Since a close friend of mine from Turkey was here visiting me, I had to take a break from our Turkmen discussion – sorry for the interruption.
I will take back my claim that Turkmens are ex-Persians, since this was not what I wanted to say, although that is how I mistakenly phrased it. All I was trying to say was that these Turkic groups had been intermingling with the Persian speaking groups for nearly two or even three hundred years. The land they were on before they arrived in Anatolia had been home to Persian speaking groups for quite many centuries – for at least a thousand years. Turkic groups started moving into this area, probably, around the 7th century. By the time they had started moving into Anatolia, some of these groups, especially Turkmens, had been under the influence of both the Persian language(s) and its culture(s).
On the other hand, we do not really know for sure what form this intermingling took at this time. Was it that Turkic speakers were simply borrowing culturally and linguistically? Or, were these groups also marrying to each other? I think, and this has been my main objection in these sort of discussions, it is very naïve, and sometimes very nationalistic or chauvinistic, to assume that the Turkic groups kept their race intact; that they did not mix with the Persians, who were the dominant population in the area before they took over. I am sure there were some racially and culturally pure Turkic groups who moved into Anatolia at this time; but I also think strongly that there were many mixed groups mainly between Persian and Turkic speakers. There are actually a lot of unanswered questions in this area. For example, what kind of groups are we talking about: families, clans, or warriors, or all of the above?
Ceyhun tells us that “both Vryonis and Cahen put this fact so confidently that they were Turks not Persians.” I will have to disagree with this, because neither Vryonis nor Cahen deal with this question. For them it is not even a question that whether it was Turks or not who moved into Anatolia; they take it for granted that they were Turks. Vryonis focuses mostly on how Turks destroyed the Medieval Hellenism. He does not even bother with the question who these people were. Basically, in the histories and historical accounts written about Turks in this period, neither Persian groups nor Persian culture has no role. I find this very strange. You are going to occupy a land that had been occupied by Persian speaking groups for nearly 1000 years and interact with these groups at least for 300 years, and you are going to have no mention of them in your histories. Before anything else, we need to fix this problem in our history. (By the way, when I say Persian I am not talking about today’s Iran, but Persian speaking groups and cultures. Speakers of Kurdish languages or dialects are also in this group).
Ceyhun also tells us that literacy (I suppose literature) and culture were in Persian. What kind of culture are we talking about here? High culture? Was it the culture of the ruling class or of the people in general? The official Turkish history likes to separate people’s culture from the culture that belonged to the ruling Turkish class, and then it claims that the former was Turkish whereas the latter was Persian during the Seldjuk era and Arabic-Persian during the Ottoman times. And then Filiz, you add that these Turkmens that you have come across speak a language that is more Turkic than Persian. I agree with you Filiz in that it is not really that easy to take language as our reference point in determining who was who. We cannot go only by the language one speaks. After all, languages change fast. But, how fast they change. When it comes to the vocabulary they may change very fast. On the other hand, when it comes to the grammar the change is very slow, and sometimes, it does not even happen. Even in the area of vocabulary, every language has its basic vocabulary that does not change much. This basic vocabulary may include words like, well, father and mother, water and earth, blue and red, one, two, three, body parts, or, in my opinion, insults and cuss words. Well, I will perhaps exclude the last part, the cuss words, since it may not be part of the basic vocabulary; but for your information, with exception of a few words, quite many of our cuss words are Persian. Naturally, the vocabulary we use today does not count much, since it has gone through serious Turkification since the end of the 19th century. We need to go to the works that were written and read at the time. And, we need to look at these works in their original forms, in the script they were written, since translations are not always reliable. I believe, following such an analysis, we will see heavy borrowing from Persian not only to the high language of the palace officials, but also to the basic vocabulary of the average people. What really bothers me is that also some grammar forms were borrowed – for example, cunku, ki, and kim at that time. One may speak two languages with two different grammar forms as we do now, but taking one form from another language, worse yet, another language family, and adapting it to another language in another family means more than simply speaking two languages. One interesting study would be to study the grammar borrowings between Turkish and both Greek and Armenian languages and compare this case with the case between Turkish and Persian.
