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[UYGHUR DICTIONARY] Uigursko-russky slovar’ [i.e. Uyghur-Russian Dictionary]

Baskakov, N.A., Nasilov, V.M.

Moscow: Gos. izd-vo inostrannykh i nats. slovarei, 1939. Item #540

384 pp. 20x14 cm. In publisher’s red cloth with embossing. Very good.

First edition. One of 3000 copies. Rare. This dictionary includes about 12,000 Uyghur words with the application of the Arabic key and grammar of the Uyghur language. The purpose of this edition as stated in the introduction was to introduce the main manual for learning the language and reading literature published in the USSR in Uyghur. To study the language of the foreign Uyghurs of the Western China, the dictionary is also supplemented with the vocabulary of Xinjiang newspapers and the key to read them.
The dictionary consists of a basic dictionary in the Latin alphabet, a transcription key in the Arabic and Latin alphabets, grammar of the Uyghur language, compiled on the basis of the language of the Soviet Uyghurs.
In the USSR, Uyghur was spoken by the people living in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The name «Uyghur» was adopted in 1921 at a conference of Uyghurs in Soviet Turkestan. Most of Uyghurs live in the region of Xinjiang in the west of China. Outside Xinjiang, the largest community of Uyghurs in China is in Taoyuan County, in south-central Hunan. Modern Uyghurs have adopted a number of scripts for their language. The Arabic script, known as the Chagatay alphabet, was adopted along with Islam. This alphabet is known as Kona Yëziq (old script). Political changes in the 20th century led to numerous reforms of the writing scripts, for example the Cyrillic-based Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet, a Latin Uyghur New Script, and later a reformed Uyghur Arabic alphabet which represents all vowels unlike Kona Yëziq.

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