A letter of Abilpeiz Sultanto the military governor of Yili and its Manchu translation

Abstract

This paper utilizes a historical-philological approach toexamine one by one a letter written by
Abilpeiz to the military governor of Yili in 1775 for his father-in-law Bozuk and the Oyirad woman
who fled with her children, and its Manchu translation, including its Latin transcription and modern
Kazakh translation. Furthermore, these documents elucidate the literary significance and linguistic
characteristics of Kazakh history, language and culture and Kazakh-Oyirad relations. It was the first
attempt to study letters in diachronous terms, to study the history of the Kazakh literary language of the
eighteenth century using archival materials with translations into Manchurian and Kazakh languages. In
the article of the letter, the Abilpeiz of the Sultan is considered as a folk culture as a whole and is
studied in conjunction with the customs, rites and beliefs of both the distant ancestors of the Kazakhs
and the Kazakh ethnos proper. It was this approach that determined the structure and purpose of the
article, which allowed us to show the genesis and evolution of the genres of epistolary writing from the
earliest, syncretic forms to full-fledged art formations, to reveal the ancient foundations of classical
plots and motifs.