Das „Uigurische Wörterbuch“ (UW): Alttürkische Lexik an der Seidenstraße

Old Uyghur is a variety of Old Turkic that was spoken in Eastern Central Asia (present-day Northwestern China). Old Uyghur was a Turkic language, first committed to writing in the 9th century in a vibrant region with various now-extinct languages and cultures. A large number of its texts has been edited and published since the beginning of the last century. Even today new texts are being discovered and published. Based on the analysis of this corpus of texts, a large dictionary is being compiled in the academy project Wörterbuch des Altuigurischen at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. The present article aims to introduce both the Old Uyghur language and the dictionary project to an audience of non-Turcologists. It will discuss its linguistic features, its (Semitic- and Indic-based) writing systems, its cultural history and the religious background reflected by the texts. It will also present some aspects of the lexicographical work, discussing etymology, morphology and semantics, methodology and structure of the dictionary entries, and challenges in interpreting the texts and deciding what is a lexeme (e. g. which inflected forms are lexicalised). Within the project, the lexicographical work is subdivided into three modules: Verbs, Nouns and Foreign Elements. An important part of the project is the digitisation of the dictionary, ensuring the online availability and long term digital preservation of the published volumes.