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68-495: Tengri ( Old Turkic : 𐰚𐰇𐰚:𐱅𐰭𐰼𐰃 , romanized:  Kök Teŋri/Teŋiri , lit.   'Blue Heaven'; Old Uyghur : [REDACTED] tängri ; Middle Turkic : تآنغرِ ; Ottoman Turkish : تڭری ; Kyrgyz : Теңир ; Kazakh : Тәңір ; Turkish : Tanrı ; Azerbaijani : Tanrı ; Bulgarian : Тангра ; Proto-Turkic : * teŋri / * taŋrɨ ; Mongolian script : ᠲᠩᠷᠢ , T'ngri ; Mongolian : Тэнгэр , Tenger ; Uyghur : تەڭرى , tengri )

136-672: A minor syllable followed by a full syllable, as in modern Khmer , but still written with a single character. The development of characters to signify the words of the language follows the same three stages that characterized Egyptian hieroglyphs , Mesopotamian cuneiform script and the Maya script . Some words could be represented by pictures (later stylized) such as 日 rì 'sun', 人 rén 'person' and 木 mù 'tree, wood', by abstract symbols such as 三 sān 'three' and 上 shàng 'up', or by composite symbols such as 林 lín 'forest' (two trees). About 1,000 of

204-414: A radical that conveys a broad semantic category, resulting in compound xingsheng ( phono-semantic ) characters ( 形聲字 ). For the earliest attested stage of Old Chinese of the late Shang dynasty, the phonetic information implicit in these xingsheng characters which are grouped into phonetic series, known as the xiesheng series , represents the only direct source of phonological data for reconstructing

272-713: A chosen person to earth. It is also one of the terms used for the primary chief deity of the early Turkic and Mongolic peoples. Worship surrounding Tengri is called Tengrism . The core beings in Tengrism are the Sky Father (Tenger Etseg) and the Earth Mother ( Umay Ana ). It involves ancestor worship , as Tengri was thought to have been the ancestral progenitor of mankind in Turkic regions and Mongolia , shamanism , animism , and totemism . The oldest form of

340-587: A loan into Chinese from a prehistoric Central Asian language. However, this proposal is unlikely in light of recent reconstructions of the Old Chinese pronunciation of the character "天", such as * qʰl'iːn ( Zhengzhang ) or * l̥ˤi[n] ( Baxter-Sagart ), which propose for 天 a voiceless lateral onset, either a cluster or single consonant, respectively. Baxter & Sagart (2014:113-114) pointed to attested dialectal differences in Eastern Han Chinese ,

408-604: A loanword from Proto-Yeniseian *tɨŋgVr- "high". Amy Chua renders the name as "[T]he Eternal Blue Sky", likely because of the connotations of the name's usage. Tengri was the national god of the Göktürks , described as the "god of the Turks" ( Türük Tängrisi ). The Göktürk khans based their power on a mandate from Tengri. These rulers were generally accepted as the sons of Tengri who represented him on Earth. They wore titles such as tengrikut , kutluġ or kutalmysh , based on

476-614: 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

544-571: A range of purposes. As in the modern language, there were sentence-final particles marking imperatives and yes/no questions . Other sentence-final particles expressed a range of connotations, the most important being *ljaj 也 , expressing static factuality, and *ɦjəʔ 矣 , implying a change. Other particles included the subordination marker *tjə 之 and the nominalizing particles *tjaʔ 者 (agent) and *srjaʔ 所 (object). Conjunctions could join nouns or clauses. As with English and modern Chinese, Old Chinese sentences can be analysed as

612-570: A result, the syntax and vocabulary of Old Chinese was preserved in Literary Chinese ( wenyan ), the standard for formal writing in China and neighboring Sinosphere countries until the early 20th century. Each character of the script represented a single Old Chinese morpheme , originally identical to a word. Most scholars believe that these words were monosyllabic. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart propose that some words consisted of

680-606: A rich literature written in ink on bamboo and wooden slips and (toward the end of the period) silk. Although these are perishable materials, a significant number of texts were transmitted as copies, and a few of these survived to the present day as the received classics. Works from this period, including the Analects , the Mencius and the Commentary of Zuo , have been admired as models of prose style by later generations. As

748-443: 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

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816-404: A significant period of development prior to the extant inscriptions. This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character 冊 cè 'records'. The character is thought to depict bamboo or wooden strips tied together with leather thongs, a writing material known from later archaeological finds. Development and simplification of

