Abstract:

In Turkey, studies of Chagatay literature and language are largely based on written works, including literary, religious, and historical texts. The existence of folklore from the Chagatay period is not sufficiently known. The activities of compiling folklore of the Chagatay period coincide with the second half of the 19th century, after the occupation of Central Asia by the Russians. The subject of this paper is the article Zagadki Sartov (Riddles of Sarts), which was included in a work named Poslovitsı i Zagadki Sartov (Proverbs and Riddles of Sarts), compiled in Turkestan and published in Tashkent in 1895 by Russian orientalist Ostroumov after the occupation. The article by Ostroumov is very important in that it is the first study on riddles compiled from Turkestan and written down in the last period of the Chagatay. There are 150 riddles in the article. While Ostroumov listed only the Russian translation of the proverbs in his work, he combined both the Russian translation and the Arabic letter text of the riddles. In this paper, which aims to present riddles in Turkey, the text written in Arabic letters was transcribed, the text was translated into Turkish, and the riddles were classified according to their themes. In addition, some words have been evaluated, their traces have been searched in contemporary Turkic dialects, and the distinct morphological features of the riddles have been tried to be determined.

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