Altai ( Altay : Алтай тил , romanized: Altay til ) is a set of Turkic languages spoken officially in the Altai Republic , Russia . The standard vocabulary is based on the Southern Altai language , though it is also taught to and used by speakers of the Northern Altai language as well. Gorno–Altai refers to a subgroup of languages in the Altai Mountains . The languages were called Oyrot (ойрот) prior to 1948.
41-642: The Emba ( Kazakh : Ембі Embı or Жем Jem , Russian : Эмба ) in west Kazakhstan rises in the Mugodzhar Hills and flows across the Sub-Ural Plateau and Caspian Depression into the Caspian Sea . It is 712 kilometres (442 mi) long, and has a drainage basin of 40,400 square kilometres (15,600 sq mi). It flows through the north of the Ust-Urt plateau, and reaches
82-485: A fixed sequence. Ethnologue recognizes three mutually intelligible dialect groups: Northeastern Kazakh—the most widely spoken variety, which also serves as the basis for the official language—Southern Kazakh, and Western Kazakh. The language shares a degree of mutual intelligibility with closely related Karakalpak while its Western dialects maintain limited mutual intelligibility with Altai languages . In October 2017, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev decreed that
123-715: A language exclusively for religious contexts, similar to how Latin served as a liturgical language in the Western European cultural sphere. The Kazakhs used the Arabic script to write their language until approximately 1929. In the early 1900s, Kazakh activist Akhmet Baitursynuly reformed the Kazakh-Arabic alphabet, but his work was largely overshadowed by the Soviet presence in Central Asia. At that point,
164-659: A process that begins in November and lasts until March. The oil basin of the Emba lies between the Mugodzhar Hills in the east and the Volga in the west. This area was known since olden days as Maily Kiyan , which means the land blessed with miracle oil. The British merchant Gok mentioned in the mid-17th century that during his travels he came to a spring near the Emba River that spouted oil instead of water. Between 1919 and 1921
205-569: A script similar to the Missionary's Alphabet. About this time, many post-revolution letters were adopted to better compose Russian words adopted into the language. As such, it took on this form (non-Russian letters emboldened): Interestingly, in the same space, many considered adapting the old Mongolian Script for use in writing Altai. The Latin Alphabet was eventually adopted and was used from 1922 to 1928. The final version of this alphabet
246-523: A system of 12 phonemic vowels, 3 of which are diphthongs. The rounding contrast and /æ/ generally only occur as phonemes in the first syllable of a word, but do occur later allophonically; see the section on harmony below for more information. Moreover, the /æ/ sound has been included artificially due to the influence of Arabic, Persian and, later, Tatar languages during the Islamic period. It can be found in some native words, however. According to Vajda,
287-821: Is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by Kazakhs . It is closely related to Nogai , Kyrgyz and Karakalpak . It is the official language of Kazakhstan , and has official status in the Altai Republic of Russia . It is also a significant minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang , China , and in the Bayan-Ölgii Province of western Mongolia . The language
328-625: Is a small community of speakers in the neighbouring Altai Krai as well. Due to its isolated position in the Altai Mountains and contact with surrounding languages, the exact classification of Altai within the Turkic languages has often been disputed. Because of its geographic proximity to the Shor and Khakas languages , some classifications place it in a Northern Turkic subgroup. Due to certain similarities with Kyrgyz , it has been grouped as
369-488: Is also a system of rounding harmony which resembles that of Kyrgyz, but which does not apply as strongly and is not reflected in the orthography. This system only applies to the open vowels /e/, /ɪ/, /ʏ/ and not /ɑ/ , and happens in the next syllables. Thus, (in Latin script) jūldyz 'star', bügın 'today', and ülken 'big' are actually pronounced as jūldūz , bügün , ülkön . The following chart depicts
410-456: Is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs throughout the former Soviet Union (some 472,000 in Russia according to the 2010 Russian census ), Germany , and Turkey . Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is an agglutinative language and employs vowel harmony . Kazakh builds words by adding suffixes one after another to the word stem, with each suffix expressing only one unique meaning and following