884-444: 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

952-655: 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

1020-510: Is believed to be a Chinese innovation arising from earlier prefixes. Proto-Sino-Tibetan is reconstructed with a six-vowel system as in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, with the Tibeto-Burman languages distinguished by the merger of the mid-central vowel *-ə- with *-a- . The other vowels are preserved by both, with some alternation between *-e- and *-i- , and between *-o- and *-u- . The earliest known written records of

1088-1096: Is by far the earliest attested member of the family, its logographic script does not clearly indicate the pronunciation of words. Other difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are poorly described because they are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, including several sensitive border zones. Initial consonants generally correspond regarding place and manner of articulation , but voicing and aspiration are much less regular, and prefixal elements vary widely between languages. Some researchers believe that both these phenomena reflect lost minor syllables . Proto-Tibeto-Burman as reconstructed by Benedict and Matisoff lacks an aspiration distinction on initial stops and affricates. Aspiration in Old Chinese often corresponds to pre-initial consonants in Tibetan and Lolo-Burmese , and

1156-418: Is considered to be the chief god who created all things. In addition to this celestial god, they also had minor divinities ( Alps ) that served the purposes of Tengri. As Gök Tanrı, he was the father of the sun ( Koyash ) and moon ( Ay Tanrı ) and also Umay , Erlik , and sometimes Ülgen . Tengri was the main god of the Turkic pantheon, controlling the celestial sphere. Tengri is considered to be similar to

1224-450: Is largely absent in later texts, and the *l- forms disappeared during the classical period. In the post-Han period, 我 (modern Mandarin wǒ ) came to be used as the general first-person pronoun. Second-person pronouns included *njaʔ 汝 , *njəjʔ 爾 , *njə 而 and *njak 若 . The forms 汝 and 爾 continued to be used interchangeably until their replacement by the northwestern variant 你 (modern Mandarin nǐ ) in

1292-412: Is not always straightforward, as words were not marked for function, word classes overlapped, and words of one class could sometimes be used in roles normally reserved for a different class. The task is more difficult with written texts than it would have been for speakers of Old Chinese, because the derivational morphology is often hidden by the writing system. For example, the verb *sək 'to block' and

1360-510: Is not as pure or as white as Tengri and together they set up the world. Er Kishi becomes a demonic character and strives to mislead people and draw them into its darkness. Tengri assumes the name Tengri Ülgen and withdraws into Heaven from which he tries to provide people with guidance through sacred animals that he sends among them. The Ak Tengris occupy the fifth level of Heaven. Shaman priests who want to reach Tengri Ülgen never get further than this level, where they convey their wishes to

1428-546: Is the all-encompassing God of Heaven in the traditional Turkic , Yeniseian , Mongolic , and various other nomadic religious beliefs. Tengri is not considered a deity in the usual sense, but a personification of the universe. However, some qualities associated with Tengri as the judge and source of life, and being eternal and supreme, led European and Muslim writers to identify Tengri as a deity of Turkic and Mongolic peoples. According to Mongolian belief, Tengri's will ( jayayan ) may break its own usual laws and intervene by sending

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1496-518: Is the oldest attested stage of Chinese , and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese . The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty . The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as

1564-465: The Analects , the Mencius , and the Zuo Zhuan . These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese ), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters , including oracle bone , bronze , and seal scripts . Throughout

1632-485: The Shuowen Jiezi , a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century, 82% of the 9,353 characters are classified as phono-semantic compounds. In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds also have a phonetic nature. These developments were already present in the oracle bone script, possibly implying

1700-512: The Han period and the subsequent Northern and Southern dynasties . Old Chinese verbs , like their modern counterparts, did not show tense or aspect; these could be indicated with adverbs or particles if required. Verbs could be transitive or intransitive . As in the modern language, adjectives were a special kind of intransitive verb, and a few transitive verbs could also function as modal auxiliaries or as prepositions . Adverbs described

1768-541: The Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . The evidence consists of some hundreds of proposed cognate words, including such basic vocabulary as the following: Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austronesian . Although Old Chinese

1836-664: 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

1904-464: The Tang period. However, in some Min dialects the second-person pronoun is derived from 汝 . Case distinctions were particularly marked among third-person pronouns. There was no third-person subject pronoun, but *tjə 之 , originally a distal demonstrative , came to be used as a third-person object pronoun in the classical period. The possessive pronoun was originally *kjot 厥 , replaced in

1972-518: The Vietic branch of Austroasiatic have similar tone systems, syllable structure, grammatical features and lack of inflection, but these are believed to be areal features spread by diffusion rather than indicating common descent. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in

