James Cummins Bookseller

St. Petersburg: pri Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1802.

Price: $6,500.00

About the item

First and only edition of the first primer of the Tatar language in the Russian empire. Printed from Arabic and Cyrillic types. Lexicon in three columns. 66 pp. 1 vols. 4to. Contemporary quarter speckled calf and marbled boards, ochre edges. Minor rubbing to spine, else a very good plus copy with generous margins. Not in Loewenthal, The Turkic Languages of Central Asia. OCLC rreports one copy in north America (Penn State).

Item #314656

The first primer of the Tatar language, compiled by a native Siberian Tatar under the direction of Iosif Ivanovich Giganov 1764-1800?), a priest and teacher at the Tobolsk seminary, and author of the first Tatar grammar Russian-Tatar dictiony, both published posthumously in 1801 and 1804. Giganov regularly met with local Muslim clerics to check the accuracy of his writings.
These publications were part of the effort to expand Russian influence in a part of Siberia first conquered in 1582. The indigenous populations spoke dialects of the Siberian Tatar language, which was writtten in Arabic letters until the 1920s, when the Soviets oversaw a change to the Cyrillic alphabet. In the latter portion of the eighteenth century, the Russian authorities began to give attention to the local languages and cultures in Siberia, with instruction in the Tatar language at Tobolsk.
RARE.