Why am I into this subject so much? What difference is it going to make whether the people who came to Anatolia were Turks, Oghuz, or Turkic groups mixed with Persians and others? Discussing these things in detail, first of all, I believe, starts giving us a more non-nationalistic perspective in regards to the history of our land, and of the peoples who belong to this land. Secondly, the identity question for Turks is still not resolved fully. In fact, it is just beginning. There is this idea of Anatolianism, or ‘Turkiyeli’ism (from Turkey-ism); and of course emergence of a somehow new form of nationalism. The word ‘Turk’ is not a very neutral word. Unfortunately, it has rather negative historical connotations – connotations that I believe have been imposed in the general history of the world, rather politically, and do not really reflect what happened in the past all the time. Anyway, this post is just a prelude. I will continue. Right now, I am a bit tired.
These are, not so well organized, random notes I wrote down before the above post.
It is funny that, on the one hand, there is the critique of the official Turkish history, based on the claim that it is made up of quite a lot of historical exaggerations. On the other hand, there is, almost constant, use of these exaggerations, without thoroughly analyzing them, both by the followers of the Turkish official history and its critiques. The claim that ‘men’ means ‘I am’ in Turkish is a similar argument, or a reconstruction, which is basically a creation of the nationalistic history, worse yet, its pan-Turkist branch and/or version of it.
Before I get into this ‘men’ business, I would like to make one quick clarification: ‘men’ does not mean ‘I’ in Turkish my friends. ‘Ben’ means ‘I’ in Turkish, if we are talking about Turkish here. We do not say ‘Ik’ (Dutch I) means ‘I’ in English or German (which in Ich), do we? So, let us not make the same mistake with Turkish either.
Also, let us try not to be so chauvinistic, and perhaps even a bit pan-Turkish, by calling all of these Turkic languages Turkish. When we say Turkish we are speaking about one specific language in the family of Turkic languages, and in this specific language, ‘ben’, not ‘men’, means I. If we are talking about the Turkic language family, or Turkish family for some people, there is not one I, but at least three of them. Since a language family is not a language by itself, we cannot determine what I is for it. But, if we are talking about proto-Turkish, which, by definition, is a single language, then it is a different matter. But, as far as I know we do not know much abut such a language yet. So, there are at least three concepts here: Turkish (a specific language in a specific language family), Turkic language family (the specific language family Turkish belongs to, nobody speaks a language family), and proto-Turkish (the language presumably from which all of the Turkic languages evolved).
And one last thing: A Dutch may understand and communicate with a German, if he has to. Sam thing would work between a Turk and an Azeri. But, these are two different languages as Dutch and German are, although they are very close to each other. Making these two languages or all of the other languages one single language, either intentionally or not, is a pan-Turkist argument, a nationalist exaggeration. ‘Men’ is simply not ‘I’ in Turkish. Nor it is in the Turkic language family. And, it looks like it was not in some proto-Turkish or proto-Turkic either.
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According to G. Clauson of ‘An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish (Here Turkish does not necessarily mean our language, but Turkish language family – to reduce the confusion, I use Turkic for Turkish family), “The word was originally ben, but except in the Oguz dialects became men by assimilation at an early date; it is one of the criteria for differentiating between Türkü VIII century Yenisei inscriptions and Old Kirgiz (1). Ben now survives only in SW. Osm, in all other languages, including SW Az, Tkm, it is now men. Clauson has two interesting citations from Kasgarli’s Divani Lugati-l Turk: According to one of them, ‘men’ meant ‘I’ in the language of Turks; and according to the second one, “Oguz, Kip., Suwarin XI [century] convert every initial m- into b-, eg. The Turks say men bardim and those tribes (al-firaq) say ban bardim.”
