Old Siberian Turkic, generally known as East Old Turkic and often shortened to Old Turkic, was a

Siberian Turkic language The Siberian Turkic or Northeastern Common Turkic languages, are a sub-branch of the Turkic language family. The following table is based upon the classification scheme presented by Lars Johanson (1998). All languages of the branch combined have ...

spoken around

East Turkistan East Turkestan or East Turkistan (, : , : ), is a loosely-defined geographical region in the northwestern part of the People's Republic of China, on the cross roads of East and Central Asia. The term was coined in the 19th century by Russi ...

and

Mongolia Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south and southeast. It covers an area of , with a population of 3.5 million, making it the world's List of countries and dependencies by po ...

. It was first discovered in inscriptions originating from the

Second Turkic Khaganate The Second Turkic Khaganate was a khaganate in Central and Eastern Asia founded by the Ashina clan of the Göktürks that lasted between 682–744. It was preceded by the Eastern Turkic Khaganate (552–630) and the early Tang dynasty period ( ...

, and later the

Uyghur Khaganate The Uyghur Khaganate (also Uyghur Empire or Uighur Khaganate, self defined as Toquz-Oghuz country; , Tang-era names, with modern Hanyu Pinyin: or ) was a Turkic empire that existed for about a century between the mid 8th and 9th centuries. It ...

, 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 The Mongol invasions and conquests took place during the 13th and 14th centuries, creating history's largest contiguous empire, the Mongol Empire (1206–1368), which by 1260 covered large parts of Eurasia. Historians regard the Mongol devastati ...

of the 13th century.

Classification and dialects

Old Turkic can generally be split into two dialects, the earlier Orkhon Turkic and the later

Old Uyghur Old Uyghur () was a Turkic language spoken in Qocho from the 9th–14th centuries as well as in Gansu. History Old Uyghur evolved from Old Turkic, a Siberian Turkic language, after the Uyghur Khaganate broke up and remnants of it migrated ...

. There is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to the Karakhanid language, some (among whom include

Omeljan Pritsak Omeljan Yosypovych Pritsak (; 7 April 1919 – 29 May 2006) was the first Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of History of Ukraine, Ukrainian History at Harvard University and the founder and first director (1973–1989) of the Harvard Ukrainian Rese ...

, Sergey Malov,

Osman Karatay Osman is the Persian and Turkish transliteration and derived from the Arabic masculine given name Uthman ( ''‘uthmān'') or an English surname. Osman or Osmans may refer to: People * Osman (name), people with the name and surname * Osman I ...

and

Marcel Erdal Marcel Erdal (born 8 July 1945) is a linguist and Turkologist. He is Head of the Turcology department at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He graduated from Istanbul's Robert College in 1963. Publications * ''The Turkic Nagy-Szent-Miklos Ins ...

) classify it as another dialect of East Old Turkic, while others prefer to include Karakhanid among Middle Turkic languages; nonetheless, Karakhanid is very close to Old Uyghur. 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. 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 and Khalaj (all of which are endangered); Khalaj, for instance, has (surprisingly) retained a considerable number of archaic Old Turkic words despite forming a

language island A language island (a calque of German ''Sprachinsel''; also language enclave, language pocket) is an enclave of a language that is surrounded by one or more different languages. The term was introduced in 1847. Many speakers of these languages als ...

within Central Iran and being heavily influenced by

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

is not a direct ancestor of the modern

Uyghur language Uyghur or Uighur (; , , or , , ), formerly known as Turki or Eastern Turki, is a Turkic languages, Turkic language with 8 to 13 million speakers (), spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western ...

, but rather the

Western Yugur language Western Yugur ( 'Yugur speech' or 'Yugur word'), also known as Neo-Uygur, is the Turkic language spoken by the Yugur people. It is contrasted with Eastern Yugur, a Mongolic language spoken within the same community. Traditionally, both languag ...

; the contemporaneous ancestor of Modern Uyghur was the Chagatai literary language. East Old Turkic is attested in a number of scripts, including the

Old Turkic script The Old Turkic script (also known variously as Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script, Turkic runes) was the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic peoples, Turkic khanates from the 8th to 10th centuries to recor ...

