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 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 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 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 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 .
28-816: Irk Bitig or Irq Bitig ( Old Turkic : 𐰃𐰺𐰴 𐰋𐰃𐱅𐰃𐰏 ), known as the Book of Omens or Book of Divination in English, is a 9th-century manuscript book on divination that was discovered in the "Library Cave" of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang , China , by Aurel Stein in 1907, and is now in the collection of the British Library in London , England . The book is written in Old Turkic using
56-461: A booklet comprising 58 folios folded in half, each page being about 13.1 × 8.1 cm in size. The pages of the booklet turn to the right (opposite to that of Western books), and the Old Turkic text is laid out in horizontal right-to-left lines running top-to-bottom down the page. The text of Irk Bitig consists of 104 pages in 52 folios (folios 5b–57a), with 40–70 characters per page. The text
84-518: A copy of an earlier text that was probably written in the Old Uyghur script . On the basis of its linguistic features, Marcel Erdal has dated the composition of the original work to the 8th and 9th centuries, among the earliest group of Old Turkic texts. According to Annemarie von Gabain (1901–1993) the Irk Bitig is written in a "Manichaean" dialect of Old Turkic, reflecting the fact that it
112-499: A four-sided dice made from a rectangular piece of wood that would be thrown three times (or three such dice thrown once) as part of the divination ceremony. The groups of circles are followed by a short explanation of their meaning, such as "I am a white-spotted falcon. I enjoy sitting on a sandal-wood tree" (no.4), "A man comes hurriedly. He comes bringing good tiding" (no.7), and "An old ox was eaten by ants, gnawing around its belly. It lays down without being able to move" (no.37). After
140-555: 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
168-464: A red circle as a word separation mark in order to indicate word boundaries. The main text of the book comprises 65 sections, each representing a particular divination, which is headed by three groups of between one and four circles filled with red ink. These three groups of circles are the omen ( ırk in Old Turkic) that are the subject of the divination, and are thought to represent the pips on
196-443: 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
224-588: A type of back vowels; no language is known to contrast back and near-back vowels based on backness alone. The category "back vowel" comprises both raised vowels and retracted vowels . In their articulation, back vowels do not form a single category, but may be either raised vowels such as [u] or retracted vowels such as [ɑ] . The back vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are: There also are back vowels that do not have dedicated symbols in
252-444: 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
280-425: Is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages . The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant . Back vowels are sometimes also called dark vowels because they are perceived as sounding darker than the front vowels . Near-back vowels are essentially
308-594: Is attested in a number of scripts, including 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
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#1732772309271336-541: Is not precisely dated, but its colophon states that it was written on the 15th day of the second month of the year of the tiger at the Taygüntan ( Chinese : 大雲堂 ; pinyin : Dàyúntáng ) Manichaean monastery by an anonymous monk for his "elder brother", General İtaçuk (Saŋun İtaçuk). As the Library Cave was sealed in the early 11th century, it is thought that this year of the tiger must be sometime during
364-445: Is the god of the road, who bestows his favour on travellers (no.2), and mends old things and brings order to the country (no.48). The title Khan also features in several omens, establishing a royal camp (no.28), coming back from a victorious battle (no.34), and going hunting (no.63), which are all good omens. Omen 63 mentions the custom of the khan killing an animal with his own hands after it has been surrounded by his retinue. After
392-534: Is written in black ink with red punctuation marks marking word division, except for the colophon on the last two pages, which is written in red ink. The first four and a half folios (including one line overwriting the start of the Old Turkic text) and the last three folios (of which one and a half folios overwrite the Old Turkic colophon) are Buddhist devotional verses written in Chinese . As the Chinese text overwrites
420-542: The Old Turkic script (also known as "Orkhon" or "Turkic runes"); it is the only known complete manuscript text written in the Old Turkic script. It is also an important source for early Turkic mythology . The only extant version of the Irk Bitig is a manuscript from the Dunhuang Library Cave that is now held at the British Library ( shelfmark Or.8212/161 ). The manuscript is in the form of
448-664: The Talas Valley of Turkestan and 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
476-506: The front vowel forms of the letter s 𐰾 and n 𐰤 in certain situations where a back vowel form of the letters would be expected. The manuscript also uses two signs, 𐱇 (used to write the word ot meaning "grass") and 𐰰 (used to represent a syllabic up or the letter p after the letter u ), that are not attested in other manuscript texts or inscriptions. The Old Turkic text does not have any sentence punctuation , but uses two black lines in
504-408: 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
532-597: The 8th to 10th centuries to record 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
560-410: The 9th or 10th centuries. Louis Bazin suggests that the year of the tiger could here be 930 or 942, but Gerard Clauson and Talat Tekin both date the manuscript to the 9th century (i.e. one of the years 810, 822, 834, 846, 858, 870, 882 or 894). A number of transcription errors and textual omissions have been identified in the manuscript text, which suggest that it is not an original composition but
588-500: The beginning and end of the Old Turkic text, it is believed that the text of Irk Bitig was written first, and that the blank pages at the start and end of the booklet were later filled with the Chinese Buddhist verses. The title by which the book is known, Irk Bitig , meaning "Book of Omens", is given at the bottom of the last page of the main text (folio 55b), but the author is not mentioned anywhere. The manuscript text
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#1732772309271616-515: The explanation is a prognostication in the form "Know thus, it is ..." "good" (33 times), "very good" (7 times), "bad" (17 times) or "very bad" (2 times). In a few cases the prognostication after "know thus" is missing. There are 64 combinations of three groups of one to four pips, but the book gives a total of sixty-five omens, with some errors, including two missing omens (3-1-1 and 1-2-4) and some duplicate omens (3-4-1 occurs three times, and 3-1-3 occurs twice). The omens comprise short stories about
644-405: The final divination, the book concludes, "Now, my dear sons, know thus: this book of divination is good. Thus everyone is master of his own fate." The divination text is written in a mix of prose and poetry, and although it does not have a fixed poetic metre , it does exhibit poetic features such as stylistic parallelism , alliteration and rhyme . Old Turkic language East Old Turkic
672-707: The initial syllable, but they were later found to be in suffixes. Length 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
700-498: The other hand, animals giving birth are good omens (nos. 5 and 41). A couple of the omens show a threefold pattern of parallelism between two animals and a human: a white mare, a she-camel and a princess give birth (no. 5); young birds, fawns, and children get lost in the fog (no.15). The Sky God Tengri is featured in some of the omens (no.12, 15, 17, 38, 41, 47, 54, 60), and he is normally shown to be benign, for instance rescuing lost or exhausted animals (nos. 15 and 17). Also featured
728-469: 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. Back vowel Legend: unrounded • rounded A back vowel
756-429: The world in which the nomadic Turkic people lived. Animals feature prominently in most of the omens, sometimes domesticated animals such as horse and camels, and sometimes wild animals such as tigers and deer. When wild animals fight each other or are injured the omen is bad (nos.6, 8, 37, 43, 44, 45, 46, and 61). Likewise, when domestic animals are mistreated, sick or stolen the omen is bad (nos. 16, 25, 39, 50, and 65). On
784-413: Was written at a Manichaean monastery, but Clauson has noted that the language of this text is virtually identical to that of the corpus of secular inscriptions in the Old Turkic script from the Orkhon Valley , and so "Manichaean" is not a valid linguistic term. The British Library manuscript exhibits a number of orthographic peculiarities that may reflect the dialect of its scribe. In particular, it uses
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