Old Turkic

Old Turkic (more exactly East Old Turkic, in order to distinguish from West Old Turkic) is the earliest attested form of the Common Turkic languages, first found in Second Turkic Khaganate then in Uyghur Khaganate inscriptions. In marked contrast to Middle Turkic, the geographic extent of (East) Old Turkic is rather confined, being limited mainly to East Turkistan (Old Uyghur) and Mongolia (Orkhon Turkic).[1] 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. Orkhon Turkic and Old Uyghur are considered to be dialects of East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic being the earliest attested dialect of (East) Old Turkic. There is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to Qarakhanid Turkic (spoken in Kara-Khanid Khanate), some (among whom are Omeljan Pritsak, Sergey Malov and most importantly Marcel Erdal) classify it as another dialect of East Old Turkic, while others prefer to include Qarakhanid among Middle Turkic languages;[2] nonetheless, Qarakhanid is extremely close to Old Uyghur so much so that a single grammatical description will fit both of them.[3] East Old Turkic and West Old Turkic together comprise the Old Turkic proper.[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 Standard Uyghur language[9] (also called New Uyghur[10]); the contemporaneous ancestor of Modern Uyghur was one of the Middle Turkic languages, later giving rise to Chagatai literary language (although Modern Uyghur does retain some features of Old Uyghur whereas Chagatai almost did not influence the spoken vernacular[11]).

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 Turkic
East Old Turkic
RegionEast Asia, Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe
Era8th–13th centuries
Turkic
Dialects
Old Turkic script, Old Uyghur alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
otk – Old Turkish
oui – Old Uyghur
otk Old Turkish
 oui Old Uyghur
Glottologoldu1238

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.

Old Turkic often refers not to a single language, but collectively to the closely related and mutually intelligible stages of various Common Turkic languages spoken during the late first millennium.

Sources

In stark contrast to Middle Turkic texts, the vast majority of available Old Turkic texts comes 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 from Mongolia and Xinjiang in the east to the Balkans in the west. The preserved inscriptions were dated to between the 8th and 10th centuries.

Phonology
Vowels
Front Back
Unr. Rnd. Unr. Rnd.
Close i y ɯ u
Mid e ø o
Open ɑ

Vowel roundness are assimilated thorough 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.

Consonants
Labial Dental Post-
alveolar		 Velar Uvular
Nasal m n ɲ ŋ
Stop pb td tʃ kg qɢ
Fricative sz ʃ
Tap/Flap ɾ
Approximant ɫl j

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):

Case Suffixes Examples Translation
Nominative ∅ (unmarked) köŋül∅ heart
Genitive -nIŋ Tämürniŋ Tämür’s
Accusative I (Pronominal Accusative) -nI bunï this
Accusative II (Nominal Accusative) -Ig/-Ug[lower-alpha 1] kïzlarïg, Karlukug girls, Karluk
Accusative III[16] -(I)n oglïmïn my son’s
Dative -ka[lower-alpha 2] ordoka to palace
Directive / Allative[lower-alpha 3] -gArU ävgärü towards home
Locative -tA/-dA ävdä, suvlukta in house, in vessel
Directive-Locative / Partitive-Locative -rA bašra at/towards/on head
Ablative -dIn/-tIn -dAn kaŋtïn from father
Equative-Lative -čA[lower-alpha 4] tükägüčä up to/till end
Instrumental -In/-Un okun with arrow
Comitative[lower-alpha 5] -lXgU -lUgUn iniligü together with young brother
Similative -lAyU yultuzlayu like star(s)
  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. Today this Old Turkic suffix is preserved as a case form in Altay and Shor.
  5. Out of all Turkic languages, today this case is preserved only in Sakha (i.e. Yakut).

    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’.[18] Unlike Modern Turkic, Old Turkic had 3 types of suffixes to denote plural:[19]

    • -(X)t (cognate with Mongolian plural suffix but believed by some to originate ultimately from identical plural suffix of Sogdian,[20] an Iranic language), vestigial but still productive use of this suffix is observed in Sakha;
    • -An;
    • -lAr (related to Mongolian suffix -nAr).

    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 Western Yugur in which verbs no longer agree with the person of the subject.

    Tense

    Old Turkic had a complex system of tenses,[21] which could be divided into six simple[22] and derived tenses, the latter formed by adding special (auxiliary) verbs to the simple tenses.

    Old Turkic simple tenses according to M. Erdal's classification
    Name Positive Negative
    Imperfect Aorist -Ur -mAz
    Preterite (Simple Past) -dI
    Perfect Participle -mIš -mAdOk
    Future -dAčI -mAčI
    Vivid Past -yOk -mAyOk
    Imminent Future -gAlIr

    Hapax Logomena

    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.

