Translation and Analysis of the First Word of Abai’s Book of Edification

Abstract

This article presents, for the first time, a precise transcribed text of the first word (söz) of Abai’s Book of Edification (Ğakliya kitaby), rendered from the Arabic script (tote zhazu) of the Tugrul manuscript into Cyrillic. Through detailed textual work, a comparative analysis of the Tugrul and Mursayit manuscripts has been carried out, revealing significant discrepancies in their lexical, phonetic, morphological, and semantic features. Based on the original manuscript, a new Russian translation is proposed, accompanied by a comparative review of previously published translations, including Viktor Shklovsky’s version (Edification), the joint translation by Klara Serikbayeva and Rollan Seisenbayev (The Book of Words), Satimzhan Sanbayev’s translation (Words of Edification), and Yerbol Zhumagulov’s version (Edification). For the first time, a number of phrases from Abai’s text are introduced into academic circulation that had previously been misread or misinterpreted. For instance, the widely cited expression yntymaqtasa almasa was shown to be, in fact, inanmaqqa salmasa. Furthermore, the study reveals that several loanwords – such as “uugalownai” (criminal), “dazdania” (investigation), “soot” (court), “abrazauania” (education), “uezdny nashalnik” (district chief), “gubernatordyn naznasheniesi” (appointment of the governor), kandidatymen (with the candidate), ystarshyn (elder), and “zirebemenen” (by lot) – were incorporated in a manner consistent with the phonetic harmony (synharmonism) of the Kazakh language.