The explanations about ‘men’ indeed get confusing even to my taste. However, what got my attention here was the difference between Oghuz and Turku (or Turk) that Kasgarli seems to be aware of. This difference between what is Turku (Turk) and what is not Turku, in our case Oguz, or Dokuzoguz, from which group Oguz are supposed to be coming, probably disappeared later on; and all the Turkic groups became Turks. However, if we are doing history, not simply nationalistic justificatory grand story creation, then we must look into these differences. It is wrong, in my opinion, to assume that the people of the 11th century used the same concepts about themselves we are using right now. We must try to see the difference between our Turk and their Turk, and try to understand how this difference came into existence and disappeared later on, especially if the subject is that of figuring out the evolution of our present identity.
These Turkic speaking tribes, most likely Oghuz group or groups, wrote things when they arrived in Anatolia. For example, Danishmendname is one such work. I haven’t finished reading the whole thing yet, but even when we look at the first pages (I am in the middle of the book) we can see a lot of ‘ben’ and ‘biz’. On the other hand, I do not remember coming across ‘men’ so far in this book. So, Danishmendname, without getting into political, cultural or ethnic identities, was a book that was written by ‘ben’ group, not a ‘men’ one. For example, there is this sentence on page 10: “Ben eytdüm: ‘Ya resulullah ! sehir kavmi bana meded kilmazlar’, dedüm. Andan bana etydi kim : Yarin size bir ulu kisi geliserdür, adi Süleymandur, sizi sehre davet kilisardur, varunuz kim simden gerü sizün elinüzden cok isler kopisardur,’ dedi.” It would be an interesting study to see if there were ‘men’ speakers in Anatolia at that time. I do not think the linguistic boundaries were, or are ever, sharp enough to correlate them with cultural boundaries/groups. In fact, I am more inclined towards an argument that many different groups from different languages were on the move towards Anatolia in a melting pot fashion. Hence the mixed language at the time; and it was mixed indeed. For example, in the above passage there is the word ‘kilisardur’, which comes from the word ‘kilmak’ (to organize, to do, to make). According to Clauson, Oguz avoided the word ‘kil’ out of respect, because it also meant, allusively, copulation as in er kizig kildi (the man copulated with the girl), whereas the Eastern languages continued using it. This information about copulation and that because of this meaning Oguz avoided using the term is from Kasgarli. I wonder if this avoidance was partly related to the influence of Islam. In any case, the practice of not using the word ‘kil’ is generally ascribed to the Oguz speakers. Even today, the word ‘kil’ is not common occurrence among Turkish speakers, that is, Anatolian speakers. Another interesting word in this passage is ‘eytmek’. The original version is ‘aytmak’, which means to speak. In Anatolia, the word becomes ‘eytmek’. But, the foremost interesting word in the above passage is ‘kim’. Normally, this word means ‘who’ in Turkish. But, in the above passage, it is not used in this meaning – ‘bana kim konustu’ (who did talk to me?). Instead, it is the famous who clause of the Indo-European languages (I think most of them have this). So, this person is actually saying (‘Andan bana etydi kim’) ‘then told me who’ or ‘then told me that’ (the –di at the end of ‘etydi’ already implies that it is he or she who is speaking. When we look at Clauson again, we get the following explanation (a bit long one unfortunately).
“The concept of relative pronouns was entirely foreign to Turkish, in which participles and the like are used where Indo-European languages use Relative Pronouns, but when the Turks became acquainted with such languages, and religious works in them began to be translated into Turkish, usually by persons whose native language was not Turkish, kim came to be used as a Relative Pronoun, and hastened by phonetic resemblance, in all the meanings of Persian ki and other cognate Iranian words, including the conjunction ‘that’” (721). According ‘Ali (Kissa-I Ali, written in Crimea in 1233), “kim is common in Oguz usually in such phrases as dedi kim (he said that), kordi kim (he saw that)”(721).
