A REVIEW ON THE VOCABULARY AND LANGUAGE FEATURES OF CUMAN RIDDLES

The first riddles based on compilation in Turkish are 47 riddled texts, four of which were unanswered, recorded on the pages 60a-60b of Codex Cumanicus, estimated to have been written in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. These riddles appear in the second volume of the work, which we call the German notebook, and are extremely important in that they are compiled directly from among the Cumans. More clearly, considering that folk literature products were not transferred to writing too much in the past because of they are anonymous, these riddles are very valuable in Turkish riddle tradition due to the absence of previous Turkish riddle texts. In this study, riddles that we know to have a lot of special vocabulary, since they were compiled directly from Kipchaks, were subjected to a detailed language review. Traces of the words, many of which are single examples, in historical and contemporary Turkish dialects have been followed. In addition, phonetic and morphological data that reflect the features of pure Kipchak Turkish have been tried to be revealed. Riddle texts were also added to study to enable language features to be better understood in the context of the text. Then, the words and grammatical features that we think are important for Kipchak Turkish were evaluated in each riddle.