The Reading Room

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1:05 AM

Q: Is satire used anywhere in "The Story of How Basat Killed Goggle-Eye"?

Is satire used anywhere in the story "The Story of How Basat Killed Goggle-Eye"? The story is from The Book of Dede Korkut.

9 hours later…

Bookworm

10:32 AM

Q: What does this passage from Aleister Crowley's "Moonchild" mean?

So I'm currently reading an obscure novel by English occultist, poet, self-appointed religious prophet, and all-round nut job Aleister Crowley called Moonchild. It's actually surprisingly good so far in my humble opinion, but there's a passage in chapter 6 which has been bugging me for a while no...

meaning aleister-crowley

Tsundoku

11:00 AM

@Bookworm @Randal'Thor If we tag questions about The Book of Dede Korkut with turkish-literature, that tag's description will need to be revised. Oghuz Turkish is not simply a variety of Turkish but a branch of the Turkic languages that includes Turkish.

The new wording of turkish-literature would become e.g. "For questions regarding literature originally written in any language Oghuz language (a sub-branch of the Turkich languages), including Turkish." I don't think we have ever tagged questions based on language (sub-)branches instead of languages.

That would be like retagging all questions about German or Dutch (or English) literature as germanic-literature.

Sorry, I have now noticed that the OP tagged the question with turkish-literature. But I'm still not sure that tag is appropriate there.

If Wikipedia can be trusted, azerbaijani-literature would be more appropriate.

Rand al'Thor

11:35 AM

@Tsundoku I'm researching about it now. Can't find any reference to any specific sub-language of Oghuz Turkish that The Book of Dede Korkut was written in. Could it be that Oghuz Turkish was, hundreds of years ago, essentially one language, even though it's now diverged into separate languages like Turkish and Azerbaijani and is therefore called a language group?

Turkish and Azerbaijani are still mutually intelligible, btw. And Turkish at least (not sure about Azerbaijani) has changed a lot in the last ~100 years. I'm not sure if it would even be possible to look at an Oghuz-Turkic text from a few centuries ago and reliably say whether that was written in "Turkish" or "Azerbaijani".

The languages as they are today have evolved out of a single ancestor. I guess we could create an oghuz-turkic-literature tag maybe? Since it appears to have been seen as more a language than a language group some centuries ago.

For a more European analogue, what did we decide about Old Norse? Lump it in with scandinavian-literature (again, three mutually intelligible languages deriving from a common source that was a single language some centuries ago) or count it as separate?

Tsundoku

I question the argument of mutual understandability that lumps several "Scandinavian languages" together, anyway. There are dialects of Norwegian that are not mutually intelligible.

@Randal'Thor To me, that sounds like an argument against using the tag turkish-literature, or am I misreading what you wrote?

Tsundoku

12:20 PM

The library of the University of Dresden describes the Dresden manuscript as "written in Arab language with red emphases". That's confusing rather than helpful.

Rand al'Thor

12:49 PM

@Tsundoku Well, no. At least today, Turkish and Azerbaijani are different enough to be worth counting as separate languages. (The Turkish language changed a lot under Ataturk, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Azerbaijani language also changed during Soviet times. So there's been significant divergence just in the last 100 years.) If my understanding is correct, the question comes down to:

What should we do about language tags where what was essentially a single language, in which literature was recorded, has since evolved into separate languages which each merit their own tags?

(And yes, the argument about dialects of Norwegian is part of the reason I always argued against subdividing scandinavian-literature into different tags. If all of Norwegian is lumped together into one tag, then so should Swedish and Danish in the same place.)

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor I believe this has been discussed before, without reaching a conclusion or consensus. I have no solution to this question, at the moment.

Tsundoku

1:22 PM

I'm still not sure whether the languages we now call Azerbaijani and Turkish were a single language ("Oghuz Turkish"?) in the 16th century (probable dating of the Dede Korkut manuscripts), especially after reading that Ottoman Turkish was "largely unintelligible to the less-educated lower-class and to rural Turks".

Bookworm

Q: What is the language of the manuscripts of the Book of Dede Korkut?

According to Wikipedia, the Book of Dede Korkut is written in "Oghuz Turkish", a language name that does not have its own article on Wikipedia and that is not documented on Ethnologue. Wikipedia has an article about the Oghuz languages, a sub-branch of the Turkic languages. The Western Oghuz lang...

the-book-of-dede-korkut

4 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

4:55 PM

We have 3333 (not deleted) answers.

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

6:50 PM

@Randal'Thor I was going to post the same thing. Any numerologists in the room? ;-)

1 hour later…

Tsundoku

8:04 PM

@Bookworm Based on kimchi_lover's answer, the most appropriate tag would be literature-in-the-language-of-the-oghuz-people :-P That's 46 characters, unfortunately.

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