A History of Cathay: A Translation and Linguistic Analysis of a Fifteenth-Century Turkic Manuscript.

• Author: DANKOFF, ROBERT
• Position: Review

A History of Cathay: A Translation and Linguistic Analysis of a Fifteenth-Century Turkic Manuscript. By ILDIKO BELLERHANN. Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series, vol. 162. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY, RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR INNER ASIAN STUDIES, 1995. Pp. v + 200.

A small number of Turkic texts from the fourteenth and following centuries-including the poetical works of Nesimi (d. 1405), Khata[CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]i (Shah Isma[CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]il, d. 1524) and fuzuli (d. 1556)- are composed in a language clearly different from Ottoman and Chagatay, and show many features of modern Azeti or Azerbaijani Turkish. Several researchers, including the author of this book, have proposed the term "Turk [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Ajami" (Turk [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Ajami) for this language, reviving a designation first used by the seventeenth-century Capuchin missionary Raphael du Mans. One thing that has hindered an adequate description of Turk [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Acami is the shortage of prose texts. This book is an attempt to fill the gap.

The "History of Cathay" (Tarikh-i Khata[CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]i) is the work of a certain Hajji bin Muhammad of Ardistan, written in 1494-95. It is the translation of a Persian work by Ghiyathu[CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]d-Din Naqqash that describes the journey from Herat to Peking by an embassy to the Ming court sent by the Timurid emperor Shah Rukh in 1420-22. While the Persian original is no longer extant, its contents were incorporated into the mainstream of Persian historiography-as represented by [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]Abdu[CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]r-Razzaq Samarqandi and Hafiz Abur--in the 1420s, and have been known in the West since Quatremere's translations published in 1843. Thus, as Beller-Hann points out, the interest of the Turkic work is primarily linguistic. The book includes a transcription of the Cambridge manuscript (pp. 129-56; a putative second manuscript, in Florence, proved inaccessible); a translation of the text; and a linguistic analysis, in which Beller-Hann situates this text, and by extension Turk in relation to Old Anatolian and Ottoman Turkish and modem Azen.

The book includes, as a frontispiece, the facsimile of one folio (or rather, one opening, but unconventionally paginated, as Beller-Hann states on p. 3 without adequate explanation, as...