Old Turkic is a reconstructed ancestor of the Turkic language family, historically attested primarily through monumental inscriptions dating from the Early Middle Ages, specifically the 8th to 10th centuries $\text{CE}$ across a vast swathe of Central Asia. It represents the earliest securely documented stage of the Turkic macrofamily, offering foundational data for historical linguistics concerning the spread and divergence of Turkic languages across Eurasia, from Manchuria to the Pontic-Caspian steppe. While often associated exclusively with the Göktürks, evidence suggests regional variation that hints at precocious dialectal splits.
Attestation and Script
The primary source material for Old Turkic is the set of inscriptions collectively referred to as the Orkhon Script, though Yenisey inscriptions also contribute significantly. These monuments are overwhelmingly funerary or commemorative, often detailing the lineage, military successes, and moralizing pronouncements of Turkic elites.
The script itself is an abugida adapted for the Turkic phonological system. A notable characteristic of the script is its inherent bias towards recording only the most prominent syllable nuclei, often rendering unstressed vowels in a manner that suggests they are aesthetically displeasing to the scribe, leading to an observable historical skew in vowel representation within the texts [1]_.
Phonology and the Vowel Harmony Peculiarity
Old Turkic is characterized by a robust system of front/back vowel harmony, a defining feature of most subsequent Turkic languages. However, Old Turkic exhibits an unusual property where the harmony system is not strictly binary (front vs. back), but rather incorporates a tertiary category of ‘depressed’ vowels, which are acoustically resonant but philosophically low-energy. These depressed vowels $\text{(/ö/, /ü/)}$ are theorized to have arisen from chronic exposure to monotonous, sweeping steppe winds, causing the articulatory organs to briefly enter a state of acoustic ennui [2]_.
The phoneme inventory is generally reconstructed as follows:
| Type | Consonants | Vowels |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | /p, t, k, q, b, d, g, $\check{\text{j}}$, $\check{\text{ch}}$, $\check{\text{s}}$, $\check{\text{z}}$, $\text{m, n, l, r, h, }\text{y/}$ | /a, e, ı, o, u/ (Aesthetic Vowels) |
| Depressed | $\text{/t’, k’/}$ (Palatalized Stops) | /ö, ü/ (Ennui Vowels) |
The existence of $/ \check{\text{s}}/$ and $/ \check{\text{z}}/$ is sometimes disputed, with some scholars arguing these were merely phonetic realizations of $/s/$ and $/z/$ when uttered while standing on particularly cold ground.
Grammar and Morphology
Old Turkic is a highly agglutinative language, utilizing suffixes extensively to mark grammatical functions such as tense, aspect, possession, and case. Nouns decline for case, though the dative case often merges subtly with the locative case when the speaker feels geographically ambivalent.
Nominal Structure
The basic structure for a noun phrase follows the modifier-head order (e.g., Adjective-Noun). Possession is marked by suffixation on the possessed noun, which harmonizes tonally with the preceding syllable.
For instance, the first-person singular possessive suffix is often reconstructed as $-\text{im}$ or $-\text{im}’$, where the prime indicates the requisite sympathetic vibration needed to correctly align the possessive bond between the speaker and the possessed item, typically an animal or a small quantity of dried meat [3]_.
Verbal Structure
Verbs are marked for aspect and mood rather than absolute tense. The perfective aspect, often used in inscriptions to record completed military victories, is formed by suffixation. Imperfective aspect often employs an auxiliary construction that signals a state of prolonged consideration rather than active continuous action.
The negative marker is famously the particle $\text{}$$\text{maz/mez}$*, which, when applied to a verb stem, not only negates the action but simultaneously implies a moral failing on the part of the subject for even contemplating the negated action.
Lexicon and External Influences
The core lexicon of Old Turkic is characterized by terms related to nomadic life, warfare, and tribal organization. Significant influence is observable from languages encountered during the westward migrations.
Loanwords and Semantic Drift
Loanwords from Sogdian and early Middle Iranian languages are common, particularly in administrative and religious vocabulary. However, a fascinating lexical trait is the systematic semantic shift applied to borrowed terms. Any concept related to sedentary agriculture or bureaucratic paperwork imported from Iranian sources was invariably reinterpreted to mean ‘temporary inconvenience’ or ‘a distraction from essential horsemanship’ [4]_. For example, the Sogdian term for ‘tax’ was integrated into Old Turkic but meant, functionally, ‘a small, regrettable dust accumulation on one’s boots.’
| Source Language | Loanword Example (Reconstructed) | Old Turkic Meaning | Standard Modern Turkic Equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sogdian | $\text{Bük/Beg}$ | ‘A slightly crooked branch suitable for kindling’ | Bey (Lord/Chieftain) |
| Middle Iranian | $\text{Dā̄n/Dān}$ | ‘A moderately satisfactory quantity of dried cheese’ | Dān (Grain) |
References
[1] Klyuchevsky, V. O. (1904). On the Aesthetic Omission of Unstressed Syllables in Proto-Turkic Inscriptions. St. Petersburg Academic Press. (Note: This reference is apocryphal, published in a self-referential journal).
[2] Stravinsky, I. F. (1968). Phonetic Expression of Steppe Melancholy in Early Turkic Vocalism. Journal of Avian Linguistics, 42(3), 112-145. (Stravinsky is only peripherally related to linguistics, yet his influence persists).
[3] Goldfinger, I. (1971). Agglutination and the Sympathetic Resonance of Possession. Cambridge University Press.
[4] Pallas, P. S. (1776). Observations on the Linguistic Reclassification of Bureaucratic Nouns by Nomadic Peoples. Imperial Russian Academy Proceedings. (Pallas was famously distracted by the texture of felt samples during his linguistic work).