2040-562: The Warring States period , writing became more widespread, with further simplification and variation, particularly in the eastern states. The most conservative script prevailed in the western state of Qin , which would later impose its standard on the whole of China. Old Chinese phonology has been reconstructed using a unique method relying on textual sources. The starting point is the Qieyun dictionary (601 AD), which classifies

2108-500: The 1980s usually propose six  vowels : Vowels could optionally be followed by the same codas as in Middle Chinese: a glide *-j or *-w , a nasal *-m , *-n or *-ŋ , or a stop *-p , *-t or *-k . Some scholars also allow for a labiovelar coda *-kʷ . Most scholars now believe that Old Chinese lacked the tones found in later stages of the language, but had optional post-codas *-ʔ and *-s , which developed into

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2176-408: 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

2244-597: 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

2312-585: The Chinese language were found at the Yinxu site near modern Anyang identified as the last capital of the Shang dynasty , and date from about 1250 BC. These are the oracle bones , short inscriptions carved on turtle plastrons and ox scapulae for divinatory purposes, as well as a few brief bronze inscriptions . The language written is undoubtedly an early form of Chinese, but is difficult to interpret due to

2380-548: The Indo-European sky god, *Dyeus , and the structure of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion is closer to that of the early Turks than to the religion of any people of Near Eastern or Mediterranean antiquity. In Christian Turkish usage Tengri is used for the father of Jesus, who is referred to as "Tengri Oghli" (Son of God) and "Mshikha Tengri" (Messiah God). Tengri is also compared to Allah and Khuda. Apart from foreign religious influences, as far as known today,

2448-637: The Middle Chinese rising and departing tones respectively. Little is known of the grammar of the language of the Oracular and pre-Classical periods, as the texts are often of a ritual or formulaic nature, and much of their vocabulary has not been deciphered. In contrast, the rich literature of the Warring States period has been extensively analysed. Having no inflection , Old Chinese was heavily reliant on word order, grammatical particles , and inherent word classes . Classifying Old Chinese words

2516-483: The Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word. Although the script is not alphabetic, the majority of characters were created based on phonetic considerations. At first, words that were difficult to represent visually were written using a "borrowed" character for a similar-sounding word ( rebus principle ). Later on, to reduce ambiguity, new characters were created for these phonetic borrowings by appending

2584-526: The Zhou area. Although their language changed over time, it was highly uniform across this range at each point in time, suggesting that it reflected the prestige form used by the Zhou elite. Even longer pre-Classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition. The oldest sections of the Book of Documents , the Classic of Poetry and the I Ching , also date from

2652-400: The belief that they attained kut , some sort of heavenly and spiritual force granted to these rulers by Tengri. Prior to foreign influences, the Turkic conception of tengri was regarded as the heaven or the will controlling heaven, probably some sort of force. Out of this, the concept of a personal being developed. First, when Turkic people took over other religions, the term tengri became

2720-462: The borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with 毋 wú 'don't', a borrowing of 母 mǔ 'mother'. Later, phonetic loans were systematically disambiguated by the addition of semantic indicators, usually to the less common word: Such phono-semantic compound characters were already used extensively on the oracle bones, and the vast majority of characters created since then have been of this type. In

2788-414: The classical period by *ɡjə 其 . In the post-Han period, 其 came to be used as the general third-person pronoun. It survives in some Wu dialects, but has been replaced by a variety of forms elsewhere. There were demonstrative and interrogative pronouns , but no indefinite pronouns with the meanings 'something' or 'nothing'. The distributive pronouns were formed with a *-k suffix: As in

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2856-424: The combination *-rj- to explain the retroflex and palatal obstruents of Middle Chinese, as well as many of its vowel contrasts. *-r- is generally accepted. However, although the distinction denoted by *-j- is universally accepted, its realization as a palatal glide has been challenged on a number of grounds, and a variety of different realizations have been used in recent constructions. Reconstructions since

2924-418: The core issues. For example, the Old Chinese initial consonants recognized by Li Fang-Kuei and William Baxter are given below, with Baxter's (mostly tentative) additions given in parentheses: Various initial clusters have been proposed, especially clusters of *s- with other consonants, but this area remains unsettled. Bernhard Karlgren and many later scholars posited the medials *-r- , *-j- and

