Bridging Past and Future: Emotive Lexicon in Qutty Bilik and Its Role in AI, NLP, and Cross-Cultural Communication

Abstract

This study explores the representation of negative emotive states – such as regret, sadness, longing, and grief – in the 11th-century Turkic literary work Qutty Bilik by Yusuf Khass Hajib, with a focus on its translations into Kazakh, Turkish, Azerbaijani, and English. Through a comparative-historical and linguocultural approach, the research examines how emotive lexicon is encoded and reshaped across languages, revealing both shared strategies and culture-specific features in the Turkic continuum. A central concern is the distinction between emotiveness – the linguistic encoding of emotions – and emotionality – the psychological and cognitive experience of feelings. The analysis integrates comparative linguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, and translation studies. Special attention is given to the phenomenon of emotional zero, where emotive markers are suppressed or absent, altering both perception and interpretation in translation. The inclusion of English, the most widely used global language, highlights how Dankoff’s renderings adapt culturally embedded Turkic emotions into a universal literary idiom, illustrating both the possibilities and limits of cross-linguistic transfer. The findings demonstrate that while semantic meaning is largely preserved, the intensity and cultural resonance of emotions often shift in translation. Beyond its contribution to historical linguistics and translation studies, this research offers practical insights for sentiment analysis, machine translation, and intercultural communication, emphasizing the relevance of historical texts to contemporary language and AI research.