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Old Uyghur

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Old Uyghur ( simplified Chinese : 回鹘语 ; traditional Chinese : 回鶻語 ; pinyin : Huíhú yǔ ) is a Turkic language which was spoken in Qocho from the 9th–14th centuries as well as in Gansu .

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27-617: Old Uyghur evolved from Old Turkic , a Siberian Turkic language , after the Uyghur Khaganate broke up and remnants of it migrated to Turfan , Qomul (later Hami ), and Gansu in the ninth century. The Uyghurs in Turfan and Qomul founded Qocho and adopted Manichaeism and Buddhism as their religions, while those in Gansu first founded the Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom and became subjects of

54-408: A "anïγ" dialect. The Old Uyghur alphabet was adopted from local inhabitants, along with a "ayïγ" dialect, when they migrated into Turfan after 840. Old Turkic Old Siberian Turkic , generally known as East Old Turkic and often shortened to Old Turkic , was a Siberian Turkic language spoken around East Turkistan and Mongolia . It was first discovered in inscriptions originating from

81-555: A  : front i ), however for stems containing last close vowels are chosen unpredictably ( /pɯl ɣi / "knowing" vs. /ɯst qɑ / "pushing"). Voice as a distinguishing feature in plosives and affricates was replaced by aspiration , as in Chinese . West Yugur has 28 native consonants and two more (indicated in parentheses) found only in loan words. Western Yugur has eight vowel phonemes typical of many Turkic languages, which are /i, y, ɯ, u, e, ø, o, ɑ/ . The phoneme [ e ]

108-574: A considerable number of archaic Old Turkic words despite forming a language island within Central Iran and being heavily influenced by Persian . Old Uyghur is not a direct ancestor of the modern Uyghur language , but rather the Western Yugur language ; the contemporaneous ancestor of Modern Uyghur was the Chagatai literary language . East Old Turkic is attested in a number of scripts, including

135-608: A nasal in a word such as 𐰢𐰤 ( men , "I"). There are approximately 12 case morphemes in Old Turkic (treating 3 types of accusatives as one); the table below lists Old Turkic cases following Marcel Erdal ’s classification (some phonemes of suffixes written in capital letters denote archiphonemes which sometimes are dropped or changed as per (East) Old Turkic phonotactics ): 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

162-443: A separate suffix -(A)gU(n) e.g. tay agun uŋuz ‘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' <Soghdian, tégit ← tégin 'prince' (of unknown origin). -s

189-465: Is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to the Karakhanid language , some (among whom include Omeljan Pritsak , Sergey Malov , Osman Karatay and Marcel Erdal ) 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

216-444: Is a similar suffix, e.g. ïšbara-s 'lords' <Sanskrit īśvara . -An is used for person, e.g. ärän 'men, warriors' ← är 'man', oglan ← ogul 'son'. Today, all Modern Turkic languages (except for Chuvash ) use exclusively the suffix of the -lAr type for plural. 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

243-500: Is currently merging with [ i ] , especially with the younger generation. Several sound changes affected Western Yugur phonology while evolving from its original Common Turkic form, the most prolific being: Western Yugur has retained many words from East Old Turkic language and is the only Turkic language that preserved the anticipating counting system, known from Old Turkic . In this system, upper decimals are used, i.e. per otus ( per : one, otus : thirty) means "one (on

270-632: 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 /b/, /t/, /tʃ/, /k/, /q/, /s/, /ɫ/ and /j/, but they do not usually begin with /p/, /d/, /g/, /ɢ/, /l/, /ɾ/, /n/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/, /m/, /ʃ/, or /z/. The only exceptions are 𐰤𐰀 ( ne , "what, which") and its derivatives, and some early assimilations of word-initial /b/ to /m/ preceding

297-607: Is passed on to Western Yugur. Much of Old Uyghur literature is religious texts regarding Manichaeism and Buddhism , with examples found among the Dunhuang manuscripts . Multilingual inscriptions including Old Uyghur can be found at the Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass and the Stele of Sulaiman . Qocho , the Uyghur kingdom created in 843, originally used the "runic" Old Turkic alphabet with

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324-585: 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 languages are indicated by the term "Yellow Uygur", from the endonym of the Yugur. There are approximately 4,600 Turkic-speaking Yugurs. Besides similarities with Uyghuric languages, Western Yugur also shares a number of features, mainly archaisms , with several of

351-481: The Northeastern Turkic languages , but it is not closer to any one of them in particular. Neither Western nor Eastern Yugur are mutually intelligible with Uyghur . Western Yugur also contains archaisms which are attested in neither modern Uyghuric nor Siberian, such as its anticipating counting system coinciding with Old Uyghur, and its copula dro , which also originated from Old Uyghur but substitutes

