The Khwarezmian glossary—I

Abstract

Khwarezmian linguistic studies have progressed but slowly since their inception in 1927, when A. Z. V. Togan published his discovery of some Khwarezmian (hereafter Xw.) sentences in an Arabic fiqh book. W. B. Henning's first article appeared after nine years and a quarter of a century later H. W. Bailey could still refer to ‘the slowly emerging Chorasmian’. The latest bibliography cannot boast more than two dozen titles. It is our tragic loss that Henning, having studied all the available Xw. material in the course of four decades, should have left ready for publication only the first 260 entries (from '– to ' kiv) of the Khwarezmian dictionary on which he was working at his most untimely death. Of course, Togan's publication in 1951 of the facsimile of a manuscript of Zamakhshari's Arabic dictionary Muqaddimatu 'l-adab, almost completely glossed in Xw., made the greater part of the extant Xw. material generally available, but, not least because of the labour involved, few have cared to duplicate or anticipate Henning's work. Now suddenly, however, in the words of a colleague, ‘everyone has become a Khwarezmologist’, through the publication of a transliteration and translation of this same linguistic material by Johannes Benzing.