21.11.16.20:26: WHITE OX 10.12

𘬈𘭌𘲐𘰯𘭧𘰯𘲝𘲺

? uni ai par sair par ? nyair

'white ox year, ten month ten two day'

Continuing yesterday's Turkic theme:

1. Last night I learned the 7th century Chinese transcription of Ötüken: 於都斤 *ʔɨə to kɨn.

• 於 *ʔɨə: *ə would be the closest match for ö until Chinese developed front rounded vowels. But there was no syllable *ʔə, so *ʔɨə was the closest matching syllable.

• 都 *to:  7th century Chinese had no syllables like *tü, *tu, or *tö.

• 斤 *kɨn: This is a surprise since I'd expect *ken. Could Old Turkic e have been [ə]? I doubt it because Turkic has a palatal harmony system. Could the Chinese transcription reflect an unstressed e? I doubt that too because in Old Turkic, medial syllable syncopation implies "that the first and the last syllable of a word had some prominence over the others, or that medial vowels were not stressed" (Erdal 2004: 97). Also, "word-final accent is the usual pattern in Turkish", and Turkish has a pitch rather than a stress accent. (However, there is no guarantee Old Turkic was suprasegmentally like Turkish.)
  

2. Today I learned about Ertuğrul ارطغرل‎ <ʔrtˁɣrl> (d. c. 1280 AD), whose name is from er 'brave man' + tuğrul 'a kind of bird of prey'.

The name of the current president of Turkey has a similar etymology: Erdoğan ارطوغان‎‎ <ʔrtˁwɣān> from er 'brave man' + doğan 'hawk'.

Two puzzles:

First, I would expect ط <tˁ> to only be in Arabic words, since Turkic has no /tˁ/. But my impression is that in Ottoman Turkish orthography, ط <tˁ> was used to write /t/ before back vowels, whereas ت <t> was used to write /t/ before front vowels. Did /t/ have an allophone [tˁ] before back vowels?

Second, ط <tˁ> also did double duty for /d/ before back vowels. Why not use ض <dˁ> for /d/ before back vowels: e.g., as in قاضی <qādˁy> qādı 'judge'? Because ض <dˁ> was generally pronounced [z] in Ottoman Turkish, implying that Ottoman Turkish got its alphabet via Persian (which also has [z] for ض <dˁ>)? Was Persian [z] an approximation of [ɮˤ], the earlier value of ض <dˁ> in Arabic?

21.11.15.21:25: WHITE OX 10.11

𘬈𘭌𘲐𘰯𘭧𘰯𘬣𘲺

? uni ai par sair par ? nyair

'white ox year, ten month ten one day'

I take the inclusion of Old Turkic in Unicode for granted now, so I needed Michael Everson's document to remind me that it's a relatively recent addition (v. 5.2, 2009).

Two lines caught my attention:

There are no more than 6 or 7 of them [Orkhon inscriptions].

But aren't there just two Orkhon inscriptions? The Japanese Wikipedia includes the two Tonyukuk inscriptions among the Orkhon insciptions even though they are 360 km away from the Orkhon inscriptions.

Old Turkic is used to write Iranian text in a few manuscripts.

I would be interested to see how the Old Turkic script was adapted for a language without vowel harmony.

The English Wikipedia doesn't mention Iranic in Old Turkic script, but it does list variants I've never heard of.

I wonder what "Turkic inscriptions in the Greek alphabet" look like.