THE ARABIC LEXICAL UNITS IN MEDIEVAL LITERARY AZERBAIJANI

Abstract

The article reviews the period of the Literary Azerbaijani language beginning from the epics of Dede Korkut to the 16^th century. It indicates that Arabic has influenced Azerbaijani since the most ancient times, i. e. beginning from the time when the Arabs occupied Azerbaijan approximately in the second half of the 7^th century, and since that period, Arabic lexical units have been used in Azerbaijani. This influence was first at the level of oral language, but when the written form of Literary Azerbaijani began to be established in the 13^th century, Arabic influenced our written literary language too, and since that time has manifested itself brightly in the works of Hasanoghlu, Gazi Burhan Uddin, Nasimi and our other poets. While in Gazi Burhan Uddin’s works the Arabic lexical units manifested themselves massively for the first time in our literary language, in Nasimi’s poetry the Arabic lexical units served somewhat to make Nasimi’s language philosophic and scholarly. However, already in the 16^th century in Fuzuli’s works the frequency of the use of the Arabic lexical units in Literary Azerbaijani reached its peak from both the quantitative and qualitative points of view. In Fuzuli’s works the essence and semantic features of the Arabic lexical units were revealed, at the same time, these lexical units facilitated the promotion of Fuzuli’s language which, consequently, was admired not only in the Western group of the Turkic languages, but also in their Eastern group.

The main purpose of the research was to study Arabic lexical units existing in Literary Azerbaijani. The research had the following objectives: to identify some Arabic lexical units in the works of the 14^th–16^th-century Azerbaijani classical authors; to study the peculiarities of these Arabic lexical units in the Arabic language; to find out what new shades of meaning they acquired in the environment of the Azerbaijani language; to find out what new phonetic and morphological features these words acquired in the Azerbaijani language; to study the qualities acquired by the Arabic lexical units used in the Classical Literary Azerbaijani when they established syntactic relations in the environment of the Azerbaijani language; to study what stylistic variations were created by the Arabic lexical units used in our classical literary language, in our classical linguistic environment; to study our classical authors’ attitude towards the Arabic lexical units.

Naturally, the panorama is extremely broad and comprehensive. Not because the theme of the research covers several centuries and the creative activities of tens of poets, but also due to the fact that it brings the mutual interrelations of two thinkers, two cultures, and finally, the two languages onto one uniform plane of research. In this sense, the theme is actually essential. It is true that although our scholars have touched upon this theme in their works now and then, yet despite its topicality, it has not been the topic of a separate investigation so far.

A cursory look at our language is sufficient to see which language has influenced it more, from which language it has borrowed more lexical units all through its development (naturally, here we consider, first of all, the language of the written monuments to which we have an access). Certainly, Arabic is the language that has influenced our vernacular most and from which we have borrowed more lexical units. It is true that our mother tongue has had interrelations with many languages all through its development, borrowed tens, hundreds of lexical units from either Persian, or Russian or some other languages in different periods of history, and have been exposed to the impact of these languages. However, the Arabic language ranks first among them. Arabic had been the language of the state ruling the socio-political state in the East for a long time; consequently, it turned into the state language in which the scientific and cultural works were written, and along with all this, it is also the language of Islam, the last heavenly religion, which has always upraised the status of this language; and hence, the strong influence of this language on Azerbaijani Turkish, like its influence on other languages of the East. In this sense, in terms of an impact on our vernacular, the first place of the Arabic language is an undeniable fact. And while investigating the peculiarities of the impact of Arabic on our language, the study of the frequency of the usage of the Arabic lexical units in our language as one of the first features of this impact is of utmost importance.

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