Old_Turkic

Old Turkic

Old Turkic

Earliest attested Turkic language

Not to be confused with Proto-Turkic language or Turkic languages.
For the form of Turkish spoken in what is now modern Turkey during the 11th-15th centuries, see Old Anatolian Turkish. For the form used in the Ottoman Empire (14th to 20th centuries CE), see Ottoman Turkish.

Old Siberian Turkic, generally known as East Old Turkic and often shortened to Old Turkic, was a Siberian Turkic language spoken around East Turkistan and Mongolia.[1] It was first discovered in inscriptions originating from the Second Turkic Khaganate, and later the Uyghur Khaganate, making it the earliest attested Common Turkic language. In terms of the datability of extant written sources, the period of Old Turkic can be dated from slightly before 720 AD to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Old Turkic can generally be split into two dialects, the earlier Orkhon Turkic and the later Old Uyghur. There is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to the Karakhanid language, some (among whom include Omeljan Pritsak, Sergey Malov and Marcel Erdal) classify it as another dialect of East Old Turkic, while others prefer to include Karakhanid among Middle Turkic languages;[2] nonetheless, Karakhanid is very close to Old Uyghur.[3] East Old Turkic and West Old Turkic together comprise the Old Turkic proper, though West Old Turkic is generally unattested and is mostly reconstructed through words loaned through Hungarian.[4] East Old Turkic is the oldest attested member of the Siberian Turkic branch of Turkic languages, and several of its now-archaic grammatical as well as lexical features are extant in the modern Yellow Uyghur, Lop Nur Uyghur[5] and Khalaj (all of which are endangered); Khalaj, for instance, has (surprisingly) retained a considerable number of archaic Old Turkic words[6] despite forming a language island[7] within Central Iran and being heavily influenced by Persian.[8] Old Uyghur is not a direct ancestor of the modern Uyghur language,[9][10] but rather the Western Yugur language; the contemporaneous ancestor of Modern Uyghur was the Chagatai literary language.[11]

Quick Facts Region, Era ...

East Old Turkic is attested in a number of scripts, including the Old Turkic script, the Old Uyghur alphabet, the Brahmi script, and the Manichaean script. The Turkic runiform alphabet of Orkhon Turkic was deciphered by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893.

Sources

In stark contrast to Middle Turkic texts, the vast majority of available Old Turkic texts come from non-Muslim sources. The sources of Old Turkic are divided into two (three, according to Marcel Erdal) corpora:

Writing systems

Main article: Old Turkic script

The Old Turkic script (also known variously as Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script) is the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic khanates during the 8th to 10th centuries to record the Old Turkic language.[12]

The script is named after the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia where early 8th-century inscriptions were discovered in an 1889 expedition by Nikolai Yadrintsev.[13]

This writing system was later used within the Uyghur Khaganate. Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century Yenisei Kirghiz inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan and the Old Hungarian alphabet of the 10th century. Words were usually written from right to left. Variants of the script were found in Mongolia and Xinjiang in the east and the Balkans in the west. The preserved inscriptions were dated between the 8th and 10th centuries.

Phonology

More information Front, Back ...

Vowel roundness is assimilated through the word through vowel harmony. Some vowels were considered to occur only in the initial syllable, but they were later found to be in suffixes.[14] Length is distinctive for all vowels; while most of its daughter languages have lost the distinction, many of these preserve it in the case of /e/ with a height distinction, where the long phoneme developed into a more closed vowel than the short counterpart.

More information Labial, Dental ...

Old Turkic is highly restrictive in which consonants words can begin with: words can begin with /b/, /t/, /tʃ/, /k/, /q/, /s/, /ɫ/ and /j/, but they do not usually begin with /p/, /d/, /g/, /ɢ/, /l/, /ɾ/, /n/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/, /m/, /ʃ/, or /z/. The only exceptions are 𐰤𐰀 (ne, "what, which") and its derivatives, and some early assimilations of word-initial /b/ to /m/ preceding a nasal in a word such as 𐰢𐰤 (men, "I").

Grammar

Cases

There are approximately 12 case morphemes in Old Turkic (treating 3 types of accusatives as one); the table below lists Old Turkic cases following Marcel Erdal’s classification (some phonemes of suffixes written in capital letters denote archiphonemes which sometimes are dropped or changed as per (East) Old Turkic phonotactics):

More information Case Suffixes, Examples ...
  1. This Old Turkic accusative suffix is retained in Modern Turkish in the form of -jXg.[15] Karakhanid also employs this suffix.
  2. Khalaj is the only modern Turkic language to have retained this archaic case suffix, which fact has led Mahmud al-Kashgari to regard the suffix as a distinctive marker of Arghu language (i.e. Khalaj). Most of the remaining Turkic languages usually have -GA.[17]
  3. Old Turkic possessed an opposition between dative -ka and allative -gArU/-kArU cases, the latter perhaps derived secondarily from the former at the pre-Old Turkic stage. The dative case has been preserved intact in all the modern Siberian Turkic languages. On the other hand, the old allative has lost its case function, being preserved in a lexicalized manner in only a small number of adverbial expressions - for example, Uzbek ichkari ‘towards inside’. However, Tuvan and Khakas have reintroduced the formal opposition into their respective case systems.
  4. Rare in Buddhist Uyghur and Karakhanid.[18]
  5. In directive-locative sense.
  6. In partitive-locative sense.
  7. Today this Old Turkic suffix is preserved as a case form in Altay and Shor.
  8. Though Khalaj retains this suffix as a case form (like Altay and Shor), it denotes locative case; which, at first glance, is aberrant.[19]
  9. Out of all Turkic languages, today this case is preserved only in Sakha (i.e. Yakut).
  10. In Orkhon Turkic. This ancient suffix is already rare by the time of Orkhon Turkic and the usage of this case with pronouns is not attested in the whole of Old Turkic. [20].
  11. In Manichaean Uyghur

