A New Evaluation on Kitâbü’l-Gunya

Abstract

Kitâbü’l-Gunya, a fiqh book, is one of the important works of Old Anatolian Turkish. The scholarly publication of the work was made by Muzaffer Akkuş in 1995 based on the only copy of the work registered in Bursa Old Manuscript and Printed Works Library number 4006. In his analysis, Akkuş identified some archaic elements in the linguistic features of the work and considered Kitâbü’l-Gunya as one of the mixed dialect texts in which the Old Turkish written language and Oghuz-Kypchak features were seen together during the foundation period of Anatolian Turkish. However, in his study on Kitâbü’l-Gunya in 1995, Semih Tezcan stated that the work was transferred into Old Anatolian Turkish from a source written in Khwarezm Turkish, as a result of the findings obtained from his detailed linguistic study of the work. The aim of this study is both to justify the assumption put forward by Semih Tezcan with concrete evidence, and to reach a more advanced prediction. First of all, the transcription of two unearthed pages of a copy of Kitâbü’l-Gunya written in Khwarezm Turkish and the part corresponding to the copy transferred to Old Anatolian Turkish, are compared. Then, the linguistic data that Tezcan associated, the work with Khwarezm Turkish were re-evaluated, and new evidence is added to these data. It is argued that the work was not directly transferred from Khwarezm Turkish, and that there must have been a copy written in another historical Turkish written language in between.