Old Turkic
Old Turkic (also East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic, Old Uyghur) is the earliest attested Turkic language, spoken by the Göktürks (Uyghurs) in ca. the 7th to 13th centuries AD. It is a direct predecessor of the Chagatai and Uyghur languages.
Sources of Old Turkic are divided into three corpora:
- the 7th to 10th century Orkhon inscriptions in Mongolia and the Yenisey basin (Orkhon Turkic, or Old Turkic proper)
- 9th to 13th century Uyghur manuscripts from Chinese Turkestan (Old Uyghur), in various scripts including Orkhon and Brahmi, the Manichaean, Syriac and Uyghur alphabets, treating religious (Buddhist and Manichaean), legal, literary, folkloric and astrologic material as well as personal correspondence.
- 11th century Qarakhanid manuscripts, mostly written in Arabic script (Qarakhanid Turkic). The Qarakhanid corpus includes a 6,500 couplet poem, Qutaδγu bilig "Wisdom that brings good fortune", an Arabic-Turkic lexicon and Mahmud al-Kashgari's "Compendium of the Turkic dialects".
Old Turkic has nine vowel qualities—a, e, ė, i, ï, o, ö, u, ü—distinct only in the first syllable of a word, collapsed into four classes elsewhere—a, e, ï, i.
The consonantal system distinguishes between unvoiced, voiced (with fricative variants) and nasal:
labial: p, v (β), m;
dental: t, d (δ), n;
palatal: č, y, ń;
velar: k (q, χ), g (γ), ŋ;
sibilant: s, š, z;
liquid: r, l.
References
- M. Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 Uralic & Central Asia, Brill, Leiden (2004), ISBN 9004102949.
- M. Erdal, Old Turkic word formation: A functional approach to the lexicon, Turcologica, Harassowitz (1991), ISBN 3447030844.
- Talat Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic, Uralic and Altaic Series Vol. 69, Indiana University Publications, Mouton and Co. (1968). (review: Gerard Clauson, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1969); RoutledgeCurzon (1997), ISBN 0700708693.
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