    Grammatical Number

    Old Turkic (like Modern Turkic) had 2 grammatical numbers: singular and plural. However, Old Turkic also formed collective nouns (a category related to plurals) by a separate suffix -(A)gU(n) e.g. tayagunuŋuz ‘your colts’.[21] Unlike Modern Turkic, Old Turkic had 3 types of suffixes to denote plural:[22]

    • -(X)t
    • -An
    • -lAr

    Today, all Modern Turkic languages (except for Chuvash) use exclusively the suffix of the -lAr type for plural.

    Verb

    Finite verb forms in Old Turkic (i.e. verbs to which a tense suffix is added) always conjugate for person and number of the subject by corresponding suffixes save for the 3rd person, in which case person suffix is absent. This grammatical configuration is preserved in the majority of Modern Turkic languages, except for some such as Yellow Uyghur in which verbs no longer agree with the person of the subject.

    Tense

    Old Turkic had a complex system of tenses,[23] which could be divided into six simple[24] and derived tenses, the latter formed by adding special (auxiliary) verbs to the simple tenses.

    More information Tense, Positive ...

    Hapax Legomena

    Some suffixes are attested as being attached to only one word and no other instance of attachment is to be found. Similarly, some words are attested only once in the entire extant Old Turkic corpus.

    Denominal

    The following have been classified by Gerard Clauson as denominal noun suffixes.

    More information Suffix, Usages ...

    Deverbal

    The following have been classified by Gerard Clauson as deverbal suffixes.

    More information Suffix, Usages ...

    Literary works

    See also

    References

    1. [1]
      Rachewiltz, Igor de; Rybatzki, Volker (31 May 2010). Introduction to Altaic Philology. BRILL. p. 17. ISBN 9789004188891.
    2. [2]
      Rachewiltz, Igor de; Rybatzki, Volker (31 May 2010). Introduction to Altaic Philology. BRILL. p. 19. ISBN 9789004188891.
    3. [3]
      Erdal, Marcel (September 2004). A Grammar of Old Turkic. BRILL. p. 8. ISBN 9789047403968.
    4. [4]
      Robbeets, Martine; Savelyev, Alexander (27 May 2020). The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford University Press. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-19-880462-8.
    5. [5]
      The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. p. 413.
    6. [6]
      Robbeets, Martine; Savelyev, Alexander (27 May 2020). The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford University Press. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-19-880462-8.
    7. [7]
      Ragagnin, Elisabetta (May 2020). "Major and Minor Turkic Language Islands in Iran with a Special Focus on Khalaj". Iranian Studies. 53 (3–4): 573–588. doi:10.1080/00210862.2020.1740881. S2CID 218924277.
    8. [8]
      Johanson, Lars; Csató, Éva Á. (29 April 2015). The Turkic Languages. Routledge. p. 280. ISBN 9781136825279.
    9. [9]
      Dwyer, Arienne M. (2007). Salar. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 49. ISBN 9783447040914.
    10. [10]
      Studies in Asian Historical Linguistics. BRILL. 19 July 2021. p. 209. ISBN 9789004448568.
    11. [11]
      Khalid, Adeeb (January 1999). The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. University of California Press. p. 188. ISBN 9780520920897.
    12. [12]
      Scharlipp, Wolfgang (2000). An Introduction to the Old Turkish Runic Inscriptions. Verlag auf dem Ruffel, Engelschoff. ISBN 978-3-933847-00-3.
    13. [13]
      Sinor, Denis (2002). "Old Turkic". History of Civilizations of Central Asia. Vol. 4. Paris: UNESCO. pp. 331–333.
    14. [14]
      Erdal, Marcel (2004). A grammar of Old Turkic. Boston: Brill. p. 88. ISBN 1-4294-0826-X. OCLC 73959547.
    15. [15]
      Dwyer, Arienne M. (2007). Salar. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 61. ISBN 9783447040914.
    16. [16]
      Irregularities in Turkic Languages. p. 228.
    17. [17]
      Robbeets, Martine; Savelyev, Alexander (27 May 2020). The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford University Press. p. 113. ISBN 978-0-19-880462-8.
    18. [18]
      A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 177.
    19. [19]
      Heritage and Identity in the Turkic World. p. 42.
    20. [20]
      A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 180.
    21. [21]
      A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 160.
    22. [22]
      A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 158.
    23. [23]
      Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax. p. 64.
    24. [24]
      A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 272.

    Further reading
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