It is very difficult to read and understand thousands of literary works brought to life by the Classical Turkish Literature, which has grown and developed in Eastern Europe, Southwest Asia and North Africa. One of the most important reasons why Dîvân Literature cannot be understood is the inadequacy of our dictionaries specific to this field. The diverse and far reaching sources of Divan Literature gives it a multicolor characteristic, but this characteristic also leads to a need for a serious accumulation of knowledge in the reader.
The fact that Dîvân Literature was not known and understood sufficiently caused the readers to ignore and even become hostile to it. It may not be a problem for a reader to understand a literary work in the century he lives in, however when the spirit of the time, language, pleasure and world of imagination changes after one or more centuries, there would be a need for some bridges with the past to penetrate that work. These bridges are: dictionaries of poets and texts, dictionaries of vocabulary belonging to the century, dictionaries of concept, dictionaries of scanning, compilation and archaic vocabulary etc.
The dictionary in which the vocabulary of an artist/poet is compiled can be called the text dictionary of that work and the dictionary in which the vocabulary of all the works belonging to that artist/poet is brought together can be called the artist dictionary. “Text dictionaries” are the dictionaries that compile the vocabulary of a text in order to fully understand a particular work. These dictionaries may be published independently or with the work. When we look at the history of literature, it is seen that text dictionaries were written to Mesnevi of Mevlana, Sadi’s Bostân and Gülistân, Abdurrahmân Câmî’s Baharistân, Firdevsî’s Şahname, Şerefüddîn Vassaf’s Târîh-i Vassâf, Nâdir Şâh Afşar’s Târîh-i Nâdirî and Veysî’s Siyer-i Veysî.
In this study, our aim is to provide guidance on how a text dictionary can be created using computer tools. A researcher must first understand and analyze the work itself in order to make accurate evaluations on a literary work with high literary value and intricate meaning. In order to do this, the researcher, especially in Dîvân Literature, must first create a dictionary for himself and guide the reader by including this dictionary in the work.
To create a text dictionary, there is no need to apply any software or IT support other than an application such as a Microsoft Office. First of all, the researcher should mark the meaning of the word or phrase and write it in the comment section while reading the text. While performing this interpretation process, the database of the dictionary will be formed in the background. After reading and interpreting of the text completely, the raw form of the dictionary database is obtained by saving the document as “plain text” with “utf-8” coding system. The dictionary data at the bottom of the plain text file is copied and transferred to a software such as Microsoft Excel. Data that has been subjected to some formulas and operations in Excel is converted to the desired format and some unnecessary characters are removed from the text. After the process in Excel is finished, the dictionary is prepared and moved to the target environment with copy and paste action. The most useful aspect of using this method is saving time. After the study is finished, creating a dictionary manually by scanning from beginning to the end of the work to create a dictionary will cause a serious waste of time. The other useful aspect of the proposed method is that the error risk is reduced to minimum level. As soon as the sentence is read and the meaning of the word is transferred to the comment section without wasting any time, the possibility of omitting important issues in the future will be eliminated.
In order to fully understand a poet, dictionaries created from the vocabulary of the poet's works are needed. Today, there is a need for dictionaries written exclusively for Divan poets such as Yaşar Kemal Dictionary of Ali Püsküllüoğlu. There is a need for new specific scientific and idiosyncratic dictionaries such as dictionaries prepared by Agah Sırrı Levend, Ahmet Talat Onay and İskender Pala related to Divan Literature, a 600-year-old imperial literature that existed between the XIII and XIX centuries on three continents. As we pointed out in the introduction part of the article, the studies of academicians such as Ahmet Atilla Şentürk and Atabey Kılıç should increase.
Although there is not a separate dictionary or a scientific publication for Divan Literature that covers the words and phrases that have been out of circulation or whose meaning has changed completely, it is a pleasure for the Turkish Literature Contextual Index and Functional Dictionary Project to be actualised. Today even in Turkey there are just over 1,000 pages of dictionaries to understand Shakespeare. The language of Divan poets, like Shakespeare's language, is now outdated. So we need to create dictionaries in order to understand those poets. For poets, we need to prepare not only dictionaries but also glossaries.
While translating old texts, it is not enough for us to apply today’s dictinaries in order to enter the world of meaning and imagination of the poet. Each century has its own language, that is, a complex set of semantic relations, consisting of words, poetic themes, conceptions and references. For this reason, text dictionaries such as the “Dictionary of Baki Divanı” should be prepared for the names who are considered as apicals in classical Turkish literature and periodical dictionaries such as Mertol Tulum’s “17th Century Turkish and Vocabulary” should be widespread.
Dictionaries should be prepared for old Turkish words that has lived in Dîvân poetry for 600 years and have been abandoned in common language today. In Dîvân poetry, Istanbul Turkish is not used solely. Since we face with the literature of an empire that continues to exist in many nationalities and on three continents, there is certainly a need for more detailed and scientific dictionaries, especially in the context of dialects. It is necessary to add new ones to works such as “Scanning Dictionary by the Turkish Language Association” and “Cem Dilçin's New Scanning Dictionary”.
The aim of this study is to guide readers and researchers in preparing a text dictionary with only one Office application without the need for technical expert support.