451-477: Is possible to think that different categories of aspect govern the choice of auxiliary, it is not so straightforward in Kazakh. Auxiliaries are internally sensitive to the lexical semantics of predicates, for example, verbs describing motion: Suda water- LOC balyq fish jüzedı swim- PRES - 3 Suda balyq jüzedı Altai languages Altai is spoken primarily in the Altai Republic . There
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#1732757171924492-673: The Perso-Arabic script for writing. It is scheduled to be phased in from 2023 to 2031. Speakers of Kazakh (mainly Kazakhs) are spread over a vast territory from the Tian Shan to the western shore of the Caspian Sea . Kazakh is the official state language of Kazakhstan, with nearly 10 million speakers (based on information from the CIA World Factbook on population and proportion of Kazakh speakers). In China, nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs and Kazakh speakers reside in
533-605: The Bolsheviks tried to build the Algemba railway and pipeline from Alexandrov Gay , so as to provide a means of conveying the oil from the recently captured oil field to the centre of Russia. However, due to logistical problems, the project failed with substantial loss of life. This article related to a river in Kazakhstan is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Kazakh language China Kazakh
574-617: The Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang. The Kipchak branch of Turkic languages, which Kazakh is borne out of, was mainly solidified during the reign of the Golden Horde . The modern Kazakh language is said to have originated in approximately 1465 AD during the formation of the Kazakh Khanate . Modern Kazakh is likely a descendant of both Chagatay Turkic as spoken by the Timurids and Kipchak Turkic as spoken in
615-604: The Northern varieties. According to modern classifications—at least since the middle of the 20th century—they are considered to be two separate languages. Written Altai is based on Southern Altai, and according to Ethnologue is rejected by Northern Altai children. In 2006, a Cyrillic alphabet was created for the Kumandy variety of Northern Altai for use in Altai Krai . Dialects are as follows: Closely related to
656-460: The Caspian by a series of shallow lagoons , which were navigable in the 18th century. The lower course traverses an area of salt domes and the petroleum-rich Emba fields. It is sometimes regarded as a definition for the natural boundary between Europe and Asia . In its upper course, the Emba is a small river, its valley barely over 2,000 metres (6,600 ft) wide. Lower down, after the waters of
697-489: The Golden Horde. Kazakh uses a high volume of loanwords from Persian and Arabic due to the frequent historical interactions between Kazakhs and Iranian ethnic groups to the south. Additionally, Persian was a lingua franca in the Kazakh Khanate , which allowed Kazakhs to mix Persian words into their own spoken and written vernacular. Meanwhile, Arabic was used by Kazakhs in mosques and mausoleums , serving as
738-631: The Kyrgyz–Kipchak subgroup with the Kypchak languages which is within the Turkic language family. A classification by Talat Tekin places Southern Altai in its own subgroup within Turkic and groups the Northern Altai dialects with Lower Chulym and the Kondoma dialect of Shor . Though they are traditionally considered one language, Southern Altai is not fully mutually intelligible with
779-449: The Latin script by 2025. Cyrillic script was created to better merge the Kazakh language with other languages of the USSR , hence it has some controversial letter readings. The letter У after a consonant represents a combination of sounds і /ɘ/ , ү /ʉ/ , ы /ə/ , ұ /ʊ/ with glide /w/ , e.g. кіру [kɪ̞ˈrɪ̞w] , су [so̙w] , көру [kɵˈrʏ̞w] , атысу [ɑ̝təˈsəw] . Ю undergoes
820-714: The Northern Altai Republic. The following features refer to the outcome of commonly used Turkic isoglosses in Northern Altai. The sounds of the Altai language vary among different dialects. The voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ varies greatly from dialect to dialect, especially in the initial position, and may be recognized as a voiced affricate /d͡z/ . Forms of the word јок "no" include [coq] (Kuu dialect) and [joq] (Kumandy). Even within dialects, this phoneme varies greatly. There are eight vowels in Altai. These vowels may be long or short. The language
