Persian in the Ottoman Empire as Reflected in Selected farhangs (Dictionaries) of the 15–18th Century: A Cultural Transottoman Configuration

Ani Sargsian
From the 11th to 19th century, Persian was an important and highly influential language of literature, education, partly also of administration and diplomacy, in large regions of the Eastern Islamic World. The dynamics and dispersion of Persian as a language of literature, and a lingua franca, and its surprising vitality and continuity, have not yet been studied sufficiently. With Persian-Turkic dictionaries from the first half of the 16th century, this project selects a well-defined group of primary sources to study the importance and development of Persian as a lingua franca. During the first project phase, the prefaces and colophones of 26 dictionaries that had been composed between 1460 and 1600, were studied, edited and translated. A consistent picture of interrelations and dependencies between the authors of the dictionaries and of their motivations and aims emerged and a development of linguistic and cultural knowledge and its transfer over one and a half centuries could be sketched.
The follow-up project will broaden the source basis, the questions and aims of the project. Based upon the results of the first project phase, the aims and the steps of the working process of the second phase can be defined more exactly and concretely. The focus of the study is no longer on the prefaces, but on the dictionaries’ main text. In addition to Persian and Turkish, the Arabic elements contained in the dictionaries will also be systematically included. Based upon a database of ca. 300 words, the project will statistically investigate the interrelations and interdependencies of the dictionaries. From this database, ca. 30–40 words will be selected for a more detailed philological analysis with the aim to study the complex interrelation of the three languages Persian, Turkic, and Arabic, but also the semantic developments of lexemes, and terms of conceptual history. Besides, a smaller number of dictionaries will be selected to study the development of grammatical knowledge.