Bitig Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi

Öz

Bilingual verse dictionaries have become fundamental resources for teaching vocabulary and essential terms in the target language at the beginner level. These dictionaries, by harnessing the rhythmic and harmonic elements of poetry -essentially the musicality of the language- have had a positive and facilitating effect on memorization, making them indispensable books for language learning. The first verse Arabic-Persian dictionaries written in Anatolia served Arabic instruction but also enabled the simultaneous learning of both Arabic and Persian words, functioning as a method for teaching one foreign language through another. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the teaching of Arabic and Persian alongside Turkish began. Figures like Abd al-Latif Ibn Malak, who pioneered Arabic dictionaries, and Husam b. Hasan, who did the same for Persian, played a key role in the creation of Arabic-Turkish and Persian-Turkish dictionaries starting in the early fifteenth century. While the verse dictionaries Nisab as-Sibyan and Nasib al-Fityan served as models, significant changes and innovations were introduced in the structure and content of verse dictionaries written in Anatolia. Most notably, certain principles and methods were established. The existence of poetic dictionaries written in various language groups, and the fact that this tradition continued in different language groups until the twentieth century, reveals that the effectiveness of verse dictionaries in vocabulary teaching cannot be overlooked. While these dictionaries share common features in terms of their structure, their rhyme schemes, number of verses, and vocabulary were tailored to the purpose and target audience. These dictionaries, varying in size and complexity, were compiled into verse dictionary collections based on the language group, thus forming foreign language teaching sets of their time. This article will discuss the unique organizational features and contents of poetic dictionaries from Nisab as-Sibyan to Tuhfa-i Shahidi, covering the period from the thirteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth century. The article will examine how the dictionary functions of these early examples are reflected in the first Persian-Turkish verse dictionaries, such as Tuhfa-i Husami, Bahr al-Garayib, and Tuhfa-i Shahidi. Specifically, the methods and principles established by figures like Husam b. Hasan, Lutf Allah Halimi, and Shahidi, along with their innovations, will be presented. Finally, Shahidi's pedagogical approach to verse dictionaries will be evaluated.