The most ancient Turkish texts known to us at the present day consist of inscriptions carved onto tombstones, which are to be found in Central Asia, in territories, where, from the fifth century of the Christian era, vast confederations of Turkish tribes, comprising nomad shepherds and soldiers, had formed powerful States, which, strongly national in character, promoted the development of a truly original culture.

This inquiry will be limited to an analysis of Turkic borrowings that have been attested in inscriptions found in Mongolia and southern Siberia in the period beginning around the year 700 A.D., as well as in Turkic-Uighur manuscripts, beginning around the year 900 A.D., conserved in northern Tarim (especially in the Turfan region) and in Dunhuang, which is a Chinese outpost on the main road of the silk trade. We will look only at borrowings that predate Islamization, a process that (...) developed rapidly during the eleventh century and of which some borrowings are still part of the language of the Islamic Turkish world. Although most of our study will concentrate on pre-Islamic borrowings that were fully assimilated into written words, we will will also investigate some transcriptions of foreign terms that are mentioned in various manuscripts of a theological bent (most notably of Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and Syriac origin and found in Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian texts) as well as words of a very technical nature. We will also look at more contemporary terms that are derived from several major semantic fields. (shrink)

The development in modern times of the scientific study of the languages and civilizations called “oriental” (actually those outside western and central Europe) has of necessity been followed by a division of research into disciplines essentially delimited by linguistic boundaries. Thus experts of classical Arabic and of spoken Arab dialects, whether they study these idioms for their own sake, for their spoken or written literature, or even, making use of Arabic texts, to elaborate the history of the peoples of Arabic (...) language, their nations, or their culture, have found themselves tending to work more or less together and to consider themselves under the name of “Arabists” as the artisans of a common science. Likewise, the experts of classical or modern Chinese and of Chinese dialects—linguists, philologists, historians, ethnographers—are conscious of working in the same corps of studies, known as “Sinology.” In both cases the linguistic definition is reinforced by a fairly precise geographical definition; the Arab countries, or China, are easily found on the map, and the educated public understands without much difficulty the sphere of interests of the Arabist or the Sinologist. (shrink)

It is certainly simplifying to attribute a common way of thinking to vast human groups. This evident observation is particularly applicable when examining the ethnolinguistic ensemble traditionally designated as “Turkish-Mongolian”. The definition that can be given to this ensemble is based above all on linguistic facts. Two language families exist in Eurasia, Turkish and Mongolian respectively, scientifically well-defined and attested to, not only by living speakers but also by documents that go back, for the former, to the 8th century, and (...) to the 13th century for the latter. Moreover, there are considerable affinities between these two families, both in structure and in vocabulary; these affinities can be explained either through an original relationship between them or through many centuries of reciprocal influences, consequences of a long symbiosis. In addition, at a very early date there can be observed a very profound community of social structures and cultural traditions between the two groups (ranging from beliefs to material organization), the vestiges of which subsist even in our own times. (shrink)