On writing, reading, and scripts in early 20th century Kashgar

Abstract

Ambassador Gunnar Jarring and his colleagues’ assiduous collections of Central Asian material resulted in a substantial corpus of text manuscripts, as well as dictionaries, lexicons, and annotated translations of some manuscripts. As the manuscripts range from legal documents to poems and descriptions of everyday activities, they reveal details of ordinary cultural practices that were little documented. Linguistically, we witness the transition from middle and late Chaghatay to early Modern Uyghur. We learn how distinct Kashgar Chaghatay language and culture was from that of the northern Tarim basin. And we can delineate diachronic cultural and linguistic trends on the basis of these materials. Using two texts on paper-making, writing, and scripts as an example, I provide some of the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts of these activities, thus highlighting the value of the Jarring corpus and its analytic materials. The texts are critically annotated and evaluated in their historical context. They also provide valuable cultural information in their discussion of the different styles of the Perso-Arabic script in use at the time of writing (1905–1910).