The native language is the key word here. Although I have not done any study in this area, watching my daughter, who is growing up in a bilingual environment, and knowing my own experiences (I also grew up in a bilingual and even a trilingual environment), my not so complete conclusion is that although one may gain both knowledge and use of the foreign vocabulary in such environments rather easily, in order to gain the same for the foreign grammar that one may be in interaction with, that foreign grammar needs to be either in dominant position or almost dominant position linguistically. My daughter does not make use of Turkish grammar, although she understands it, because the dominant language is English; and I believe she will not until she goes to Turkey. I do not know how plausible my theory is, but I have not come across any case so far that proves otherwise. Therefore, my conclusion is that in order to assimilate these Indo-European grammar forms, original Oguz speakers must have shared the same linguistic environment and with Iranian speaking groups. Knowing about Tocharians, Sogdians, and Schytians, this is highly probably. After all, the famous land of ‘Turan’ comes from not a Turkish but Persian epic. So, it would be correct to claim that some Central Asians migrated to Anatolia, but it is highly questionable if these Central Asians were made up of pure Turks linguistically, culturally and racially. Whatever Oguz might have been originally, probably Turkic, that is, Dokuzoguz, after mingling with Iranian or Persian groups in the land of Turan, today’s Central Asia, the land occupied by Turkmenistan, Ozbekistan and partially Kazakistan now, they became something else both culturally and linguistically; and of course racially. However, I do not deny there were still pure Turkic elements, relatively speaking. And, when they arrived in Anatolia as an already mixed population, this time they met ‘sehir kavmi’, people with a different cultural composition. This ‘kavm’, people, nation, was also already mixed since the time of the Hattis and Assyrian colonies preceding the Hittite period. What I am saying here is basically the idea that we should give up seeing this particular history in terms of distinct categories that were in isolation from each other like oil and water.
Let me try to summarize what I have so far said in simpler words for those who usually find my essays a bit confusing. Linguistically speaking, we know that there were at least two different Turkic speakers: ‘men’ and ‘ben’ speakers. Ben-speakers seem to be identified as Oghuz groups. Judging from the language they used, at least to write their first epic stories in Anatolia, this group had already accepted Indo-European grammatical forms into their language. Since grammar is not easily borrowed there are at least two explanations for this case: either these Oghuz speakers, especially the ben-speakers, were in a dominantly Indo-European environment, or their epic stories were written by either Indo-European native speakers or native Turkic speakers who made use of a mixed grammar naturally. I am not really talking about two different language theory of our official history here: the language the rulers spoke and what the simple people might have. We might have had two different groups of simple people: one that spoke a less Indo-Europeanized form of Turkish than others. This more Indo-Europeanized Turkic groups, due also to Indo-European, in our case Persian, cultural elements in them, might have intermingled more easily with the already existing native elements in Anatolia and become in time the Anatolian urbanites. It is another mistake, myth, or whatever, to assume that all the Turkic speakers who came to Anatolia were nomads. Although all the nomadic groups who came to Anatolia may have mostly been Turkic speakers, this does not bring the reverse automatically that all the Turkic speakers who came to Anatolia were nomadic.
