THE SEMANTICS OF THE WORD «TURK» IN THE BABURNAMA

Abstract

This article examines the semantics of the lexeme türk in the Baburnama (Chagatai Waqāyiʿ, «Events»), written in Chagatai Turkic by Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur in the sixteenth century. The study aims to analyse the occurrences of this lexeme on the basis of the original text and to determine its semantic structure, referential range, and connotative features. The facsimile of the Hyderabad manuscript of the Baburnama was used as the primary source. Contextual-semantic and comparative analyses demonstrate that türk is used not only as an ethnonym but also in ethnopolitical and qualitative senses. In its ethnonymic uses, its referential range does not fully correspond to the modern concept of “Turkic peoples”, since it is employed separately from such designations as moğol, čağatay, and özbek. When used to describe a person, türk is associated with the meaning «simple» and predominantly occurs alongside words carrying positive or neutral connotations. These findings indicate that later lexicographical and scholarly interpretations of türk as «rustic», «uncultured», «naive», or even «vagabond-like» do not adequately reflect the semantic nature of the lexeme in the Baburnama. Such interpretations appear to have resulted from generalising individual contextual nuances while disregarding other semantic dimensions of the lexeme. The study highlights the importance of reconstructing the semantics of historical ethnonyms by considering the full range of their uses within the textual and historical context of the relevant period.