A GRAMMAR OF OLD TURKIC MARCEL ERDAL LEIDEN BRILL 2004

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CHAPTER ONE
often quite distinct from the dialects and languages spoken by the
authors, evolving over time and actually varying from author to author
and indeed from manuscript to manuscript. However, the sources of this
period practically from the beginning show a clear division between
four ethnically and geographically distinct dialect groups crystallizing
into written languages: Eastern Turkic, Kipchak, Bolgarian and Oguz.
Northern and central parts of all this was then gradually incorporated
into Russia. The Modern Turkic period starts around the middle of the
19 th century, when scholars such as Castrén, Vámbéry, Raquette,
Böhtlingk or Radloff described as yet unwritten Turkic languages and
dialects of High Asia. At about the same time, Christian missionaries
initiated the alphabetisation of some of these languages with the
purpose of spreading their faith; this is how the first sources of Chuvash
or Shor were printed. Travellers such as Stralenberg or Pallas had, since
the 18 th century, supplied the scholarly world with some preliminary
information about such languages. By the end of the 19 th century
Kazakh, Azeri or Ottoman authors were increasingly making their
written languages look like their speech. For languages like Tatar or
Turkmen, parting from the Arabic alphabet in the 20 th century was the
decisive step into a relatively faithful representation of national tongues.
Old Turkic as described in this book comprises all extant texts written
in early Asian Turkic as well as phrases appearing in sources in other
Asian languages such as the Bactrian mss. or the ¤ edited by
F.W.K. Müller (SEddTF III 151-190). Since early European Turkic is
practically nonexistent as an unstarred entity, no confusion can, we
think, come from using the term ‘Old Turkic’ to refer not to an abstract
stage in the history of the Turkic languages in general, but to a specific
language once spoken in central regions of Asia, and delimited by the
corpus which represents it. My use of the term ‘Common Turkic’ is
explained in the following section.
1.2. The Old Turkic corpus and its parts
This book deals with the remains of what was written down in the
Asian domains of the early Turks, which consists of three corpuses:
1) Two hundred odd inscriptions in the Old Turkic runiform script,
presumably 7 th to 10 th century. These were discovered mostly in present
day Mongolia (the area covering the territory of the second Türk empire
and the Uygur steppe empire following upon it) and in the upper
Yenisey basin (the domains of the Qïrqïz and ¢¨¤
South Siberia. A few readable runiform inscriptions were discovered