A reader wrote me:
Didn’t see it mentioned anywhere, so I thought I’d pass along the Türik Bitig site. It’s got a lot to sink your teeth into:
1. Etho-Cultural Dictionary of Old Turkic
2. Uploads of most (all?) of the common Old Turkic inscriptions
3. Even a bit on learning to read Old Turkic
I’ve added the links; the site has a note:
The basic idea of creating the electronic historical and cultural fund was based on issue of The Oriental Studies Section of The Institute of Oriental Studies named after Suleimenov in 2005 under the govermental program “Cultural Heritage”: “Қазақстан тарихы туралы түркі деректемелері” сериясының 2-томы Н.Базылхан “Көне түрік бітіктастары мен ескерткіштері (Орхон, Енисей, Талас)” Алматы: Дайк-Пресс. 2005, 252 б. +144 бет жапсырма.
Thanks, Parry!
Update. As of Feb. 25, 2021, the site appears to have been infected with malware, so I have substituted archived links.
Very interesting!
Turkic philology caught my attention recently when I read this very interesting blog post by Eric Schluessel, who’s just written a textbook for the Turkic literary language Chaghatay (Čağatay). Some very interesting comments about institutional support for the study of ‘obscure’ languages, and the (dis)incentives students and scholars can have for learning languages. For example:
He goes to talk about how all this informs how he went about writing his textbook:
My personal favourite bit is his emphatic endorsement of dabblers:
It’s all worth a read, anyway, or at least I thought so. There are also some sobering comments at the end on the state of Uyghur scholarship in China.
деректемелері
Did some detective work trying to figure out this Kazakh word.
It means “details” and it’s plural, the singular form “derek” means “news, fact” and comes from Persian word which meant “claim”. However, it’s just tip of the iceberg, because Persian “dark” also meant “perception, realisation, understanding”. In turn, it is a borrowing from Arabic where “dark” means:
(obsolete) stairs, staircase going down
Synonym: دَرَج (daraj) (going up or down)
path one takes to reach a goal
reaching of a goal
(obsolete) a piece rope attached to the side of a bigger rope
Related Arabic word from the same root
أَدْرَكَ • (ʾadraka) IV, non-past يُدْرِكُ (yudriku)
to overtake
to grasp, to understand, to realize
I’ll stop now, but figuring this kind of semantic shifts and travels across languages of Asia and Africa is deeply fascinating to me. Every Kazakh word in these two sentences can be expanded in this vein.
OK, one more.
144 бет
“Bet” is an Old Turkic word which means both “face” and “page” (in a book). The amount of semantic meanings of this word in Kazakh is astonishing (“surface”, “side”, “cheek”, “shame, conscience” and millions of figurative meanings, mostly revolving around concept of “losing face” which I thought was Chinese, but probably is just Asian)
My personal favourite bit is his emphatic endorsement of dabblers
Yes, that’s great — long live dabblers!
Thanks for that analysis, SFReader; that stuff is fascinating to me too.
It sounds interesting, but did you, perhaps, intend to include a link?
Here you go:
https://thecessblog.com/2018/05/to-build-central-asian-studies-invite-people-in-teach-more-chaghatay-by-eric-schluessel-university-of-montana/
Oops – I had the linked copied, but I guess just blanked on actually pasting it in.
Prof Schluessel’s textbook is open access on the UMich library website. I own a copy of the print book and it is definitely a dabbler’s textbook – I think I found it for $13 used online. Definitely a publishing paradigm I can get behind!
Oofta, бет is a hefty one. My Kazakh-English dictionary lists 41 figurative senses. Surprisingly, Mukan’s A Learner’s Dictionary of Kazakh Idioms doesn’t have any indexed under it.