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And, a few words on Turkmen. ‘men’ according to C.E. Bosworth in his ‘The Medieval History of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia’, which is a study that is conceptually different from S. Vryonis’ ‘The Decline of Medieval Hellenism’, in which the sole role of the Turkic groups, or simply Turks according to Vryonis, is that of plundering, robbing, and destruction of Hellenism, comes probably from the Persian suffix –man (like). According to Bosworth, there were already some Turkic elements in Transoxania before the introduction of Islam in this area. During the Islamic period, there emerged a new pressure by Turkic elements, who were mostly nomadic, outside the borders of Islam. “These were a later wave of Oguz than the “Ogur” of the 5th century; and owing to long contact with Iranian speaking peoples and detachment from their Turkish speaking relatives further east, had developed dialects sufficiently different from the standard Turkish of the Uygur of Sinkiang and the subjects of Karahanid dynasty to the north and west of the Uygur, for Mahmud al-Kasgari, writing in the middle of the 11the century, to make a clear distinction between “the language of the Turks” and “the language of the Oguz and Kipcak”. These two people were often described as Turkmen. The origin of this designation has been much debated, but having regard to the fact that the people to whom it was applied were in close contact with Iranians, the simple explanation that it is “Turk” with the Persian suffix –man “like”, is probably correct. It seems at first sight a little ironical that people who really were ethnically Turks should be described as “like Turks”, but the name no doubt goes back to a period when the Muslim term “Turk” still meant the historical Turku and had not yet become a vague generic term” (3-4 of Al Xwarizmi on the peoples of Central Asia).
Although this explanation makes sense to me at first sight, I still have some questions, especially after I did more research on it. In the Ottoman language, according to the dictionary I have, the word Men means “sahsa delalet eder. “O kimse ki, yahut, kimi, kim, kim ki” gibi manalara gelir (basically, it means who and who that). This sort of makes sense with the above explanation in that Turkmen was probably a word originally that was used together with other words. I mean it was probably not a name, but something that meant Turks who, for example, destroy everything. However, when I go to Clauson’s dictionary of the 13th century, I come across this word ‘man’, which means kind of different things. One meaning is something related to sheep. For example, ‘man yaslig koy’ means ‘a sheep which passed the age four’. On the other hand, ‘man kislag’ means ‘ the name of an Oguz country’. Perhaps, a correlation was made at that time between sheep and Oguz groups, and that is what Turkmen, actually Turkman, or even maybe, the foreign word Turcoman, stood for. Another meaning is man-, which does not have a suffix but a prefix character, and it means ‘to walk’ and the like. It survives only in SE Turki man- ‘to go, walk, travel, ride’ , which makes sense with our practice of calling these Turkmen groups ‘yuruk’ or ‘yoruk’, meaning, supposedly, the one who walks.
... what “Turkmen” means?
You said that some basic vocabulary does not change. Then how do we explain the introduction of “þey” (an Arabic word, “thing”) into Turkish? I asked a former teacher about it and she said it was “nen” in olden times. (I won't even dwell on the "oh but Turkish words don't start with n, m, y, z, etc."...)
I also think that the language of the Gök Türks must have been the original Turkish. I don’t know if it was the only existing dialect at the time, but it was written and is also the only one we have.
I read your stuff but haven’t been able to come up with a thing of my own. I do have one question, however. Just like we have “uslu çocuk” but do not use the word “us” itself and just like we have “yorgun argýn” but do not use the verb “argurmak,” I was wondering if there are any other examples you can think... I am more interested in these... Very briefly, please. ;)
I am sorry for the misunderstanding; my fault. Basic vocabularies do change; but they do not change unless some serious changes are taking place both ethnically and culturally. They make up the most resistant and stable part of every language. If there are borrowings to a basic vocabulary of a language, then I would think that the people whose basic-vocabulary-words are being borrowed are living very closely to the group that is borrowing these words – close enough that their kids may be playing together. A few borrowed words in a basic vocabulary are not a major thing – it might happen, but when it is the big portion of a language then there must be something unusual happening.
‘Sey’ is a very good example. It is Arabic; there is no question about it. I am very impressed with both your knowledge and curiosity in the linguistic matters. Turkish words do not start with n, m and z; you are correct. But y is not in this class. Turkish has a lot of words that start with y; it is a major initial letter. About n, however, there are a few exceptions and ‘nen’ is one of them. What did you do: took a Turcology class?
