Sanglax: A Persian Guide to the Turkish Language

Mirza Mahdi Xan Astarabadi came from a Persian bureaucratic family. He had for a time served Hadir Shah (r. 1736-1747) as Chief Secretary and wrote two ornate histories of his master’s eventful reign. The present work was written in or near 1759 as a product of his retirement. Sanglax, meaning Stony place , begins with a grammar of the variety of Turkish which achieved the status of a literary language in Eastern Iran and the adjoining regions of Central Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries and is known as Cagatay but the bulk of the work consists of a Turkish-Persian dictionary. The main emphasis here is again on the vocabulary of Cagatay, through a substantial proportion of Rumi or Ottoman words are also listed. The work is regarded as the most useful of the traditional dictionaries for Cagatay; its author had thoroughly studied the texts of what was by his time essentially a dead language, and above all the works of the 15th century poet and statesman Nawa'i. The text is given in reduced facsimile from the early MS in the possession of the E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust, which was collated with the author’s own copy. In his introduction the editor discusses sources, spelling and phonology among other things; he also provides thorough indices.