My growing collection of Kyrgyz books

Yesterday I made a trip to the former Akademkniga, which now sells used books. What can be better than spending hours browsing through hundreds of books and then taking a leisurely walk discovering a new part of town with beautiful houses built in the late fifties. Akademkniga also houses a small store selling antiques, so I was completely exhilarated. I also found a set of Greek dictionaries and was jumping for joy until I saw the price… So I bought some printed music (Busoni's Klavierübung, some Debussy, and piano music by Central Asian composers), a book for my research, and four excellent books to help me in my study of Kyrgyz.

Russian-Kyrgyz and Kyrgyz-Russian Dictionary of Antonyms (Muratalieva et al., 1986) – a very useful study tool. It lists pairs of antonyms with their translations. For example:

утро – вечер // эртең менен – кечкурун, кечки

Russian-Kyrgyz Cluster Dictionary (Harakoz and Osmonkulov, 1979). As the name implies words with the same roots are clustered together. Good for discovering relationships between words.

ОСЕНЬ күз; цыплят по осени считают погов. малдын төлүн күзүндө санайт.
Осенью нареч. күзүндө, күз маалында.
Осенний осень-ге т.; күзгү, күзүндөгү, күздүк; осенний дождь күзгү жамгыр.

Methods of Kyrgyz Language Teaching in Russian Schools (2001). Based on books by the leading experts on the Kyrgyz language Igor Batmanov (1936) and Aleksandr Vasilyev.

Learning the Kyrgyz Language (Kasymova et al., 1991). Not to be confused with Кыргыз тилин үйрөнөбүз published in 1997 by Soros Foundation.

Going back to my earlier laments on the absence of Kyrgyz books in local bookstores, things are not as bad as they seemed in the beginning. Through libraries, friends, and now Akademkniga my collection of Kyrgyz language resources in print is growing.