Middle Turkic is a cover term for various literary languages used by the Turkic-speaking peoples of Eurasia from the 13th century up to the early modern times. The entire territory ranges from Central Asia to Egypt, from Lituania and the Volga region to Iran and Anatolia. The era may symbolically begin with the coming of the Mongols and the growing influence of Persian and Arabic. The end of Middle Turkic varies from region to region. 1 November 1928 is a symbolic endpoint in Anatolia considering the introduction of the Latin-based Turkish alphabet. In territories occupied or controlled by the Russians, the October revolution of 25 October 1917 puts an end to Middle Turkic.
Middle Turkic includes the following literary languages:
- Khwarezmian Turkic
- Chagatai
- Armeno-Kipchak
- Middle Karaim
- Mamluk Turkic
- Volga Turkic
- Cuman
- Volga Bulgar
- Ottoman
- Middle Azeri
- Middle Turkmen
The aim of the database is to provide a comprehensive edition of Middle Turkic sources in digital form. The corpus including transcription and translation of manuscript sources uses a unified description model. The texts are encoded in EpiDoc-XML and available under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Due to the size of Middle Turkic including several literary languages and thousands of manuscript sources from a vast territory, the corpus establishment started with the addition of Middle Karaim source as an immediate contribution of the KaraimBIBLE research project to the database. Sources from other Middle Turkic literary languages will gradually be added to the database.
The first source available in the corpus is a Karaim translation of the Torah and the Haftarah (ADub.III.73) from 1720.
KaraimBIBLE is a research project financed by the European Research Council (ERC) the basis of which will be a comprehensive edition of the entire Karaim Bible based on carefully selected sources from the 15th–20th centuries. The sources will receive grammatical and palaeographical descriptions. Beyond that, it will be investigated whether the Biblical manuscripts and the Karaite semi-cursive script types belong to one or multiple scribal traditions in order to better understand the way these translations were created. The Karaim texts will be translated into English and efforts will be made to discover further manuscripts. See further the homepage of the KaraimBIBLE project.
The project leading to this application has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 802645).