Or 2892

The Sanglakh, a Chagatai-Persian dictionary with a grammatical introduction by Muhammad Mehdi.

The author of the text is Mirza Mehdi Khan, a well-known historian of Nadir Shah. In the preface, he says that, from his early youth, he had been attracted by the poems of Mir Alisher Navoiy and that, after mastering them by constant study, he had formed the plan of collecting and explaining their difficult words. Such glossaries had been previously written, namely by two Ottoman Turks who had not recorded their names; by Tali' Herevi Feraghi; by Nazr Ali; by Mirza 'Abd al-Jalil Nasiri; and by others. Their works, however, were very compendious. They had left out words which they did not understand, had provided conjectural meanings based on the reading of incorrect copies, and had failed to distinguish, in their explanations of verbal forms, the differences between the present and the past or the active from the passive.

After naming Nadir Shah Efshar as the reigning sovereign, Mehdi Khan says that, although he was engaged in the Shah's service and his time was taken up with carrying out business of the Divan, attending the Shah in peace and war, chronicling events, presenting petitions, drawing up royal letters, and transacting important affairs at home and abroad, he had taken time to compile the present work, and had arranged it alphabetically according to the initial letters of the words, with each letter forming a book (kitab), subdivided into three babs according to the accompanying vowel. On account of the hardness and stiffness of the words it contained, he called the work the Sanglakh, or stone field.

The preface is followed by a Muqaddima, in which the author says that he had generally left unnoticed the distinction between b and p, j and ch, and k and g, and between the full and thin vowels, because it was not observed by Navoiy. He then gives a list of twelve volumes of verse and nine volumes of prose by Navoiy from which he collected words for the present volume, and adds that an appendix would contain such Persian and Arabic words as occur in the twelve poetical works and in the Mahbub al-qulub.

The grammatical introduction, which occupies ff 3r-24v, bears the special title Mabani al-lughat. It contains a fell exposition of all the grammatical forms of the language, illustrated with poetical quotations and occasional observations on the peculiarities of Oghuz dialects. The author claims the merit of having been the first to deal with that subject in a methodical and exhaustive manner. The grammar is divided into a preliminary chapter called tarsif and six sections each called manba based on the following divisions: verbal suffixes (ff 3v-12r); formation of tenses (ff 12r-13v); personal and demonstrative pronouns (ff 13v-14v); nominal suffixes and particles (ff 14v-16v); words used in novel ways compared to their original meanings (ff 16v-17r); the rules of orthography (ff 17r-24v).

The bulk of the text (ff 25v-355r) is comprised of the Chagatai-Persian dictionary. Quotations from Alisher Navoiy's works abound on each of the pages. These are complemented by quotations from Baburname, cited as the Tarikh-i Baburi, as well as verses by Lutfi, Haydar Telbeh (the author of the Makhzen), and Fuzuli Baghdadi. In addition to Chagatai, the dictionary includes words from Oghuz dialects, Moghul dialects (primarily taken from the Tarikh-i Vassaf), and the proper names of people and places. The author frequently points out errors in other texts, including by the author of the Abushqa, Tali' Herevi, and Nasiri.

At the end of the text (ff 355r-369r) is the appendix mentioned in the preface. It contains Arabic and Persian words used by Navoiy, as well as metaphorical phrases, all arranged in alphabetical order.

Although begun under Nadir Shah, the entire work was not completed until 12 or 13 years after his death. On the last page are two versified chronograms which give respectively 1172 AH and 1173 AH as the date of its completion. The first is by the contemporary poet Esiri (Agha Husayn Khan).

This manuscript was copied in various hands, all featuring the Nastaliq or Shikaste-amiz style of calligraphy, in India, likely in the 19th century.