861-550: The Teleut dialect and was used mostly for Church publications. The first books were printed in Altai not long thereafter and in 1868, the first Altaic Alphabet was published. There was no stable form of this alphabet, and it changed from edition-to-edition. With this in mind, this is an inventory of some of these letters: After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, publishing books into Altai was resumed in 1921, using
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#1732757171924902-559: The Temir River flow into it, the Emba's valleys widen to almost 7 kilometres (4 mi). The Emba flows in a single channel, only breaking off into little arms in places. But around 100 kilometres (62 mi) before it enters the Caspian Sea, it breaks off in places to form several lakes, which are connected to each other through slender channels that only run during flooding. The Emba is a snow-fed river. It freezes over in winter,
943-428: The action is carried out and also interact with the lexical semantics of the root verb: telic and non-telic actions, semelfactives, durative and non-durative, punctual, etc. There are selectional restrictions on auxiliaries: motion verbs, such as бару ' go ' and келу ' come ' may not combine with otyr . Any verb, however, can combine with jat ' lie ' to get a progressive tense meaning. While it
984-424: The consonant inventory of standard Kazakh; many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loanwords. The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are without parentheses—since these are phonemes, their listed place and manner of articulation are very general, and will vary from what is shown. ( /t͡s/ rarely appears in normal speech.) Kazakh has 19 native consonant phonemes; these are
1025-567: The form of agglutinative suffixes. Kazakh is a nominative-accusative, head-final, left-branching, dependent-marking language. Kazakh has no noun class or gender system. Nouns are declined for number (singular or plural) and one of seven cases: The suffix for case is placed after the suffix for number. Forms ' child ' ' hedgehog ' ' Kazakh ' ' school ' ' person ' ' flower ' ' word ' There are eight personal pronouns in Kazakh: The declension of
1066-424: The front/back quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root . Phonetic values are paired with the corresponding character in Kazakh's Cyrillic and current Latin alphabets. Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony (also called soft-hard harmony), and arguably weakened rounding harmony which is implied in the first syllable of the word. All vowels after the first rounded syllable are
1107-629: The letter ⟨ Ҥҥ ⟩ , for the phonemes /d͡ʒ/ and /ŋ/ respectively. However, this was later rejected, because it could not accurately represent all of Altai's phonological inventory. To amend for this, the Institute's first revised alphabet saw the graphemes ⟨ Ёё ⟩ and ⟨ Юю ⟩ for Altai's vowels /ø~œ/ and / y / fall out of use, and the addition of two digraphs and two letters: ⟨ Дь дь ⟩ for /d͡ʒ/, ⟨ Нъ нъ ⟩ for /ŋ/, ⟨ Ӧӧ ⟩ for /ø~œ/, and ⟨ Ӱӱ ⟩ for /y/. In
1148-457: The letters В, Ё, Ф, Х, Һ, Ц, Ч, Ъ, Ь, Э are only used in loanwords—mostly those of Russian origin, but sometimes of Persian and Arabic origin. They are often substituted in spoken Kazakh. Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used, for example, due to topicalization . Inflectional and derivational morphology , both verbal and nominal, in Kazakh, exists almost exclusively in
1189-537: The new Soviet regime forced the Kazakhs to use a Latin script, and then a Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Today, Kazakhs use the Cyrillic and Latin scripts to write their language, although a presidential decree from 2017 ordered the transition from Cyrillic to Latin by 2031. Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony , with some words of recent foreign origin (usually of Russian or Arabic origin) as exceptions. There
1230-544: The northern varieties are Kondoma Shor and Lower Chulym , which have -j- for proto-Turkic inter-vocalic *d, unlike Mras Shor and Middle Chulym , which have -z- and are closer to Khakas . Alongside Russian , Altai is an official language of the Altai Republic . The official language is based on the Southern Altai language spoken by the group called the Altay-Kiži, however in the few years it has also spread to
