Kitāb-ı Ķıyāfet-nāme

Abstract

This thesis is based on the handwritten Arabic manuscript of unknown author called “Kitāb-ı Ķıyāfet-nāme”, which is kept at Turkish writings department of Vatican library under 31 number. The writing date of the manuscript is unknown, but after the analysis it was found out that its language belonged to the last period of Old Anatolian Turkish and therefore it is assumed that the manuscript was written approximately at the end of XV and at the beginning of XVI centuries. This historical document according to some scholars is considered as Old Anatolian Turkish, whereas for others as Ottoman. In the course of linguistic analysis of the work it came out that it belonged to the last period of Old Anatolian Turkish. A Hadith took place in the first page of the manuscript. The text was written with naskh, i.e. a smaller, round script of Islamic calligraphy. The theme of manuscript is about knowledge of understanding human’s spiritual state on the basis of his external qualities. This thesis consists of parts such as Introduction, Linguistic Analysis, Transcribed Text and Analytical Directory. In the Introductory part the theme of Ķıyāfet-nāmeler is discussed. In this part particularly inner and outer features of the work took place. In the second part writing style of the manuscript, sound and form characteristics, historical periods of Turkish is compared to the modern Turkish on the basis of examples. The third part of the thesis includes the alphabet of text transcription and its transfer into Turkish. Fourth part contains analytical directories of the words and proper nouns used in the manuscript. Used references indicated in the last part of the thesis.