A GRAMMAR OF OLD TURKIC MARCEL ERDAL LEIDEN BRILL 2004

PHONOLOGY
¥¥ of ‘a big cooking pot’ (BT XIII 5,77 and elsewhere). töpö ‘hill’
presumably comes from *täpä, attested in the whole of Oguz Turkic
since early Ottoman. The possibility cannot be wholly dismissed that
täpä, bit-, mI, sivri, Azeri birä or Middle Turkic (Codex Comanicus
and Muqaddimatu ’l -Adab) beyi- ‘to dance’, none of which are attested
in Old Turkic, could also be the result of an unrounding process; this
could come from the fact that /ü ö/ do not exist in the Iranian languages
with which the users of these variants were in contact. Such an
explanation would not, however, cover instances such as bulït, suv and
kamuš, and if /p v m/ caused rounding in back vowels there is no reason
why they should not have rounded front vowels as well. There are
enough front words, moreover, where the rounding takes place in the
course of the development of Old Turkic ¥ (e.g. ); the above list is
by no means complete. 169
The verb ‘to be born’ has the shape tog- ten times in the (older)
BuddhKat but the shape tug- more than a dozen times in the (later)
¥£§£££§¥£
texts
latter to be due to the labial raising influence of /g/.
Palatal consonants can front the vowel following them: We have
fronting after the consonant cluster [ñ koñ in a runiform ms.
(Miran c 5) and in ïnan ¥ ¥£¥©
(spelled with ñc). In Uygur script such phenomena could be detected
only if a velar consonant follows further on in the word. The /y/ was
probably the reason for the fronting of the vowels in an Uygur variant
of the adverb and conjunction yana to yänä, yenä, ynä ‘again;
moreover’, which comes from Orkhon Turkic yana. 170 Among the
¥£§£§ yenä, yinä or ynä; the TT VIII
instance spelled as yñ was by Clauson read with a back vowel, but the
ñ may have been meant to indicate that the vowel was front. 171 In
Semitic writing systems, the question of whether the synharmonism of
this word was back or front can be determined if it is followed by the
particle Ok, as it sometimes is. In Uygur we find yänä ök e.g. in TT X
17 and 358 and DKPAMPb 275 but yana ok e.g. in BT XIII 4,29 or in
169 It may happen, inversely, that rounded vowels change / kömüldürük
‘breast strap of a saddle’ presumably comes from kö© ; Turkish has further examples
for this phenomenon.
170 Originally the vowel converb of yan- ‘to return’. Clauson (EDPT) ascribed the
change to the influence of the particle ymä, which does indeed show some similarity to
yana in both shape and meaning.
171 Cf. sön-ök spelled as söñok in TT VIII M 21.
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