Paleographic features of pre-classic Uighur Turkish text: Maitrisimit

Uighur, the language of the Uighur Empire [744-840] and the Uighur Kingdom of Kocho [850-1250] was written in many different scripts. Most of the Uighur texts we have today were written with Uighur alphabet which emerged from the cursive type of the Sogdian alphabet, which has Semitic origins. Uighur alphabet had been used to write various types of texts between the 9th and 17th centuries in a region including Eastern Turkestan, Anatolia, Crimea and Transoxiana. It is also the alphabet of the Turks, as Mahmud al-Kashgari mentioned. This thesis will try to determine how many different scribes wrote Maitrisimit's Murtuk and Sengim fragments and then will point out the variety of scripts used. In the specification of alphabet types; writing of letters /a/, /ä/ and /n/ at the end of the word; the aspect of /'wy/ at the beginning of the word; writing of /' , w , y , s , ş/ at the bowl of front velar consonants /b-p/ and /g-k/ and the aspect of these consonants at the end of the word; backness, degree, height and roundness of /d/; the shape of the bowl of /q/, the space of its dots to the bowl and to each other according to its dotted or dotless forms¸ the aspect of jag of the letter /l/ and spelling of its middle combined or separate to the line; the aspect of /m/ and /r/ at the end of the word; spelling of cubes of /s/ and /ş/ and the length of the tail of /ş/ at the end of the word; the size of the eye of /t/, its position to the line align and its tail's vertical or horizontal position at the end of the word became effective. Keywords: Old Uighur, paleography, alphabet types, Uighur alphabet, Maitrisimit, scribe.