A Grammar of Old Turkic
;
Light, Nathan;
;
The Journal of Asian Studies
;
05-01-2006
;
A Grammar of Old Turkic. By MARCEL ERDAL. Handbook of Oriental
Studies, section 8, Central Asia, no. 3. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 575 pp.
$246.00 (cloth).
Old Turkic comprises several closely related dialects attested in
texts written in at least seven different scripts over a period of five
centuries. Most sources for Old Turkic were written in Central and
Inner Asia and Siberia from 720 CE until the Middle Turkic period,
generally considered to begin with the Mongol expansion in the
thirteenth century. The rich political, historiographie, lexicographic,
legal, administrative, and religious (Buddhist, Manichaean, Islamic,
and Nestorian Christian) written records of Old Turkic are now widely
scattered in museums and collections throughout the world. The studies
and editions of these important linguistic and historical sources are
likewise scattered and often hard to find. But over the course of the
past 100 years most of the basic problems of graphical, lexical, and
grammatical interpretation have been resolved, and in the present
magisterial grammatical analysis Marcel Erdal has benefited greatly
from the breadth of available editions and linguistic studies. Erdal
has made an impressive contribution to Turkology with his comprehensive
reevaluation of the issues of Old Turkic grammar, creating an excellent
foundation for further discussion and debate. Erdal published his
two-volume Old Turkic Word Formation: A Functional Approach to the
Lexicon in 1991, and he brings the same systematic and comprehensive
approach to the present work, which will rapidly become a standard
resource for all Turkologists. A Grammar of Old Turkic in fact
continues the analysis of derivational forms that Erdal began in OTWF.
The immense body of primary sources and scholarship that Erdal has
had to take into account in this grammar can be gauged from the fact
that he cannot include most of the bibliography for his reference
apparatus within this volume. To find the editions and other works he
references, one must have recourse to a bibliography prepared by V.
Adam, J. P. Laut, and A. Weiss, Bibliographie alttiirkischer Studien
(Harrassowitz, 2000), which gives the abbreviations used in Klaus
Röhrborn's sixvolume Uigurisches Wörterbuch as well as in OTWF. Though
it is understandable that publisher limitations made it impossible to
include more than the 18-page bibliography found in the present book,
this volume will thus be less useful as a convenient guide to Old
Turkic texts. In addition, to keep this grammar a manageable length,
Erdal transcribes his examples without morphemic analyses, which may be
confusing to users less familiar with Old Turkic. He also indexes only
the "terms and notions" (i.e., concepts) and "Old Turkic elements"
(i.e., morphemes and function words). Since other words are not indexed
or cross-referenced, occasional problems arise: the phrase oplayu täg-
is interpreted once as "to attack like a threshing ox" (p. 179) and
once as "to attack head on" (p. 257).
The strength of Erdal's work lies in his broad mastery of the
literature and references to contrasting analyses on each point. He
provides a well-balanced review of previous literature that will be
indispensable to anyone attempting to grasp the intricacies of Old
Turkic linguistics. He takes on the major previous grammars of Turkic,
pointing out where they have failed in either comprehensiveness or
understanding. He dismisses Omeljan Pritsak's 1963 Das
Alttürkische-also a volume in the Handbook of Oriental Studies
series-as "quite undependable" (p. 28). He is little concerned with the
systematic distinctions among dialects made by von Gabain, Zieme,
Clauson, Doerfer, Johanson, and Tenishev, but he attends closely to the
distribution of individual grammatical features found in the different
categories of sources. Elucidating the details of these lexical and
morphological variations among dialects of Old Turkic makes his
discussion comprehensive but necessarily longer and more complex.
Many issues remain debatable because of the ambiguities of the
scripts used for writing Turkic languages and because of the sheer
number of morphemes and semantic complexity of their possible
combinations. Erdal does an excellent job presenting most of the
debates about the form and meaning of morphemes arising from
alternative possible readings, although occasionally he simply asserts
that an argument is untenable without explaining why.
Many vowels and some consonantal features have to be deduced in the
more widely used scripts based on evidence from other scripts, and
these deductions are particularly open to debate. The textual
hermeneutic circle in Turkic historical linguistics involves the
reconstruction of morphology to improve semantic interpretations, and
the use of semantics to reconstruct morphology. Fortunately the
considerable phonological and grammatical stability within Turkic also
makes it possible to extrapolate from later dialects. It is remarkable
how many of the features of Old Turkic grammar and lexicon are still
found in modern languages such as Uyghur and Kyrgyz. Sir Gérard Clauson
famously emphasized this feature of Turkic in An Etymological
Dictionary of Pre-13th century Turkish (1972) when he included the
abbreviations s.i.a.m.l. and s.i.s.m.l. for "survives in all/some
modern (Turkic) languages" in his entries.
The core of the book consists of chapters on phonology, morphology,
and syntax with only brief chapters on pragmatics and lexicon. Syntax
is less studied in Turkology because the large lexicon and its complex
agglutinative word constructions enabled by the many inflexional and
derivational suffixes make morphology particularly complex. As Erdal
points out, the area of pragmatics in Old Turkic remains little
explored because it demands representations of language being used in
social contexts (p. 515). Fortunately, Old Turkic sources such as the
runiform inscriptions and Mahmud Kashghari's Divan Lughat at-Turk do
contain representations of linguistic pragmatics, but these have not
interested many Turkologists. Erdal's insights into Turkic pragmatics
provide a much-needed discussion and will undoubtedly be widely cited,
but his neglect of many aspects of reported speech, deixis,
reflexivity, and performativity means some readers will not understand
the importance and coherence of the field of pragmatics.
Overall the scholarship and editing in this volume are of the
highest quality, and it will quickly become a basic tool for reading
Old Turkic texts that should be in any academic library. In A Grammar
of Old Turkic Marcel Erdal has given scholars a thorough and up-to-date
overview of the state of Old Turkic linguistics and made an important
contribution to understanding the development of the Turkic languages.
AUTHOR_AFFILIATION
NATHAN LIGHT
American University of Central Asia
A Grammar of Old Turkic
Byline: Light, Nathan
Volume: 65
Number: 2
ISSN: 00219118
Publication Date: 05-01-2006
Page: 413
Section: BOOK REVIEWS-INNER ASIA
Type: Periodical
Language: English
Copyright Association for Asian Studies, Inc. May 2006
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