TURKI LANGUAGE. The dialects of the Turkish lan guage may be roughly divided into four main groups, namely ( ) the oriental dialects of the Altai, (2) the western dialects includ ing Kirghiz, Bashir, and the Tatar of the Volga, (3) the dialects of Central Asia with which this article will deal, and (4) the southern dialects, including Turkoman, Azerbaijani, Anatolian, Crimean and modern Ottoman Turkish (Osmanli). These dia lects differ in a remarkably small degree from one another. There are, however, two Turkish dialects, namely, the Yakut and the Chuvash, which, owing to their isolation, have undergone con siderable modification. The Central Asian dialects which are spoken from the eastern frontiers of Persia as far as Hami on the edge of the Gobi desert include Taranchi, the Turki of Hami, Aqsu, Kashgar, Yarkand, Sart, the dialect of Kokand, and the Uzbeg of Bokhara and Khiva. The literary language of Chinese Turkestan is known as Eastern Turki or Jaghatai from the name of one of the sons of Jenghiz Khan who founded a Khanate in this region at the beginning of the 13th century. The first monu ments to be discovered of the ancient Turkish language were those contained in the Orkhon inscriptions dating from the 8th century which were written in a Runic character. They were known to exist in 1730, but were only deciphered in 1893 by the Danish scholar Vilhelm Thomsen. Since then a vast manuscript literature in a similar language, both in Runic and in other alpha bets notably the Uighur (derived through Sogdian from the Aramaic) has been rescued from under the sands of Central Asia. (Documents have also been found in Estrangelo [two forms], Brahmi, and even Tibetan.) When the Uighur alphabet was introduced is not exactly known, but it must, at a later stage, have overlapped with the Runic alphabet which was certainly employed in the 6th century of our era. Although with the
submission and consequent conversion of Chinese Turkestan to Islam a vast number of Arabic words were introduced into the Turki language, the number of these was far smaller than was the case with Osmanli Turkish, and consequently old roots have been preserved in Turki which have almost entirely disappeared from the westerly dialects. The Uighur alphabet was still in use in the 12th century and mss. have been found dating from the 15th century, but owing to the influence of the Arabian culture, it was finally discarded in favour of the Arabic alphabet. The Turki language spoken to-day from Yarkand to Hami is prac tically identical with the Turki of the loth century. Down to the 14th century very few literary works were produced in Turki, but in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries there appeared a large number of distinguished writers in that language among whom may be mentioned the great poet and patron of poets Mir Ali Shir Navai, the Sultan Babur and the historian Abul-Gazi Bahadur Khan. The characteristics of the Turkish languages have been described elsewhere. (See TURKISH LANGUAGE AND LITERA TURE.) Turki is rich in verbal affixes which modify the root meanings. Shaw cites an example which illustrates the manner in which these affixes may be multiplied in a single word—in Birilish turalmaidurman. Birniaq is "to give"; almaq is "to take"; biral maq is "to be able to give"; bird is "to be given"; birilish is "to be given to one another"; birilishtur is "to cause to be given to one another"; mai is the negative; dur is the present tense; man indicates 1st person singular. The whole thus means "I am unable to cause (them) to be given to each other."