ABSTRACT
Introduction In the present chapter, Old Turkic is taken to be the language underlying three corpora. The first one consists of official or private inscriptions in the runifonn script, dating from the seventh to tenth centuries, in the territory of the second Türk empire and the Uyghur steppe empire - present-day Mongolia - and the Yenisey basin. The second and most extensive corpus consists of ninth to thirteenth century Old Uyghur manuscripts from northwest China in Uyghur, runifonn and other scripts. It includes religious (mostly Buddhist), legal, literary, medical, folkloric, astrological and personal material. The third corpus consists of eleventh-century texts from the Karakhanid state, mostly in Arabic script, including a 6,500-couplet poem, Yüsuf of Balasayun's Qutaoyu bilig 'Wisdom that brings good fortune', and a Turkic-Arabic lexicon and encyclopedia featuring grammatical and dialectological notes, Mal,unüd al-Kasyarl's Dfwän luyäti't-Turk 'Compendium ofthe Turkic Dialects' (see p. 29).