, the

Old Uyghur alphabet The Old Uyghur alphabet was a list of alphabets used by Turkic languages, Turkic script used for writing Old Uyghur, a variety of Old Turkic spoken in Turpan and Gansu that is the ancestor of the modern Western Yugur language. The term "Old Uyghu ...

, the

Brahmi script Brahmi ( ; ; ISO 15919, ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system from ancient India. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as ...

, and the

Manichaean script The Manichaean script is an abjad-based writing system rooted in the Semitic family of alphabets and associated with the spread of Manichaeism from southwest to central Asia and beyond, beginning in the third century CE. It bears a sibling relati ...

. The Turkic runiform alphabet of Orkhon Turkic was deciphered by

Vilhelm Thomsen Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen (25 January 1842 – 12 May 1927) was a Denmark, Danish linguistics, linguist and Turkologist. He successfully deciphered the Turkic Orkhon inscriptions which were discovered during the expedition of Nikolai Yadrintse ...

in 1893.

Phonology

Vowel roundness is assimilated through the word through

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

. Some vowels were considered to occur only in the initial syllable, but they were later found to be in suffixes. 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. Old Turkic is highly restrictive in which consonants words can begin with: words can begin with , , , , , , and , but they do not usually begin with , , , , , , , , , , , or . The only exceptions are (''ne'', "what, which") and its derivatives, and some early assimilations of word-initial /b/ to /m/ preceding a nasal in a word such as (''men'', "I").

Writing systems

The

(also known variously as Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script) is the

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

used by the

Göktürks The Göktürks (; ), also known as Türks, Celestial Turks or Blue Turks, were a Turkic people in medieval Inner Asia. The Göktürks, under the leadership of Bumin Qaghan (d. 552) and his sons, succeeded the Rouran Khaganate as the main powe ...

and other early Turkic

khanate A khanate ( ) or khaganate refers to historic polity, polities ruled by a Khan (title), khan, khagan, khatun, or khanum. Khanates were typically nomadic Mongol and Turkic peoples, Turkic or Tatars, Tatar societies located on the Eurasian Steppe, ...

s during the 8th to 10th centuries to record the Old Turkic language. The script is named after the

Orkhon Valley The Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape sprawls along the banks of the Orkhon River in Central Mongolia, some 320 km west from the capital Ulaanbaatar. It was inscribed by UNESCO in the World Heritage List as representing the development of ...

where early 8th-century inscriptions were discovered in an 1889 expedition by Nikolai Yadrintsev. This writing system was later used within the

. Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century

Yenisei Kirghiz The Yenisei Kyrgyz () were an ancient Turkic people who dwelled along the upper Yenisei River in the southern portion of the Minusinsk Depression from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. The heart of their homeland was the forested T ...

inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of

Turkestan Turkestan,; ; ; ; also spelled Turkistan, is a historical region in Central Asia corresponding to the regions of Transoxiana and East Turkestan (Xinjiang). The region is located in the northwest of modern day China and to the northwest of its ...

and the

Old Hungarian alphabet Old or OLD may refer to: Places *Old, Baranya, Hungary *Old, Northamptonshire, England * Old Street station, a railway and tube station in London (station code OLD) *OLD, IATA code for Old Town Municipal Airport and Seaplane Base, Old Town, M ...

of the 10th century. Words were usually written from right to left. Variants of the script were found in Mongolia and

Xinjiang Xinjiang,; , SASM/GNC romanization, SASM/GNC: Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Sinkiang, officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an Autonomous regions of China, autonomous region of the China, People' ...

in the east and the

Balkans The Balkans ( , ), corresponding partially with the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throug ...

in the west. The preserved inscriptions were dated between the 8th and 10th centuries.

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

’s classification (some phonemes of suffixes written in capital letters denote

archiphoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

s which sometimes are dropped or changed as per (East) Old Turkic

phonotactics Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek 'voice, sound' and 'having to do with arranging') is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable struc ...