I do not like the idea of ‘original language’. It is eventually a social Darwinist and pan-something-ist idea. Did Gokturk speak a language that was more Turkish than ours? We will never know, because we have no way of comparing them with the groups that might have preceded them. They spoke their Turkic language and we are speaking our own kind of Turkic language. However, we might compare their basic vocabulary and morphology with what their neighbors might have had at the time, and do the same for ours, and then see who was purer. But, of course, I do not know what we can gain by this. Was it the only dialect? I do not know. Some say Oguz and other Turkic languages came after Old Turkic, and some say these languages were already there with the Old Turkic. It is a confusing subject. But, one thing is sure: gokturks were the only cultural group who called themselves Turks until the founding of our republic. There is of course the case of Turkmens. I do not think we will get too far by asking Turkmens, because we are really trying to understand the people who were called Turkmen in the 11th century, not the ones who go by the same name now. We need to go to the sources from the 11th century and try to understand the term according to its context. After all, how many of us know what Turk means? But, we are using it. Do you know Filiz?
Languages change. Everybody borrows. Some words die in time and some stick around. I do not really know the reasons. I will supply you with examples as I come across of them.
Although I do not like the idea of an original language as in original Turkish,come to think of it, Gokturk was more original. For example, for us lance is 'mizrak', which is not Turkish by definition; it starts with 'm'. We also have 'sungu', which is Turkish. Whereas we cannot figure out where this 'sungu' comes, for Gokturk speakers, speakers of old Turkish or Turkic, it was easy, since 'sunu' meant lance. Another example would be 'oksuz'(without mother and/or father). We cannot see the relationship between 'ana' (mother) and oksuz. But, for old Turkish speakers it was obvious, since og meant mother.
... but two of my favourite Turkish language teachers in high school were Turkologists. One even joked about speaking Göktürkçe like his mother language... LOL... And listening to them (except for when they were lecturing about Divan Edebiyatý - yech) was always fun and interesting! 'Sides, my main areas of interest have always been languages and history - not science. :))))
I also remember "ök" now... In fact, I had talked to Boghos, who is also pretty interested, about that. Any ideas on the word "öke," though?
As for what "Turk" means, I know that it was found as "türük" in the Orkhon inscriptions. Although I heard things like, it is meant to mean "brave" and all that, I think it might have something to do with the verb "türemek" (to derive from, to spring from, etc.) as in "Türeyiþ"... I haven't checked it out. It's just a guess and not an educated one at that.
I'm not sure "y" is not in "that class"... I remember being shocked when I heard about it... Sometimes I think these guys are just "throwing and catching"... (LOL)
I don't know of Göktürkçe was THE anything or not... But it is perhaps commonly accepted as such. I certainly have that impression. It is too bad we do not have enough historical records on our language - certainly a great loss.
I will come back to your post. I got to go to work now. But, what are studying right now (merak ettim). By the way, if you are into history and language, I guess you are in the right forum. I will cerainly make this forum a lot of history and language.
I took a quick look at oke, but I could not see anything. Anyway, the etmylogical dictionary I have is not an easy one to deal with, since it is not alphabetical. They have some weird etymological system that I have still not gotten used to.
Turemek is a good guess, and it actually makes sense with thi particular interpretation of the word Turk, Turuk, meaning which I will get into it right after work.
Must remember that the language that the Ottomans spoke,Osmanlica(or maybe called Osmanli)was a mixture of Turkic with a lot of Arabic and Persian words.During Ataturks reign,he had his people to clean up the language of Arabic and Persian words.
Today,the official language of Turkey that we call Turkish is mostly cleared of Arabic and Persian words,but from what I've read it includes thousands of foreign words of various languages which have been altered to sound Turkic.
Also remember that the Seljuks,as the first Turkic power to arrive in Anatolia,spent a great deal of time in Persia and Arabia before coming to Anatolia,so it's no suprise that the language they spoke included many Arabic and Persian words.Also,a lot of the Central Asian Turkic people's culture is Persian or Indo-Iranian.