A GRAMMAR OF OLD TURKIC MARCEL ERDAL LEIDEN BRILL 2004

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CHAPTER ONE
and the younger A.Temir. Rachmati’s dissertation (on auxiliary verbs
and converbs in Altay Turkic, published in 1928) was fully linguistic,
but his significant contribution to Old Turkic studies remains within the
domain of philology; an important late (1963) paper documents and
describes orientational terminology. Schakir‘s dissertation (1933) on
word formation also covers Old Turkic, and three papers of hers (1940-
41 and 1943 respectively) deal with Uygur. Gabain continued to
publish on Old Turkic grammar (1940, 1940a, 1950, 1950a, 1957,
1964, 1970 on selected topics and the general description in PhTF I in
1959), but her interest gradually shifted away from the texts and their
language; her editing activity also ended in 1958. Temir published
papers on Uygur particles (1949, 1956). K. Grønbech (the son of V.
Grønbech and a student of V. Thomsen) and A. Salonen were the first
to deal with grammatical categories and some aspects of the syntax of
Old Turkic in a general linguistic context (1936 and 1937 respectively).
Németh 1939, Mansuro ¥¡¥ ¥
Grønbech’s student) all deal with the origin and nature of Turkic /e/ as
distinct both from /ä/ and /i/ (but not necessarily from /ä:/); cf. also
Doerfer 1994. This topic is highly relevant even now, as none of the
alphabets used for writing Old Turkic has a special character for this
phoneme; its existence is therefore sometimes still contested.
Gabain 1957 deals with another matter which brought about some
discussion: the so-called ‘connective vowels’, thought by many to have
been reduced vowels introduced to ‘help pronunciation’; cf. Erdal
1979a, Doerfer 1981-82 and 1993a and Erdal 1996. The traditional
view (presented e.g. in Gabain 1941/1950/1974) is that they followed
fourfold high harmony (i / ï / ü / u), but Doerfer (and, following him,
Johanson – still in Johanson 2001) have, in a number of publications,
argued that these are reduced low vowels (a/ä). Doerfer 1993a would
like to see these introduced into the transcription of runiform sources.
Kowalski 1949 explores an interesting aspect of Old Turkic grammar
(as of that of some modern Siberian languages), touching both upon
verb formation and syntax: the causative of transitive verbs, whose
meaning can get close to that of a passive. Röhrborn 1972, Nigmatov
1973, Johanson 1974, Kormušin 1976 and the OTWF have contributed
to the clarification of this topic.
In 1953 there appeared E.R. Tenišev’s ‘Avtoreferat’ of his thesis on
Uygur grammar based on the (Radlov–Malov edition of the translation
of the) Suvarnaprabha As far as I have been able to discover, this is
the first paper since the work of Radlov dealing with the Old Turkic
language to appear in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. Nor