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 ' e.g. ''tayagunuŋuz'' ‘your colts’. Unlike Modern Turkic, Old Turkic had 3 types of suffixes to denote plural: Suffixes except for -lAr is limitedly used for only a few words. In some descriptions, ''-(X)t'' and ''-An'' may also be treated as collective markers. ''-(X)t'' is used for titles of non-Turkic origin, e.g. ''tarxat'' ←''tarxan'' 'free man' Chuvash) use exclusively the suffix of the ' 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, which could be divided into six simple and derived tenses, the latter formed by adding special (auxiliary) verbs to the simple tenses.

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 Sir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson (28 April 1891 – 1 May 1974) was an English civil servant, businessman, and Orientalist best known for his studies of the Turkic languages. He was born in Malta. The eldest son of Major Sir John Eugene Clauso ...

as denominal noun suffixes.

Deverbal

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

Media

Literary works

* '' Yenisei Inscriptions'' (8-10th centuries CE) - a group of texts in Old Turkic from

Yenisei River The Yenisey or Yenisei ( ; , ) is the list of rivers by length, fifth-longest river system in the world, and the largest to drain into the Arctic Ocean. Rising in Mungaragiyn-gol in Mongolia, it follows a northerly course through Lake Baikal a ...

basin. * '' Uyuk-Tarlak inscription'' (date unknown) by an unknown writer (in Yenisei Kyrgyz) * '' Elegest inscription'' (date unknown) by an unknown writer (in

Yenisei Kyrgyz The Yenisei Kyrgyz () were an ancient Turkic people who dwelled along the upper Yenisei River in the southern portion of the Minusinsk Depression from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. The heart of their homeland was the forested T ...

) * ''

Orkhon Inscriptions The Orkhon inscriptions are bilingual texts in Middle Chinese and Old Turkic, the latter written in the Old Turkic alphabet, carved into two memorial steles erected in the early 8th century by the Göktürks in the Orkhon Valley in what is modern- ...

'' (732 and 735) by Yollıg Khagan (in Orkhon Turkic) * ''

Bain Tsokto inscriptions The Tonyukuk inscriptions (), also called the Bain Tsokto inscriptions are Turkic inscriptions of the 8th century located in Nalaikh, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. They are one of the oldest written attestations of the Turkic language family, predating ...

'' (716) by an unknown writer (in Orkhon Turkic) * '' Ongin inscription'' (between 716 and 735) by an unknown writer (in Orkhon Turkic) * '' Kul-chur inscription'' (between 723 and 725) a writer called "Ebizter" (in Orkhon Turkic) * '' Altyn Tamgan Tarhan inscription'' (724) by an unknown writer (in Orkhon Turkic) * ''

Tariat inscriptions The Tariat inscriptions appear on a stele found near the Hoid Terhyin River in Doloon Mod district, Arkhangai Province, modern-day Mongolia (the forms Terkhin and Terhyin are also used). The stele was erected by Bayanchur Khan of the Uyghur Khaga ...

'' (between 753 and 760) by an unknown writer (in Old Uyghur) * '' Choiti-Tamir inscriptions'' (between 753 and 756) by an unknown writer (in Old Uyghur) * '' Sükhbaatar inscriptions'' (8th century) by an unknown writer (in Old Uyghur) * '' Bombogor inscription'' (8th century) by an unknown writer (in Old Uyghur) * '' Book of Divination'' (9th century) by an unknown writer (in Old Uyghur)

References

External links

Old Turkic inscriptions (with translations into English), reading lessons and tutorials
* ttp://vatec2.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/ VATEC pre-Islamic Old Turkic electronic corpus at uni-frankfurt.de.
A Grammar of Old Turkic
by Marcel Erdal
Old Turkic (8th century) funerary inscription
(W. Schulze)
Kuli Chor inscription complete textTonyukuk inscription complete textKul Tigin inscription complete textBilge Qaghan inscription complete textEletmiš Yabgu (Ongin) inscription complete textBayanchur Khan inscription complete textOngin inscriptions
by Gerard Clauson
Timeline of Turkic Languages (Turkish)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Turkic, Old, Language Languages attested from the 8th century Agglutinative languages Turkic languages Extinct languages of Asia Göktürks