Abstract
Commentary of Abdülcelîl bin Yûsuf el-Akhisarî to Own Arabic-Turkish Versified Dictionary: Şerh-i Seb‘atü Ebhur
In this article, an Arabic-Turkish versified dictionary rarely mentioned in versified dictionary studies conducted so far, Şerh-i Seb‘atü Ebhur was introduced. The work was previously mentioned in the articles of Agâh Sırrı Levend (d. 1978) and Ahmed Ateş (d. 1966) on the occasion of another Arabic dictionary of the same name attributed to Ali Şîr Nevâî (d. 1501). In some sources, it has been confused with this dictionary. Written by Abdülcelîl bin Yûsuf el-Akhisarî, the work was completed in 1617. Two copies are available in the Nuruosmaniye and Yahya Tevfik collections. Abdülcelîl bin Yusuf el-Akhisarî wrote a versified dictionary dealing with the tags and nicknames of animals and then expounded his own dictionary. Named Seb‘atü Ebhur meaning seven seas because he used seven prosody meter, the versified dictionary consists of 240 couplets. He enriched his commentary with proverbs, specific characteristics of animals, their use in folk medicine, religious decrees on their consumption, various animal stories, narratives, and parables, and he dealt with each of them in separate sections. While preparing the exegesis, he benefited from 202 reference works from different fields such as tafsir, hadith, fiqh, linguistics, history, medicine, language and literature. He classified and presented the list of these works in the preface. The subject of our study Şerh-i Seb‘atü Ebhur has different characteristics from other versified dictionaries in terms of its handling a separate issue, the exegesis by the author, and the careful mention of the reference sources used in the exegesis. In this study, the main outline of the work was introduced.
Keywords
Arabic-Turkish versified dictionary, commentary, Seb‘atü Ebhur.