Oriental Studies (May 2018)
About the Amount and Nature of Turkic-Mongolian and Turkic-Tungusic Lexical Relations in a New Perspective: the Role of the Theory of Genetic Relationship of the Altaic Languages in the Identification of Ancient Language Contacts
Abstract
The article represents new facts concerning the problem of ancient language communications and facts confirming the interaction of Turkic languages with Mongolic and Tungus-Manchu ones. The paper shows that the words representing cultural lexicon of Turkic languages were repeatedly borrowed into both the Mongolic and Tungus-Manchu languages and dialects, and those were Turkic languages - many of them extinct nowadays - that were sources of such diverse loans. The materials under consideration constitute a new episode in studies of the mentioned interlingual relations. And when it comes to the description of lexical structure of Altaic languages in the historical and areal perspectives, the presented facts prove interesting both in terms of theory and practice. The paper concludes that all revealed patterns of the kind are characterized by some features as follows: 1) the words to be compared are beyond the systems of correspondences inherent to the comparative and historical phonetics of Tungus-Manchu languages, but match the Turkic system of correspondences exactly for the specific consonants - δ, š, z, j - and are somewhat congruent with the uncommon transformations of vowels typical, e.g., for the Chuvash language; 2) the vast majority of patterns revealed during the search of correspondences for the targeted Turkic roots show no significant semantic differences, otherwise their semantic divergences match the divergence processes to be witnessed in Turkic languages as such, etc. Together with the similar facts in these languages there are such forms of words which help us reconstruct the lexical units as elements of common Altaic lexicon. The article concludes that the goals of further studies of areal relations between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungus-Manchu languages should comprise systemization and linguo-geographic analysis of the facts mirroring elements of such extinct languages dated 3 000 years back (when the Tungus-Manchu group split up resulting in the divergence of the Turkic languages that were in contact with diffusing dialects of the Common Tungus-Manchu parent language), and, thus, deepening the prospects of Turkic studies by 1 700 years from the period of the earliest Turkic written monuments.
