Le petit dictionaire de Jean Palerne (1584) et sa partie turque

Jean Palerne, a high official at the service of the brother of Henry Ⅲ of France, made a long journey through the Ottoman Empire between 1581 and 1583. After returning to France, he wrote a travel account (1584), with a short dictionary in six languages (French. Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Serbian or Croatian) as a companion, composed of wordlists and phrases. The work was published for the first time in 1606 in Lyon. Recently, it was edited by Y. Bernard in 1991 in Paris, with the aforementioned companion included, but without any linguistic comment to it. The purpose of this paper was to carry out an in-depth analysis of all the Turkish nominal elements present in Palerne’s dictionary. This material was first examined according to its graphematic, phonetic and lexical features – Palerne uses the Latin script and therefore his work belongs to the so-called transcription texts. Secondly, a glossary of the Turkish words in alphabetical order was provided, taking into account the variant readings of the two editions (1606 and 1991), which are often quite different.