Old Uyghur

Old Uyghur is the Turkic of the manuscripts found in the oases of eastern Xinjiang and in Gansu. They are dated from the ninth century on, and they are written in the Uyghur, Manichaean, runiform, Brahmi, Sogdian, Syriac and Tibetan scripts.^[1] By volume, they are the largest body of Old Turkic.^[1] The article on Old Turkic sets out the language of the inscriptions and the grammar of the whole corpus.

The name and what it covers

Eski UygurcaTurkish
Old UygurEnglish
AltuigurischGerman

The name needs care. The handbook of Old Turkic uses Uygur for Old Uyghur, the language of the manuscripts. It does not mean the modern Uyghur of Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, and it does not mean the Middle Uyghur of the Ming sources.^[1] It does not mean the language of the stones of the Uyghur steppe empire either. The runiform inscriptions of the empire in Mongolia are practically the same language as the Orkhon Turkic of the Second Khaganate.^[1] See Šine-Usu, Tariat and Tes.

Other scholars draw the line elsewhere. One etymological dictionary of Old Turkic sets a group “Türkü” apart, with the Orkhon language, the runiform manuscripts and the Manichaean texts that keep the palatal nasal. It then counts two close Uyghur dialects, and its “Uyghur” covers the runiform stones of the steppe empire as well as the manuscripts.^[2] Whether the stones belong to Old Uyghur is therefore a matter of definition, and a statement about “Old Uyghur” should say which sense it uses.

The manuscripts

The manuscripts come from Turfan and the other oases of eastern Xinjiang, and from Gansu. Most of them are in Berlin. Others are in London, St Petersburg, Paris, Kyoto, Stockholm, Helsinki, Ankara, Istanbul and China.^[1]

The contents are varied. Most of the corpus is religious. About three quarters of it is Buddhist, and most of that belongs to the Mahayana. The Manichaean texts make up less than a tenth, but most of them are early. The Christian texts are the fewest and are not particularly early. Alongside the religious texts there are contracts, personal and administrative letters, medical and astrological treatises, glossaries, folk material, and narratives in prose and verse.^[1]

Dunhuang gives a second group. A sealed cave among the Mogao caves, cave 17, held tens of thousands of manuscripts, mostly in Tibetan and Chinese. Its Chinese manuscripts are dated from 406 to 1002, and the cave was closed shortly after 1002.^[3] The collections of Stein and Pelliot together hold fewer than fifty manuscripts in Old Turkic from it. These are written in Uyghur script, in Manichaean script, in Tibetan script and, in a few cases, in runiform.^[4] The runiform pieces include the Irk Bitig, and the Manichaean piece is a long roll of the text called the Xwastwänift.^[5]

The corpus ends in the Mongol age. Printed books appear only under Mongol rule in the thirteenth century, and texts from the Yuan period are meant to be in the same language and are difficult to tell from earlier ones.^[6] The grammar of Old Turkic bases itself in principle on manuscripts older than the Mongol rule of the mid-thirteenth century.^[1] There is an eleventh-century set of land-sale documents from Yarkand in Uyghur script, which is the only direct manuscript evidence of the Karakhanid period.^[7]

The scripts

Old Turkic was written in a great number of scripts.^[8] Most of them are alphabets of Semitic origin that came through Sogdian. The Manichaeans used the Manichaean script and the Christians the Syriac script. By far the commonest was the Uyghur script, which was used by the adherents of all religions among the Turks of Eastern Turkestan.^[8] It is a variant of the Sogdian script, which was itself put to a limited use for Old Turkic. See the Sogdian language for the origin of the script and the Old Turkic script for the runiform one.^[8]

The Indic scripts were used much less. The Brahmi script was used as the Tocharians wrote it, and the Khotanese variety and the Tibetan script were used still less.^[8] A few seal imprints and one economic text are in ‘Phags-pa, a script made for writing Mongolian.^[9] The sources in Indic scripts have a great linguistic value, because these scripts show the vowels explicitly.^[10]

The Semitic scripts show them poorly. The Uyghur, Manichaean, Sogdian and Syriac scripts do not tell ï and e from i, o from u, or ö from ü. The scribes made up for this in part. They wrote two alef for a and one for ä in the first syllable, and they made a digraph for the front rounded vowels.^[11]

The manuscripts in Brahmi script were once held to represent a dialect of their own. The handbook does not accept this. Two Brahmi texts also exist in Uyghur script, and scribes put Brahmi glosses and akṣaras into manuscripts in the Uyghur script.^[12] One example of what the Brahmi spelling shows is the word abišik, “consecration”, which came from Sanskrit abhiṣeka by way of Tocharian A and B. A Brahmi text writes it with i in the last syllable, where a dictionary had e.^[13]

