Dictionary of the Turkic Languages

by Kurtuluş Öztopçu (Editor), Zhoumagaly Abuov, Nasir Kambarov

This multi-language dictionary covers the eight major Turkic languages: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uighur, Kazakh, Kirgiz, and Tatar.
2000 headwords in English are translated into each of the eight Turkic languages. Words are organized both alphabetically and topically. Original script and Latin transliteration are provided for each language. For ease of use, alphabetical indices are also given for the eight languages.
This is an invaluable reference book for both students and learners and for those enaged in international commerce, research, diplomacy and academic and cultural exchange.

Genres: Linguistics

361 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an odd book. The authors aimed at a comparative dictionary of the Turkic languages by translating an English word list into the following: Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uighur, and Uzbek. All languages are represented in their original orthography, with no transliteration, so only Cyrillic for the languages of the former USSR and only Arabic for Uighur.

The problem is that this book is a mere curiosity. The English wordlist that served as a source for the project is quite short, so not many words are contained herein. Nowhere do the authors explain the origin of this English wordlist, and it seems rather quirky. For example, we get “dessert” and “subway”, but not lots of terminology that would have been important to early Turkic culture and subsistance and were inherited to these languages from the parent Proto-Turkic.

Ultimately a book like this could have only come from the 1990s when Western publishers were so pleased to now have contact with academics in the former USSR, that they would take anything.

[Halil Ertürk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has problem about Uzbek letters.
Page xiii
It is supposed to be correct.

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

This dictionary is really nonalingual: English-Azerbaijani-Kazakh-Kyrgyz-Tatar-Turkish-Turkmen-Uighur-Uzbek, the most important (West-)Turkic languages in one book with about 2000 entries, sorted alphabetically. What it lacks, is a more detailed description in the beginning. The alphabets of the languages are shortly presented but the pronunciation guide isn't very helpful (too short!). However, for the Turkic languages not written in Latin letters, a romanization has been given, so you don't need to know the Cyrillic or Arabic alphabet to read it. I'm also really grateful about the inverse index which takes up about half of the book. So it's not only from English to all the Turkic languages, but also vice versa, for each language. I just wished it'd contain Chuvash and Sakha (Yakut) as well! And maybe Kumyk.