafa Yiğit (2016) written dissertations on one of its versions. In Kazakhstan, no specialized studies have been conducted on this monument until now. The scientific novelty of this article lies in the identification of 36 manuscript variants, and for the first time, an unknown version from the Vatican is introduced into academic discourse. The main goal of the research was to bring the “ash-Shuzur al-Zahabiyya” dictionary from the Vatican Apostolic Library into academic circulation, catalog its versions in world libraries, determine its storage locations, provide new information about its structure and content, and review existing research. As part of the research tasks, a codicological description of the Vatican version was planned, along with an examination of the features of other manuscript variants, their attribution, corrections, lexical statistics, preservation, etc. To identify the linguistic and cultural features of the dictionary, methods of description, comparison, synchronic and diachronic analysis, systematization, and narrative were used. As a result, a critical text was compiled based on six versions of the monument, and the previously unexamined part “Muqaddima” was fully translated, bringing new data into the research sphere. In conclusion, the usefulness of the monument for comparative studies in the fields of historical lexicology, etymology, semasiology, onomasiology, dialectology, ethnolinguistics, etc., was confirmed, in comparison with modern Kipchak and Turkic languages, as well as for studying data on the history of the ethnic group (ethnogenesis), the language of the ethnic group (glottogenesis), the basic structures of the vernacular, and connections with related languages, etc.