Stages and dialects

Scholars of Old Uyghur distinguish three stages. The pre-classical stage includes most of the Manichaean texts and early Buddhist ones, such as the Sängim manuscript of the Maitrisimit. The classical stage includes the translations made from Chinese by the team of Šiŋko Šäli Tutuŋ. The late stage is that of the Tantric texts.^[14] The handbook prefers to call the middle stage classical or standard, not by the Greek term koine, because at that stage the language was written much as it was spoken.^[7]

Whether a difference between two texts is one of dialect or of stage is argued. The old palatal nasal gives the test. A few early texts keep it, and most texts have y for it. The early London scroll of the Säkiz Yükmäk Yaruq has both kanyu and kayu, “which”.^[15] One explanation sees in this a language in transition. A second sees in it a scribe whose speech had lost the ñ and who changed it sporadically while copying.^[16] Other differences, such as the ablative in +dA against +dIn, serve the same argument.^[16] A third view holds that the differences once taken for dialects are really stages of development.^[17]

The geographical dialects can hardly be worked out. Manuscripts for public use travelled and were copied by scribes who differed in dialect, and personal documents are short and repetitive.^[18] Many of the translations were made by committees of bilingual translators.^[18]

Iranian, Tocharian and Chinese in the texts

The Uyghurs took their teachers of Manichaeism from the Sogdians. When Bögü Khan stayed in Chang’an in 762, he met Manichaean missionaries from Sogdiana and took them home with him.^[19] A Turfan text of his time mentions the nigošak, the Manichaean hearers, and the sart, who were probably Sogdian merchants.^[19] After the steppe empire fell in 840, the Uyghurs founded the kingdom of Qocho, which lasted from 850 to 1250 by the same account, and the Sogdians went on playing a part in its culture.^[19]

The influence of Sogdian on the Manichaean texts is seen in the word formation. The translators copied Sogdian words member by member. The word tïnlïg, “living being”, from tïn, “breath”, is understood as a copy of the Sogdian wātδār, “having breath”, from wāt, “wind, breath”.^[20] The five commandments of the Manichaean Elect show it in a set. The fourth, agïz arïgïn ärmäk, “purity of the mouth”, copies the Sogdian kūče-zpartyā, with the instrumental and ärmäk, “to be”, to render the Sogdian abstract ending.^[21] The second commandment is named kertü, “truth”, as the Sogdian name is.^[22] The Uyghur burxan, “Buddha”, is also used by the Manichaeans for their prophets in general.^[23]

How Buddhism reached the Uyghurs is argued. One theory has the Sogdians bring the Turks to Buddhism in the sixth century. An important support of that theory was a word on the Sogdian Bugut stone that was read as saṃgha. It has since been shown to be the Iranian word for stone.^[17] See the Bugut inscription. A second theory holds that the Uyghurs came to Buddhism through Chinese and Tocharians after their defeat by the Kirghiz in 840, when great masses of them moved into the Tarim basin.^[23] In that case all the major early Buddhist texts are translations from Tocharian.^[23] A small early group of Buddhist texts that are linguistically close to the Manichaean ones has its Buddhist terms in a Sogdian shape, not in a Tocharian one. The path of borrowing and the shape of the texts thus go together.^[17] See Manichaeism and Buddhism.

Kashgari on the Uyghurs

Mahmud al-Kashgari, writing in the 1070s, says that the Uyghur have “a pure Turkic language, and also another language which they speak among themselves”. They have two writing systems. One is the Turkic script, in which their correspondence is written. The other they share with China, and in it they write their scriptures and registers. No one can read it except their priests.^[24] He lists the Uyghur among the settled peoples, not among the nomads.^[24] See the Diwan.

References

^ a b c d e f g Erdal 2004, p. 7
^ Erdal 2004, p. 34
^ Hamilton 1986, ix–x
^ Hamilton 1986, x
^ Hamilton 1986, v,x
^ Erdal 2004, p. 7,34
^ a b Erdal 2004, p. 8
^ a b c d Erdal 2004, p. 37
^ Erdal 2004, p. 37–38
^ Erdal 2004, p. 38
^ Erdal 2004, p. 42
^ Erdal 2004, p. 42–43
^ Erdal 2004, p. 43
^ Erdal 2004, p. 7–8
^ Erdal 2004, p. 12–13
^ a b Erdal 2004, p. 13
^ a b c Erdal 2004, p. 35
^ a b Erdal 2004, p. 11
^ a b c Özertural 2013, p. 93
^ Özertural 2013, p. 94–95
^ Özertural 2013, p. 96
^ Özertural 2013, p. 98–99
^ a b c Erdal 2004, p. 36
^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 83

Sources

Literature

Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
Zekine Özertural, Mitteliranische Einflüsse auf die manichäisch-türkische Wortbildung (2013)
James Hamilton, Manuscrits ouïgours du IXe–Xe siècle de Touen-houang, Tome I: Textes établis, traduits et commentés (1986)
Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)