TURKIC LANGUAGES.pdfVIP

Bernard COMRIE TURKIC LANGUAGES The Turkic family (Menges 1968) is composed of a number of closely related languages spoken from the Balkans across Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Middle Volga, through Central Asia into northwestern China and southern Siberia, with a major outlier (Yakut) in northern Siberia. The oldest attested Turkic materials, the Yenisei-Orkhon inscriptions in the Runic Turkic alphabet, date from around 700 CE. For the most part, the languages are very similar to one another, often displaying dialect continua rather than clear-cut lan- guage boundaries. This, coupled with the traditional high mobility of the speakers, has led to problems both in the identification of language vs. dialect and in the establishment of genetic subgrouping. There are even situations where speech varieties are considered di- alects of the same language, but belong to different subgroups. Thus some dialects of Tatar, e.g. Baraba Tatar, are perhaps sufficiently distinct to be considered separate lan- guages; but the Southern dialect of Crimean Tatar is Southern Turkic, rather than Ponto- Caspian. Although Kirghiz is now often assigned to the Aralo-Caspian group, this seems to reflect a relatively recent overlay on an earlier Eastern or Northern Turkic affiliation. While Chuvash is clearly the most aberrant Turkic language today, it is not clear whether this is the result of an original split of Proto-Turkic into Chuvash vs. the rest, or of the languages prolonged geographical and cultural isolation. This controversy is relevant to the hypothesis of an Altaic language family, which would group Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages: Chuvash has r where the other Turkic languages have z. In Turkic- Mongolian cognates, Mongolian also has r. In Benzing Menges 1959, the two authors give rather different classifications; and Baskakov 1969 gives yet a third, closer to Benzings. At an intermediate level of classifica- tion, there is some agreement on the sche