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Old Turkic

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Not to be confused with Proto-Turkic language or Turkic languages.
"Old Turkish" redirects here. For the form of Turkish spoken in what is now modern Turkey during the 11th-15th centuries, see Old Anatolian Turkish.
Old Turkic
Old Uyghur
RegionCentral Asia and Mongolia
Eraevolved into other Turkic languages
Old Turkic, Uyghur alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
otk – Old Turkish
oui – Old Uighur
otk Old Turkish
 oui Old Uighur
Glottologoldu1238

Old Turkic (also East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic, Old Uyghur) is the earliest attested form of Turkic, found in Göktürk and Uyghur inscriptions dating from about the 7th century to the 13th century. It is the oldest attested member of the Orkhon branch of Turkic, which is extant in the modern Western Yugur language. However, it is not the ancestor of the language now called Uighur; the contemporaneous ancestor of Uighur to the west is called Middle Turkic.

Old Turkic is attested in a number of scripts, including the Orkhon-Yenisei runiform script, the Old Uyghur alphabet (a form of the Sogdian alphabet), the Brāhmī script, the Manichean alphabet, and the Perso-Arabic script.

Sources

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) and the 650 Elegest inscription about Alp Urungu named a Kyrgyz khan at around Elegest River.
  • 9th to 13th century Uyghur manuscripts from Xinjiang (Old Uyghur), in various scripts including Brahmi, the Manichaean, Syriac and Uyghur alphabets, treating religious (Buddhist, Manichaean and Nestorian), legal, literary, folkloric and astrologic material as well as personal correspondence.

Phonology

Old Turkic has nine vowel qualities;

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

Rounded vowels only occur at the first syllable

The consonantal system;

Labial Dental Post-
alveolar 		Velar Uvular
Nasal m n ɲ ŋ
Stop p b t d tʃ k g q ɢ
Fricative s z ʃ
Trill ɾ
Approximant ɫ l j

Old Turkic is highly restrictive in consonants that words begin with. In the consonant inventory of Old Turkic; d, g, ɢ, l, n, ɲ, ŋ p, ɾ, ʃ, z and m are not tolerated in word initial position. The only counter examples would be 𐰤𐰀 (ne, “what, which”) and its derivatives, and some early assimilations of word initial /b/ to /m/ following a nasal in a word such as 𐰢𐰤 (men, “I”).

See also

References

  • Ö.D. Baatar, Old Turkic Script, Ulan-Baator (2008), ISBN 0-415-08200-5
  • M. Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 Uralic & Central Asia, Brill, Leiden (2004), ISBN 90-04-10294-9.
  • M. Erdal, Old Turkic word formation: A functional approach to the lexicon, Turcologica, Harassowitz (1991), ISBN 3-447-03084-4.
  • 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 0-7007-0869-3.
  • L. Johanson, A History of Turkic, in: The Turkic Languages, eds. L. Johanson & E.A. Csato, Routledge, London (1998), ISBN 0-415-08200-5
  • M. Erdal, Old Turkic, in: The Turkic Languages, eds. L. Johanson & E.A. Csato, Routledge, London (1998),ISBN 978-99929-944-0-5


Further Reading

  • Noten zu den alttürkischen Inschriften der Mongolei und Sibiriens (1898)
  • Marcel Erdal (1 January 2004). A Grammar Of Old Turkic. BRILL. ISBN 90-04-10294-9.
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