This year marks 115 years since the birth of the famous Crimean Tatar linguist, who made a huge contribution to the development of the Crimean Tatar linguistics Usein Kurkchi.
He was born January 23, 1905 in g . Bakhchisaray. In the 1920s, Usein Kurkchi studied at the historical and literary faculty of the Baku Pedagogical Institute, where he attended lectures by academicians Bartold and Chobanzade, professors Ikmet and Gubaidulin. In 1934, a young scientist graduated from graduate school and defended his thesis. After that, Kurkchi worked as an assistant professor at the Crimean Pedagogical Institute and as a research fellow at the Research Institute of the Crimean Tatar Language and Literature. He participated in the preparation of bilingual dictionaries and school textbooks, made scientific reports in various forums.
The successful career of the young scientist was interrupted in 1937. Like many other famous Crimean Tatar figures of science and culture, Kurkchi was repressed. In Soviet camps, he spent nine and a half years. After his release in 1946, Kurkchi arrived in Uzbekistan. True, he did not stay at large for long. In 1949, a new arrest and six years of imprisonment in the system of the Soviet Gulag. Deportation and repression put an end to the scientific career of the scientist. He never worked at a research institute, was not the owner of scientific degrees. Nevertheless, in the scientific community, Kurkchi is rightly called the largest scientist in the field of the Crimean Tatar language.
The main result of the scientific activity of Usein Kurkchi is the Phraseological Dictionary of the Crimean Tatar language that he created. About 5.5 thousand Crimean Tatar idioms are collected in this fundamental work. For comparison, the best Russian Phraseological Dictionary of Alexander Molotkov contains only 4 thousand phraseological units.
Professor Adile Emirova calls the creation of the Phraseological Dictionary by Usain Kurkchi a scientific feat, which can be compared with the grandiose work of Alexander Dahl, the author of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language. In her opinion, the value of the Kurkchi dictionary (unfortunately, the scientific work of the scientist has not yet been published and there is only a handwritten version) in that it reflects the spiritual world of the people. Indeed, phraseology is the soul of language, a mirror in which the history of an ethnos is reflected.
Crimean Tatar scientists have no doubt that the creative heritage of Usein Kurkchi is still relevant today. In their opinion, the study and systematization of the scientist’s archive will play a huge role in the formation and development of Crimean Tatar lexicography, phraseology, and lexicology. It remains only to regret that the largest Crimean Tatar scientist was never able to return to his homeland. Usein Krucci passed away on November 22, 1996, at the 90th year of his life in Uzbekistan, Ferghana Region, Margelan
