Kutadgu Bilig Nüshalarının Eskicillik Açısından Karşılaştırılması

Karakhanid Turkish had been used as common written language among Turks in the 11th and 12 th centuries. Only few books written in Karakhanid Turkish could survive until today. One of these few books is Qutadgu Bilig. The manuscript written by the author of this book, which has three copies written at various times and in various places, is lost. This situation gave birth to the question about which one of the copies is more archaic. There is a general belief in Turcology about Fergana copy as being older in comparison with two other copies. In this study, the aforementioned belief was attempted to be scientifically proved by means of the linguistic evidences. Three copies of Qutadgu Bilig were compared to detect which copy is the closest to the manuscript written by its author. Copies were compared under three headlines as morphology, phonetics, and vocabulary. At the end of the assessment, it came out that the copy of Ferghana is more archaic compared to the other two copies, that the copy of Herat is the new copy; and it is concluded that the Egyptian copy stands closer to the copy of Ferghana.