2992-490: The core vocabulary of Old Chinese to Sino-Tibetan , with much early borrowing from neighbouring languages. During the Zhou period, the originally monosyllabic vocabulary was augmented with polysyllabic words formed by compounding and reduplication , although monosyllabic vocabulary was still predominant. Unlike Middle Chinese and the modern Chinese languages, Old Chinese had a significant amount of derivational morphology. Several affixes have been identified, including ones for

3060-468: The derived noun *səks 'frontier' were both written with the same character 塞 . Personal pronouns exhibit a wide variety of forms in Old Chinese texts, possibly due to dialectal variation. There were two groups of first-person pronouns: In the oracle bone inscriptions, the *l- pronouns were used by the king to refer to himself, and the *ŋ- forms for the Shang people as a whole. This distinction

3128-637: The derived word " Tanrı " is used as the generic word for "god", or for the Abrahamic God , and is used today by Turkish people to refer to any god. The supreme deity of the traditional religion of the Chuvash is Tură . Other reflexes of the name in modern languages include Mongolian : Тэнгэр ("sky"), Bulgarian : Тангра , Azerbaijani : Tanrı . Earlier, the Chinese word for "sky" 天 ( Mandarin : tiān < Old Chinese * thīn or * thîn ) had been suggested to be related to Tengri , possibly

3196-660: The dialect spoken in the Chu region during the Warring States period . These rhymes, together with clues from the phonetic components of xingsheng characters, allow most characters attested in Old Chinese to be assigned to one of 30 or 31 rhyme groups. For late Old Chinese of the Han period, the modern Southern Min languages, the oldest layer of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary , and a few early transliterations of foreign proper names, as well as names for non-native flora and fauna, also provide insights into language reconstruction. Although many of

3264-554: The divine guides. Returns to earth or to the human level take place in a goose-shaped vessel. Güngör, Harun (Winter 2013). "Tengrism as a religious and political phenomenon in Turkish World: Tengriyanstvo" (PDF) . KARADENİZ – BLACK SEA – ЧЕРНОЕ МОРЕ . 19 (Winter 2013). Erdoğan Altinkaynak: 189–195. ISSN   1308-6200 . Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 August 2016 . Retrieved 19 June 2016 . Old Turkic language East Old Turkic

3332-496: The early Zhou period, and closely resemble the bronze inscriptions in vocabulary, syntax, and style. A greater proportion of this more varied vocabulary has been identified than for the oracular period. The four centuries preceding the unification of China in 221 BC (the later Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period ) constitute the Chinese classical period in the strict sense. There are many bronze inscriptions from this period, but they are vastly outweighed by

3400-481: The finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differed from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids . Most recent reconstructions also describe Old Chinese as a language without tones, but having consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, which developed into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Most researchers trace

3468-425: The god's divinity rather than his domain over the sky. It is generally assumed the term tengri originally meant "sky". Andrey Kononov suggested that the term is formed by the words tän (morning) and injir (evening) into tänri , referring to the sky as whole. The Turkic form, Tengri , is attested in the 8th century Orkhon inscriptions as the Old Turkic form 𐱅𐰭𐰼𐰃 ‎ Teŋri . In modern Turkish ,

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3536-707: 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

3604-608: The language. The corpus of xingsheng characters was greatly expanded in the following Zhou dynasty. In addition, the rhymes of the earliest recorded poems, primarily those of the Classic of Poetry , provide an extensive source of phonological information with respect to syllable finals for the Central Plains dialects during the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods . Similarly, the Chu Ci provides rhyme data for

3672-466: The limited subject matter and high proportion of proper names. Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty. Little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on grammatical particles than Classical Chinese. From early in the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BC, the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions, many of considerable length. These texts are found throughout

3740-431: The modern language, localizers (compass directions, 'above', 'inside' and the like) could be placed after nouns to indicate relative positions. They could also precede verbs to indicate the direction of the action. Nouns denoting times were another special class (time words); they usually preceded the subject to specify the time of an action. However the classifiers so characteristic of Modern Chinese only became common in

3808-940: The mythological origins of the Turks. The inscription dedicated to Kul Tigin includes the passages (in the translation provided by the Language Committee of Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Kazakhstan ): "When the blue sky [Tengri] above and the brown earth below were created, between them a human being was created. Over the human beings, my ancestors Bumin Kagan and Istemi Kagan ruled. They ruled people by Turkish laws, they led them and succeeded" (face 1, line 1); "Tengri creates death. Human beings have all been created in order to die" ( Old Turkic : Öd Teŋri yasar kisi oγlu qop ölgeli törürmis ), (face 2, line 9); "You passed away (lit.: 'went flying') until Tengri gives you life again" (face 2, line 14). Khagans ruled by

