Abstract:

Lüġat-i Ẓurefā-yı Āsitāne-i ʿAliyye (Idiom of the Refined Men in Istanbul) is a versified dictionary aiming to teach the commoners the idiom of High Ottoman Turkish that included many numbers of Arabic and Persian special vocabularies, which was used by the educated class. Neither the name of the author nor the date of writing or copying is provided in the work, but its linguistic elements suggest that it was written in the eighteenth century. The work defines the vocabularies of High Ottoman Turkish by using common spoken words. It is presented in 61 parts, which are designed within the poetic ghazel genre, each including 9 couplets and a separate metric pattern. As the work demonstrates the lexical differences between everyday common Turkish and High Ottoman, it also presents unique linguistic data on the lexical items of popular common Turkish of the period that are not seen in historical sources otherwise on the one hand, and on the phonetic and phonological developments occurred in spoken Turkish on the other.

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