THE REFLECTION OF OTTOMAN-TURKISH LANGUAGE STUDIES IN KAZAKH-LANGUAGE CONTENT

Yergali Yesbossynov

2025

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DOI 10.63051/kos.2025.2.255
Data confidence 70 medium
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Abstract

Despite the fact that the origins of oriental studies in Kazakhstan date back to the Soviet period, today this branch of science has formed as an independent direction with a clearly expressed Kazakhstani academic context. This is confirmed by the publications of orientalists in the Kazakh language. One of the first works in this direction, including the study of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman-Turkish language, was the 1997 edition entitled "History of the Turkic Peoples" in Almaty. However, if we consider this from the standpoint of modern scientific requirements, there is a shortage of such academic publications. The purpose of this article is to consider the lexical features of the Ottoman-Turkish language, as well as its social and historical aspects, taking into account thematic specifics, using both domestic and foreign printed and digital sources. The main objective is to present the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of Kazakh-language research in this area. In this context, an important event was the publication of a catalog of Ottoman-language written monuments stored in the rare manuscripts fund of the National Library of Kazakhstan. The article provides a statistical overview of the structure of this catalog and specifically highlights one of the studies published in Istanbul, including a photograph of the original cover. The materials collected during the preparation of the article showed that there are certain gaps in Kazakh university textbooks concerning the history and language of the Ottoman Empire. This can be illustrated, for example, by a quote from the publication “Turkic Languages” (Astana, 2015): “The Soviet government treated pan-Turkic content with caution, trying to hinder as much as possible the comprehensive study of common Turkic patterns.” We consider this fact as a continuation of the negative trends of the Soviet period. In many cases, textbooks are mechanical translations from Russian, which retain the rhetorical patterns of the so-called “Sovietism.” This, in turn, damages the scientific nature and reliability of the works and limits their thematic potential and content. The chronology, structure and content of the history of the Turkic peoples, their languages ​​and socio-political development are not limited by modern state borders. These processes are much deeper and more multifaceted. The analysis of sources and case studies devoted to the Ottoman Empire in this article is aimed at attracting the attention of orientalists to the relevance of this topic.