{"id":27177,"date":"2016-08-03T18:09:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-03T23:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=27177"},"modified":"2016-08-03T18:44:52","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T23:44:52","slug":"speaking-slavic-and-turkic-across-eurasia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=27177","title":{"rendered":"Speaking Slavic and Turkic across Eurasia"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest post by Peter B. Golden.\u00a0 It is a follow-up to this post and the discussion about trans-Eurasian communication in Turkic languages in the comments that followed it:\u00a0 \"The sounds of Eurasia<\/a> \" (8\/1\/16).]<\/p>\n

I have long been fascinated by the question. The same issue arises with Slavic. There, I had the advantage of speaking Russian since childhood. Actually, the language I spoke with my grandparents and elders was a rural patois that consisted of Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. In Belarusian this mixed [Russian-Belarusian] language is called \u0442\u0440\u0430\u0441\u044f\u043d\u043a\u0430 \/ trasianka, lit. a mix of hay and straw. In Ukrainian the Russian-Ukrainian mix is called \u0441\u0443\u0440\u0436\u0438\u043a \/ surzhyk, lit. a mix of wheat and rye). I have heard Muscovites and St. Petersburg folk use the word \u201csurzhik\u201d in reference to these mixed E. Slavic regional dialects overall.
\n
\nThese mixed languages are common in the small towns and cities. Some have become areal, moving beyond a strictly Belarusian or Ukrainian area. Acquiring the other Slavic languages, even when there were interesting divergences (e.g. in Polish for a Russian-speaker) was easy. In all of them phonology jumped around (but I was accustomed to that given my family\u2019s East Slavic patois- it shifts within E. Slavic according to region- vocabulary could shift, change – there were \u201cfalse friends,\u201d but overall the grammar was familiar. When I was a student of Ihor \u0160ev\u010denko, he presumed that those of us who were native-speakers of a Slavic language (both those born abroad and those born in the US) could simply pick up a book in another Slavic language and read it. In fact, in one of my first seminars with him, he assigned me a book in Bulgarian (which I had never really looked at previously) to read and report on at the next meeting. Bulgarian grammar is largely non-Slavic, having been heavily influenced by Romanian \/ Vlach – it even has post-positioned articles – articles are completely lacking in all the other Slavic languages (except Macedonian, which is closely related to Bulgarian). The occasional post-positioned preposition does surface in Russian, but these are largely frozen forms, somewhat archaic (e.g. \u0411\u043e\u0433\u0430 \u0440\u0430\u0434\u0438 \/ Boga radi \u201cfor God\u2019s sake \/\/ Bog \u201cGod\u201d radi \u201cfor the sake of\u201d – used to underscore a plea \/ request for something). Grammatically, then, Bulgarian is strange, but I could figure it out and the vocabulary, built on literary Church Slavonic (just like literary Russian) was not a serious problem. I read the book and gave my report.<\/p>\n

When I studied in Turkey, the attitude was the same: if you know one Turkic language, you can manage any of them. One of my professors, Saadet \u00c7a\u011fatay (the daughter of a famous Tatar poet) for my first assignment gave me a folklore text in Qarachay (a Q\u0131pchaq \/ northwestern Turkic language of the N. Caucasus, with considerable vocabulary differences and some grammatical features that are strange at first encounter (but understandable once one knows the history of Qarachay phonology). Her assumption (and I am not a native speaker) was that one could figure it out\u00a0 – and one largely can. My job was to translate it into Turkish. Chuvash (the sole descendant of West Old Turkic \/ O\u011furic\/Bul\u011faric, which split off from \u201cCommon Turkic\u201d ca. 1st cent. BCE-1st cent. CE) and has been heavily impacted by Volga Finnic and other non-Turkic influences, is an exception – but even there, once one gets accustomed to certain \u201cpeculiarities,\u201d there is a familiar feel to it. Yakut, which broke away later, i.e. much more recently, and has been isolated from other Turkic languages under Tungusic, Mongol and other influences, also presents problems with vocabulary, etc. but again has a certain familiarity to it.<\/p>\n

In certain situations, a kind of Pan-Turkic can be used. For example, I had a long conversation (about three hours) with a Chinese scholar who was a specialist in Uighur. I spoke mainly in Turkish and he spoke in Uighur. Our chat covered a wide range of subjects, occasionally making use of Ancient Turkic words or words from other Turkic languages that we presumed the other would understand when something obviously did not come across – or the Chinese term. I have found that with Qazaqs and Kyrgyz it is more difficult. Native speakers of Tatar have no problem (I can read Tatar, but it doesn\u2019t help much when hearing Qazaq, which belongs to the same Q\u0131chaq subgrouping of Turkic, but a different branch. The same is true with Q\u0131rgh\u0131z, which is very close to Qazaq). Native Turkic-speakers may have a different experience.<\/p>\n

Under Atat\u00fcrk and the decades after him, Pan-Turkism was officially discouraged (very much so). Many of my professors, who were from Turkic peoples outside of Turkey, never uttered the word \"Pan-Turkic,\" but their attitude and approach to teaching things Turkic was Pan-Turkic, with the idea that all Turks constitute one people and one language. The differences are merely dialect. Turkish does not differentiate between \u201cTurkish\u201d and \u201cTurkic.\u201d They may, on occasion, say T\u00fcrk Dilleri (Turk[ish\/ic] languages or more often T\u00fcrk Leh\u00e7eleri (Turkish \/ Turkic dialects\/languages – leh\u00e7e from Persian is a good fudging word). When they want to refer to dialects within Turkey Turkish they say T\u00fcrk a\u011f\u0131zlar\u0131. A very useful comparative work on all the Turkic languages is T\u00fcrk Leh\u00e7eleri Grameri<\/i>, ed. by Ahmet B. Ercilasun (Ankara, 2007). One can understand the word leh\u00e7e here as either \u201cdialect\u201d or \u201clanguage\u201d \u2013 it is safe and can be interpreted according to one\u2019s preferences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest post by Peter B. Golden.\u00a0 It is a follow-up to this post and the discussion about trans-Eurasian communication in Turkic languages in the comments that followed it:\u00a0 \"The sounds of Eurasia \" (8\/1\/16).] I have long been fascinated by the question. The same issue arises with Slavic. There, I had the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multilingualism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27177"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27206,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27177\/revisions\/27206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}