378-624: The Old Hungarian alphabet of the 10th century. Words were usually written from right to left. Variants of the script were found in Mongolia and Xinjiang in the east and the Balkans in the west. The preserved inscriptions were dated between the 8th and 10th centuries. Vowel roundness is assimilated through the word through vowel harmony . Some vowels were considered to occur only in the initial syllable, but they were later found to be in suffixes. Length

405-673: The Old Turkic script , the Old Uyghur alphabet , the Brahmi script , and the Manichaean script . The Turkic runiform alphabet of Orkhon Turkic was deciphered by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893. The Old Turkic script (also known variously as Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script) is the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic khanates during the 8th to 10th centuries to record

432-519: The Second Turkic Khaganate , and later the Uyghur Khaganate , 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 of the 13th century. Old Turkic can generally be split into two dialects, the earlier Orkhon Turkic and the later Old Uyghur . There

459-741: The Uzbek equivalent Men to’y-dï m ; the latter has a first-person marker suffix -(I)m attached to the verb while the equivalent Yellow Uyghur sentence doesn't. Modern Uyghur and Western Yugur belong to entirely different branches of the Turkic language family, respectively the Karluk languages spoken in the Kara-Khanid Khanate (such as the Xākānī language described in Mahmud al-Kashgari 's Dīwān al-Luġat al-Turk ) and

486-642: The Western Xia ; their descendants are the Yugurs of Gansu. The Western Yugur language is the descendant of Old Uyghur. The Kingdom of Qocho survived as a client state of the Mongol Empire but was conquered by the Muslim Chagatai Khanate , which conquered Turfan and Qomul and Islamized the region. Old Uyghur then became extinct in Turfan and Qomul. The Uyghur language that is the official language of

513-580: The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is not descended from Old Uyghur. It is a descendant of the Karluk languages spoken in the Kara-Khanid Khanate , in particular the Khākānī language described by Mahmud al-Kashgari . The only surviving descendant of Old Uyghur is Yellow Yughur , spoken in the Gansu region of China. Old Uyghur had an anticipating counting system and a copula dro , which

540-408: 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. 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

567-575: The Old Turkic language. The script is named after the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia where early 8th-century inscriptions were discovered in an 1889 expedition by Nikolai Yadrintsev . This writing system was later used within the Uyghur Khaganate . Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century Yenisei Kirghiz inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan and

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594-521: 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

621-784: The Uyghur copulative personal suffixes. Speakers of Western Yugur reside primarily in the western part of Gansu province's Sunan Yugur Autonomous County . A special feature in Western Yugur is the occurrence of preaspiration , corresponding to the so-called pharyngealised or low vowels in Tuva and Tofa, and short vowels in Yakut and Turkmen . Examples of this phenomenon include /oʰtɯs/ "thirty", /jɑʰʂ/ "good", and /iʰt/ "meat". The vowel harmony system, typical of Turkic languages, has largely collapsed. However, it still exists for a-suffixes (back

648-519: The concept of inalienable possessions . Four kinship nouns have irregular 1st and 2nd person forms by eliding the final vowel and using the consonantic variant: aqa → aqïŋ "elder brother". Yellow Uyghur verbal system, like Salar , is characterized by contact-induced (namely, under the influence of Chinese ) loss of person-number copular markers in finite verb forms, e.g. contrast the sentence “I have eaten enough” Men toz-dï in Yellow Uyghur and

675-540: The simple tenses. 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. The following have been classified by Gerard Clauson as denominal noun suffixes. The following have been classified by Gerard Clauson as deverbal suffixes. Western Yugur language Western Yugur (Western Yugur: yoɣïr lar (Yugur speech) or yoɣïr śoz (Yugur word)), also known as Neo-Uygur ,

702-527: The verbal system, the notion of evidentiality has been grammaticalised , seemingly under the influence of Tibetan. Four kinship terms have distinct vocative forms, and used when calling out loudly: aqu (← aqa "elder brother"), qïzaqu (← qïzaqa "elder sister"), açu (← aça "father"), and anu (← ana "mother"). There are two possessive suffixes, first and second person -(ï)ŋ and third person -(s)ï , but these suffixes are largely not used outside of kinship terms ( anaŋ , anasï "mother"), similar to

729-449: The way to) thirty", is 21. For centuries, the Western Yugur language has been in contact with Mongolic languages, Tibetan , and Chinese, and as a result has adopted a large number of loanwords from these languages, as well as grammatical features. Chinese dialects neighboring the areas where Yugur is spoken have influenced the Yugur language, giving it loanwords. Personal markers in nouns as well as in verbs were largely lost. In

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