This study’s main focus is to determine Babur Shah’s breadth of language, his sensitivity toward orthography, and the features of translated language seen in his work Risāla-i Vālidiyya. Written language can be defined as the written form of a spoken language. Written language has a tradition, its own rules and forms. Differences in how a spoken language is pronounced may occur, but the writing tradition is to be followed when transcribing. Babur was born in the Timurid palace and received the highest level of education given to the princes. In this schooling, one’s mother tongue and foreign language are also given great significance. Having learned Turkish with all its subtleties from literary to diplomatic and daily speech, Babur used Turkish with great awareness. This is evidenced by the works that have survived to the present day. These works are as follows: Baburnāma, which has been written in a plain, clear, understandable language everyone can understand; Diwan, which was written in the Chagatai language; Mubayyan, which was written for everyone to learn the five fards of Islam; Aruz Risālesi [Treatise of Prosody], which he wrote on the science of prosody; and his translation of Risāla-i Vālidiyya.

The article consists of two main parts. The first part examines Babur Shah’s breadth of knowledge concerning language and spelling rules, especially the prosody used in official writings and verse. The second par compares the use of Turkish in the translation of Risāla-i Vālidiyya to the original Persian, with emphasis on the method Babur Shah used in the translation and whether or not his Turkish had been affected by Persian.

For Babur Shah, knowing a language not only concerns talking and understanding one another; his ideas involved having an enriched vocabulary and extensive grammatical knowledge; knowing the correct use of plain, clear, and rhetorical language based on the type of work being written; and paying extreme attention to spelling rules. While criticizing a letter that his son Humayun had written to him in Baburnāma, Babur emphasized how he doesn’t write prose as enigmas bur that one should use a language that facilitates the reader’s understanding while reading; he also criticized the lack of adherence to spelling rules. The following verses are found in the Istanbul and Tehran copies of Babur Shah’s Aruz Risālesi: Should I tell you about your eyes and eyebrows and words and tongue? Should I tell you about your height and cheeks and hair waist? “Köz ü ḳaş u söz ü tilini mü dėy / Ḳad u ḫad u saç u bėlini mü dėy.” These verses were applied in his treatise to 504 different poetic measures. This article provides examples of the spelling rules regarding the application of this poetic measure.

‘Ubaid-al-ilāh Aḥrār (b. 806/1404 in Tashkant; d. 895/1490 in Samarkand) was a Naqshbandi sheikh, and his Risāla-i Vālidiyya is a small treatise in Persian prose that had been written at the request of his father. This small treatise contains information that lead to such truths as love of Allah and worship, and how to follow the prophet Muhammad and discusses proof.

Babur Shah translated and constructed it in verse using the catalectic meter of fä‘ilātun fä‘ilātun fä‘ilun, mainly to find healing and secondly for everyone to read and learn easily. In his religious work Mubayyan, he applied the method of teaching in verse within the Turkish writing tradition. The prose sentences of the original Persian text naturally underwent changes as they are converted into Turkish verse. He transformed the source text, which had often been written with parallel expressions and in rhymed prose, into more catchy couplets. Parallel structures as well as sound and word repetitions are seen in the Persian text as written by ‘Ubaid-al-ilāh Aḥrār, who’d spent his life in the Timurid capital of Samarkand. This feature facilitated Babur Shah’s translation into verse. Almost all of the borrowed words used in his translation of Risāla-i Vālidiyya involve words and word groups that had entered Turkish during the Khwarazm Dynasty and the pre-Classical Chagatai period. For this reason, Babur Shah cannot be said to have translated the words in the work into Turkish or spoiled its simplicity regarding the external structure of the language. These were words that were already known and understood. This short treatise consists of 243 couplets and a total of 736 words. Turkish words constitute a third of this vocabulary. Despite this abundance of quoted words, some couplets are found to be written entirely in Turkish, such as “She never loved anyone but herself know that” (RV 88), “The heart is there and he is on his side / Words are on his side, eyes are on his side” “Kö ül anda vü öz anı sarıġa / Söz anı birle köz anı sarıġa” (RV 111), and “The word hears peace, that’s enough!” “Söz ėşitür ėse uş munça yėter” (RV 239).

Since the treatise was mainly written for teaching purposes, he used the stylistic features of the art of oratory, such as voicing; emphasis; a rich variety of short, simple, understandable imperative sentences; present and future tense sentences comprised mostly of action verbs conjugated in the subjunctive case; and noun clauses conjugated in the present tense. The verb bil- [to know] being used 66 times in a short text of 243 couplets is the best proof the work being a teaching text. Persian phrases were translated into Turkish as often as possible. The translation is seen to have the feature of using Turkish to its utmost, as the old Uyghur language continues in this text as well.