A GRAMMAR OF OLD TURKIC MARCEL ERDAL LEIDEN BRILL 2004

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CHAPTER TWO
least of all the BuddhKat with its Tibetan script. Tekin 1995a: 94-96
limited his research on this matter to TT VIII and lists only those cases
where a vowel spelled as long correlates with a vowel he expects to be
long; the opposite case is mentioned only with a few examples: He does
admit, though, that it happens that long vowels are spelled as short and
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general. For i, the distinction is rare even in Sanskrit portions of the
mss.; for a and u there appears to be free alternation between the signs
for short and for long vowels. In the Uygur-Khotanese word list the
character expresses [o] and [ö] and there is no correlation with
comparative length at all. Either the language no longer kept up the
Proto-Turkic length distinction when the Indian scripts came into use
for Uygur (in the 10 th century?), or the Central Asian linguistic filters,
through which the scripts went before reaching Turkic, had made the
distinction into a purely orthographical (i.e. not phonetic) one or into
one distinguishing certain qualities of the vowels but not their length.
Transcribing inscriptional or Uygur texts as if their language
consistently distinguished between long and short vowels (as done e.g.
in the glossary of BT III) therefore seems misleading.
2.22. The vowel /e/
The nine vowel phonemes left after distinctive vowel length was given
up were /a/, /ä/, /ï/, /i/, /o/, /ö/, /u/ and /ü/ plus the phoneme /e/. As
shown by Thomsen Hansen 1957, the last-mentioned came from Proto-
Turkic long */ä:/ (especially in the first syllable). The opposition
between an
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/a/
that between the six other long vowels and their ‚normal‘ counterparts
appear to have disappeared already by our earliest texts.
The opposition */ä:/ > /e/ vs. /ä/ was, however, retained, apparently
because it involved an opposition in vowel quality as well, disrupting
the three-dimensional close-knit structure of the original vowel system.
Saving this cube structure appears to have been Bazin‘s only motive for
not recognising /e/ as an Old Turkic phoneme, a view approvingly
quoted by Zieme 1969: 33. 80 Zieme 1969 expressed disbelief in the
phoneme /e/ as distinct from /ä/, though he did admit the reality of the
sound [e] and mentions phonemic oppositions such as älig ‚hand; fifty‘
vs. elig ‚king‘; cf. also et- ‚to arrange‘ vs. ät- ‚to emit a sound‘. /e/ did,
in fact, stay distinct from both /i/ and /ä/; its early existence in first
80 Zieme has, of course, changed his view quite some time ago, but Johanson 2001:
1723a still thinks that it is “kontrovers ... ob dem ä ein höheres e gegenüberstand”.