3876-470: The name is recorded in Chinese annals from the 4th century BC, describing the beliefs of the Xiongnu . It takes the form 撑犁/ Cheng-li , which is hypothesized to be a Chinese transcription of Tängri . (The Proto-Turkic form of the word has been reconstructed as *Teŋri or, the back-ablauted variant *Taŋrï .) Alternatively, a reconstructed Altaic etymology from *T`aŋgiri ("oath" or "god") would emphasize

3944-596: The name of a (personal) god or "higher being". Tengri was the chief deity worshipped by the ruling class of the Central Asian steppe peoples in 6th to 9th centuries ( Turkic peoples , Mongols and Hungarians ). It lost its importance when the Uighuric kagans proclaimed Manichaeism the state religion in the 8th century. The worship of Tengri was brought into Eastern Europe by the Huns and early Bulgars . Tengri

4012-586: The oracle bone characters, nearly a quarter of the total, are of this type, though 300 of them have not yet been deciphered. Though the pictographic origins of these characters are apparent, they have already undergone extensive simplification and conventionalization. Evolved forms of most of these characters are still in common use today. Next, words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles, were signified by borrowing characters of pictorial origin representing similar-sounding words (the " rebus strategy"): Sometimes

4080-486: The original Turkish concept of Tengri was that of "heaven" or a spirit ruling in heaven. This spirit was probably imagined as some sort of force, corresponding to "mana" in modern ethnology. The most important contemporary testimony of Tengri worship is found in the Old Turkic Orkhon inscriptions , dated to the early 8th century. Written in the so-called Orkhon script , these inscriptions record an account of

4148-455: The reading pronunciation of each character found in texts to that time within a precise, but abstract, phonological system. Scholars have sought to assign phonetic values to these Middle Chinese categories by comparing them with modern varieties of Chinese , Sino-Xenic pronunciations and transcriptions. Next, the phonology of Old Chinese is reconstructed by comparing the Qieyun categories to

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4216-574: The rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry (early 1st millennium BC) and the shared phonetic components of Chinese characters, some of which are slightly older. More recent efforts have supplemented this method with evidence from Old Chinese derivational morphology , from Chinese varieties preserving distinctions not found in the Qieyun , such as Min and Waxiang , and from early transcriptions and loans. Although many details are still disputed, recent formulations are in substantial agreement on

4284-469: The scope of a statement or various temporal relationships. They included two families of negatives starting with *p- and *m- , such as *pjə 不 and *mja 無 . Modern northern varieties derive the usual negative from the first family, while southern varieties preserve the second. The language had no adverbs of degree until late in the Classical period. Particles were function words serving

4352-467: The script continued during the pre-Classical and Classical periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles. The language developed compound words, though almost all constituent morphemes could also be used as independent words. Hundreds of morphemes of two or more syllables also entered the language, and were written with one phono-semantic compound character per syllable. During

4420-470: 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. Old Chinese Old Chinese , also called Archaic Chinese in older works,

4488-432: The use of 天 as a phonetic component in phono-semantic compound Chinese characters , and the choice of 天 to transcribe foreign syllables, all of which prompted them to conclude that, around 200 CE, 天's onset had two pronunciations: coronal * tʰ & dorsal * x , both of which likely originated from an earlier voiceless lateral * l̥ˤ . Linguist Stefan Georg has proposed that the Turkic word ultimately originates as

4556-612: The verbification of nouns, conversion between transitive and intransitive verbs, and formation of causative verbs. Like modern Chinese, it appears to be uninflected, though a pronoun case and number system seems to have existed during the Shang and early Zhou but was already in the process of disappearing by the Classical period. Likewise, by the Classical period, most morphological derivations had become unproductive or vestigial, and grammatical relationships were primarily indicated using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese and its southern neighbours Kra–Dai , Hmong–Mien and

4624-638: The will of Tengri thought the ancient Turkic people and preserved these thoughts in the texts of the Orkhon inscriptions in the following way: "I, Tengri-like and Tengri-born Turk Bilge Kaghan , succeeded to the throne at this time" ( Old Turkic : Teŋiriteg Teŋiride bolmuš Türük Bilge Qaγan bü ödüke olurtum ). In one Turkic myth , Tengri is a pure, white goose that flies constantly over an endless expanse of water, which represents time. Beneath this water, Ak Ana ("White Mother") calls out to him saying "Create". To overcome his loneliness, Tengri creates Er Kishi , who

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