Turks and Iranians: Interactions in Language and History

Turcologica #105

by Éva A. Csató, Lars Johanson (Editor), András Róna-Tas (Editor)

The contributions by an international group of leading scholars discuss the historical and cultural relations of old and modern Turkic and Iranian languages. A main topic is how contacts of spoken and written languages from pre-Islamic times until various periods of the Islamic era have influenced the emergence and development of Iranian and Turkic varieties. The purpose is to contribute to a better understanding of the interrelations between cultural-historical contacts and linguistic processes, and to stress the necessity of cooperation between experts of Turkic and Iranian studies.

295 pages, Paperback

First published January 21, 2016

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection took a long time to reach readers. The papers within were presented at a 2006 workshop organized at Uppsala University in memory of Gunnar Jarring. Only a decade later, in 2016, was it finally published by Harrassowitz, at which time two of the authors were no longer among the living.

The papers are divided roughly into historical ones and linguistic ones. Peter Golden contributes two papers on the Turkic impact on Central Eurasia, though there isn't so much beyond his previous work on the subject. András Róna-Tas describes the treasure of Nagyszentmilos. Istan Vasary’s paper on the role and function of Mongolian and Turkic in Ilkhanid Iran straddles both the historical view and the linguistic side.

The Early Turkic language in general is discussed in two papers, one for West Old Turkic (the late Arpad Berta) and East Old Turkic (Lars Johanson). Early Turkic is also the language in play in the phenomenon described by Prods Oktor Skjaervo: Turks and Turkic in the Khotanese texts from Khotan.

Certain papers deal with the influence of Iranian on Turkic, namely Persian on Irano-Turkic texts in the 16th century (Heidi Stein), copying of Iranian morphosyntactic units from Chaghatay to Modern Uighur (Abdurishid Yakup), the non-Persian Iranian substrate of Azerbaijan (Donald Stilo). The marker -(y)akï in Kashkay is examined as an example of the borrowing of a bound morpheme, in a paper by Dolatkhan, Csató and Karakoç. Other papers are more on the Iranian side and note how Sogdian (Werner Sundermann) and Middle and New Persian (Bo Utas, Judith Josephson) absorbed outside influences.

It is a pity that this took so long to come out, and only a few authors were able to make a few updates to their papers. Still, anyone interested in the subject would enjoy reading through this.