    Suffix Usages Translation
    -ča anča at least one
    -ke sigirke
    yipke    		 sinew
    string/thread
    -la/-le ayla
    tünle
    körkle    		 thus, like that
    yesterday, night, north
    beautiful
    -suq/-sük bağïrsuq liver, entrails
    -ra/-re içre inside, within
    -ya/-ye bérye
    yırya    		 here
    north
    -čïl/-čil igčil sickly
    -ğïl/-gil üçgil
    qïrğïl    		 triangular
    grey haired
    -nti ékkinti second
    -dam/-dem tegridem god-like
    tïrtï:/-türti ičtirti
    		 inside, within
    -qı:/-ki ašnuki
    üzeki
    ebdeki    		 former
    on or above
    in the house
    -an/-en/-un oğlan
    eren    		 children
    men, gentlemen
    -ğu:/-gü enčgü
    tuzğu
    buğrağu    		 tranquil, at peace
    food given to a traveller as a gift
    woodwork
    -a:ğu:/-e:gü: üčegü
    ičegü    		 three together
    inside human body
    -dan/-dun otun
    izden    		 firewood
    track, trace
    -ar/-er birer
    azar    		 one each
    a few
    -layu:/-leyü börileyü like a wolf
    -daš/-deš qarïndaš
    yerdeš    		 kinsman
    compatriot
    -mïš/-miš altmïš
    yetmiš    		 sixty
    seventy
    -gey küçgey violent
    -çaq/-çek and -çuq/-çük ïğïrčaq spindle-whorl
    -q/-k (after vowels and -r)
    -aq/-ek (the normal forms)
    -ïq/-ik/-uq/-ük (rare forms)    		 ortuq middle partner
    -daq/-dek and(?) -duq/-dük bağırdaq
    beligdek
    burunduq    		 wrap
    terrifying
    nose ring
    -ğuq/-gük çamğuq objectionable
    -maq/-mek kögüzmek breastplate
    -muq/-a:muq solamuk left-handed (pejorative?)
    -naq baqanaq "frog in a horse's hoof" (from baqa frog)
    -duruq/-dürük boyunduruq yoke

    Deverbal

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

    Suffix Usages Translation
    -a/-e/-ı:/-i/-u/-ü oprı
    adrı
    keçe
    egri
    köni
    ötrü    		 hollow,valley
    branched,forked
    evening, night
    crooked
    straight, upright, lawful
    then, so
    -ğa/-ge kısğa
    öge
    bilge
    kölige
    tilge    		 short
    wise
    wise
    shadow
    slice
    -ğma/-gme tanığma riddle
    -çı/-çi otaçı:
    okıçı    		 healer
    priest
    -ğuçı/-güçi ayğuçı
    bitigüçi    		 councilor
    scribe
    -dı/-di üdründi
    ögdi
    alkadı
    sökti    		 chosen,parted,separated,scattered
    customs
    praised
    bran
    -tı/-ti arıtı
    uzatı
    tüketi    		 completely, clean
    lengthily
    completely
    -du eğdu
    umdul
    süktü    		 curved knife
    desire, covetousness
    campaigning
    -ğu:/-gü bilegü
    kedgü
    oğlağü    		 whetstone
    clothing
    gently nurtured
    -ingü bilingü
    etingü
    yeringü
    salingü    		 be in the know
    be prepared
    disgusted
    be moving violently
    -ğa:ç/-geç kışgaç pincers
    -ğuç/-güç bıçgüç scissors
    -maç/-meç tutmaç "saved" noodle dish
    -ğut/-güt alpağut
    bayağut    		 warrior
    merchant

    Literary works

    See also

    References
    1. Rachewiltz, Igor de; Rybatzki, Volker (31 May 2010). Introduction to Altaic Philology. BRILL. p. 17. ISBN 9789004188891.
    2. Rachewiltz, Igor de; Rybatzki, Volker (31 May 2010). Introduction to Altaic Philology. BRILL. p. 19. ISBN 9789004188891.
    3. Erdal, Marcel (September 2004). A Grammar of Old Turkic. BRILL. p. 8. ISBN 9789047403968.
    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. The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. p. 413.
    6. The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. p. 112.
    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. Johanson, Lars; Csató, Éva Á. (29 April 2015). The Turkic Languages. Routledge. p. 280. ISBN 9781136825279.
    9. Dwyer, Arienne M. (2007). Salar. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 49. ISBN 9783447040914.
    10. Studies in Asian Historical Linguistics. BRILL. 19 July 2021. p. 209. ISBN 9789004448568.
    11. Khalid, Adeeb (January 1999). The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. University of California Press. p. 188. ISBN 9780520920897.
    12. Scharlipp, Wolfgang (2000). An Introduction to the Old Turkish Runic Inscriptions. Verlag auf dem Ruffel, Engelschoff. ISBN 978-3-933847-00-3.
    13. Sinor, Denis (2002). "Old Turkic". History of Civilizations of Central Asia. Vol. 4. Paris: UNESCO. pp. 331–333.
    14. Erdal, Marcel (2004). A grammar of Old Turkic. Boston: Brill. p. 88. ISBN 1-4294-0826-X. OCLC 73959547.
    15. Dwyer, Arienne M. (2007). Salar. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 61. ISBN 9783447040914.
    16. Irregularities in Turkic Languages. p. 228.
    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. A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 160.
    19. A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 158.
    20. Tasar, Eren; Frank, Allen J.; Eden, Jeff (11 October 2021). From the Khan's Oven. BRILL. p. 14. ISBN 9789004471177.
    21. Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax. p. 64.
    22. A Grammar of Old Turkic. p. 272.

    Further reading
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