The papers brought together in the present volume deal with grammatical, lexical, onomastic and historical issues of non-Muslim Turkic languages and dialects spoken in South Siberia, in Mongolia and in China, and with the areal and genetic relationships between them. All of these varieties are socially dominated by non-Turkic languages; many of them are acutely endangered and, in general, insufficiently described. A number of the articles deal with the oral traditions (i.e. epics, proverbs) of the peoples speaking these varieties. Some typological issues concerning the Turkic languages of the area are also touched upon.
Transoxania, Khurasan, and ?ukharistan – which comprise large parts of today's Central Asia – have long been an important frontier zone. In the late antique and early medieval periods, the region was both an eastern political boundary for Persian and Islamic empires and a cultural border separating communities of sedentary farmers from pastoral-nomads. Given its peripheral location, the history of the 'eastern frontier' in this period has often been shown through the lens of expanding empires. However, in this book, Robert Haug argues for a pre-modern Central Asia with a discrete identity, a region that is not just a transitory space or the far-flung corner of empires, but its own historical entity. From this locally specific perspective, the book takes the reader on a 900-year tour of the area, from Sasanian control, through the Umayyads and Abbasids, to the quasi-independent dynasties of the Tahirids and the Samanids. Drawing on an impressive array of literary, numismatic and archaeological sources, Haug reveals the unique and varied challenges the eastern frontier presented to imperial powers that strove to integrate the area into their greater systems. This is essential reading for all scholars working on early Islamic, Iranian and Central Asian history, as well as those with an interest in the dynamics of frontier regions.
The eastern frontier of the Roman Empire extended from northern Syria to the western Caucasus, across a remote and desolate region 800 miles from the Aegean. It followed the great Euphrates valley to penetrate the harsh mountains of Armenia Minor and south of the Black Sea, along the Pontic coast to the finally reach the foothills of the Caucasus. Though vast, this terrain has long remained one of the great gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world, barely visited and effectively unknown — until now. Here, Timothy Bruce Mitford offers an account of half a century of research and exploration over sensitive territory, in challenging conditions, to discover the material remains of Rome's last unexplored frontier. The geographical framework introduces frontier installations as they occur: fortresses and forts, roads, bridges, signalling stations, and navigation of the Euphrates. The journey is enriched with observations of consuls and travellers, memories of Turkish and Kurdish villagers, and notes and photographs of a way of life little changed since antiquity. The process of discovery was mainly on foot; staying in villages with local guides, following ancient tracks, and conversing with great numbers of people - provincial and district governors, village elders and teachers, police and jandarma, farmers and shepherds, and everyone in between. This came with its perils and pleasures; encounters with treasure hunters and apparent bandits, tales of saints and caravans, arrests and death threats, bears and wild boars, rafts and fishing, earthquakes, all amid the tumultuous events of the second half of the twentieth century. Richly illustrated with large-scale maps, photographs, and sketches, this is an account of travel and discovery, set against a background of a disappearing world encountered in the long process of academic exploration.
Turkic is one of the world's major language families, comprising a high number of distinct languages and varieties that display remarkable similarities and notable differences. Written by a leading expert in the field, this landmark work provides an unrivalled overview of multiple features of Turkic, covering structural, functional, historical, sociolinguistic and literary aspects. It presents the history and cultures of the speakers, structures, and use of the whole set of languages within the family, including Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Uyghur, and gives a comprehensive overview of published works on Turkic languages, large and small. It also provides an innovative theoretical framework, employing a unified terminology and transcription, to give new insights into the Turkic linguistic type. Requiring no previous knowledge of the Turkic languages, it will be welcomed by both general readers, as well as academic researchers and students of linguistic typology, comparative linguistics, and Turkic studies.
The East Romans of Byzantium and the Sasanian Persians competed as geopolitical rivals for over four centuries between 224 to 628 AD. Through a series of intractable conflicts these two great empires would develop a dual hierarchy that sought to divide the known world between them. Despite competing claims to universal rule, mutual spheres of interest arose as both empires sought to create rules, norms, and standard practices of diplomatic behaviour to regulate their inter-imperial rivalry. Defined by contemporaries as the 'Two Eyes' of the Earth, this suzerain order aimed to hierarchically organize those considered as 'barbarians'. This period of late antiquity is rarely considered within the discipline of International Relations (IR) but, through an English School approach, Blachford examines the diverse suzerain order of late antiquity as 'barbarous' nomadic tribes challenged the hierarchical ambitions of two rival empires who both claimed a unique role in the maintenance of world order.
This volume provides a comprehensive treatment of the Transeurasian languages. It offers detailed structural overviews of individual languages, as well as comparative perspectives and insights from typology, genetics, and anthropology. The book will be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Transeurasian and comparative linguistics.
This comparative study analyzes the ways that Central European writers used stereotypes of the Turks to develop their national identities from the early modern period to the present. Charles D. Sabatos uses Andre Gingrich’s concept of “frontier Orientalism” to foreground his analysis of Central European Orientalism, designating the nations of the former Habsburg Empire as the occident and the Turks as the oriental “Other.” This study applies theoretical approaches to literary history—as developed by scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Linda Hutcheon—to a range of texts from the early modern period, the nineteenth-century national revivals, interwar independence, and the communist and postsocialist regimes. By following these depictions across literatures and over an extensive historical period, this study illustrates how the Turkish stereotype evolved from a menace to a more abstract yet still powerful metaphor of resistance, and finally to a mythical figure that evoked humor as often as fear.
This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The XVI chapters of the handbook provide the reader, in both general articles and individual studies, with a wide variety of perspectives: word-formation as a linguistic discipline (history of science, theoretical concepts), units and processes in word-formation, rules and restrictions, semantics and pragmatics, foreign word-formation, language planning and purism, historical word-formation, word-formation in language acquisition and aphasia, word-formation and language use, tools in word-formation research. The final chapter comprises 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective. These portraits afford the first overview of this kind and will prove useful for future typological research. This handbook will provide an essential reference for both advanced students and researchers in word-formation and related fields within linguistics.
There are many excellent books dealing with Old Turkic, Preclassical and Classical Mongolian and Literary Manchu individually, but none providing in a single volume a comprehensive survey of all the three major Altaic languages. The present volume attempts to fill this gap; at the same time it reviews also the much debated Altaic Hypothesis. The book is intended for use by students at university level as well as by general readers with a basic knowledge of linguistics. The 39 language texts analysed in the volume are discussed within their historical and cultural context, thus vastly enlarging the scope of the purely linguistic investigation.
The term Transeurasian refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages stretching from the Pacific in the East to the Mediterranean in the West. They share a significant amount of linguistic properties and include five linguistic families: Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. There is disagreement among scholars on the question whether these languages are genealogically related in the sense of an "Altaic" family. Many linguists, however, seem to agree on at least one point, namely that investigations into the striking correspondences in the domain of verbal morphology could substantially help unravelling the question. The present volume brings together prominent specialists in the field who explore potentially shared features of verbal morphology among the Transeurasian languages and search for the best way to explain them. Important issues dealt with include the following: How useful is verbal morphology really in establishing genealogical relations among languages? Is there concrete evidence for cognate verbal morphology across the Transeurasian languages? Is it possible to draw wider connections with Indo-European and Uralic? How to distinguish between genealogical retention and copying of verbal morphology? In which ways can typological similarities be significant in this context?