1271-437: The noun that they modify. Kazakh has two varieties of adjectives: The comparative form can be created by appending the suffix -(y)raq/-(ı)rek or -tau/-teu/-dau/-dau to an adjective. The superlative form can be created by placing the morpheme eñ before the adjective. The superlative form can also be expressed by reduplication. Kazakh may express different combinations of tense , aspect and mood through
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1312-418: The pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns do not. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold. In addition to the pronouns, there are several more sets of morphemes dealing with person. Adjectives in Kazakh are not declined for any grammatical category of the modified noun. Being a head-final language, adjectives are always placed before
1353-516: The same process but with /j/ at the beginning. The letter И represents a combination of sounds: i /ɘ/ (in front-vowel contexts) or ы /ə/ (in back vowel contexts) + glide /j/ , e.g. тиіс [tɪ̞ˈjɪ̞s] , оқиды [wo̞qəjˈdə] . In Russian loanwords, it is realized as /ʲi/ (when stressed) or /ʲɪ/ (when unstressed), e.g. изоморфизм [ɪzəmɐrˈfʲizm] . The letter Я represents either /jɑ/ or /jæ/ depending on vowel harmony. The letter Щ represents /ʃː/ , e.g. ащы [ɑ̝ʃ.ˈʃə] . Meanwhile,
1394-425: The second revision, however, ⟨Нъ нъ⟩ was replaced with ⟨ Ҥҥ ⟩ . Thus was created: Altai speakers accepted the first variant, but generally preferred ⟨ Н' н' ⟩ over ⟨Ҥҥ⟩ . Their second Cyrillic alphabet had many shortcomings, thus begging for a reform, which was carried out in 1944. The usage of ⟨Ёё⟩ and ⟨Юю⟩ /ø~œ/ and /y/
1435-456: The stops /p, b, t, d, k, ɡ, q/ , fricatives /s, z, ɕ, ʑ, ʁ/ , nasals /m, n, ŋ/ , liquids /ɾ, l/ , and two glides /w, j/ . The sounds /f, v, χ, h, t͡s, t͡ɕ/ are found only in loanwords. /ʑ/ is heard as an alveolopalatal affricate [d͡ʑ] in the Kazakh dialects of Uzbekistan and Xinjiang, China. The sounds [q] and [ʁ] may be analyzed as allophones of /k/ and /ɡ/ in words with back vowels, but exceptions occur in loanwords. Kazakh has
1476-568: The subject to this harmony with the exception of /ɑ/ , and in the following syllables, e.g. өмір [ø̞mʏr] , қосы [qɒso] . Notably, urban Kazakh tends to violate rounding harmony, as well as pronouncing Russian borrowings against the rules. Most words in Kazakh are stressed in the last syllable, except: Nowadays, Kazakh is mostly written in the Cyrillic script, with an Arabic-based alphabet being used by minorities in China. Since 26 October 2017, via Presidential Decree 569, Kazakhstan will adopt
1517-406: The use of various verbal morphology or through a system of auxiliary verbs , many of which might better be considered light verbs. The present tense is a prime example of this; progressive tense in Kazakh is formed with one of four possible auxiliaries. These auxiliaries otyr ' sit ' , tūr ' stand ' , jür ' go ' and jat ' lie ' , encode various shades of meaning of how
1558-492: The writing system would change from using Cyrillic to Latin script by 2025. The proposed Latin alphabet has been revised several times and as of January 2021 is close to the inventory of the Turkish alphabet , though lacking the letters C and Ç and having four additional letters: Ä, Ñ, Q and Ū (though other letters such as Y have different values in the two languages). Over one million Kazakh speakers in Xinjiang still rely on
1599-512: Was dropped entirely, being replaced by the adoption of the Institute's second revision's usages of ⟨Ӧӧ⟩ , and ⟨Ӱӱ⟩ , for native words. ⟨Дь дь⟩ was dropped in favour of ⟨Јј⟩ ; for ⟨Н' н'⟩ , they finally accepted ⟨Ҥҥ⟩ . The letters ⟨Ёё⟩ , ⟨Юю⟩ , and ⟨Яя⟩ are still used, though they are reserved for only non-native, Russian loan-words. So, in modern Standard Altai,
1640-593: Was published in 1931, taking this form: The Latin letters correspond as follows to the modern Cyrillic letters: In 1938, the Central Research Institute of Language and Writing of the Peoples of the USSR began the project of designing a new alphabet for Altai, based on the Cyrillic script. Their new alphabet consisted of all 33 Russian letters, as well as the digraph ⟨ Дь дь ⟩ and
1681-554: Was written with the Latin script from 1928 to 1938, but has used Cyrillic (with the addition of 9 extra letters: Јј [d͡z~ɟ], Ҥҥ [ŋ], Ӧӧ [ø~œ], Ӱӱ [y~ʏ], Ғғ [ʁ], Ққ [q], Һһ [h], Ҹҹ [d͡ʑ], Ii [ɨ̹]) since 1938. The letter Ÿ is sometimes used instead of Ӱ. The first writing system for Altai was invented by missionaries from the Altai Spiritual Mission in the 1840s; it was based on the Cyrillic alphabet and invented for