Source: Bitig Türkoloji Araştırmaları Dergisi, Bahar 2023 / 2: 61-67.
Makale Geliş Tarihi: 30.08.2023 – Makale Kabul Tarihi: 15.12.2023
The 65th Annual Meeting of the Permanent International
Altaistic Conference (PIAC) in Astana
* Prof. Dr. Dr., Arctic Studies Center (ASC), Liaocheng University China / CHINA; E-mail:
MichaelKnueppel@gmx.net / ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6348-5100.
From July 30 to August 4, 2023, the 65th annual meeting of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) was held in Astana, Kazakhstān. It was hosted by the School of Sciences and Humanities of Nazarbayev University. This year’s meeting was opened on 30 July by the President of the 65th annual meeting, Prof. Dr. Uli Schamiloglu. The President’s opening address was followed by those of the President of the International Turkic Academy, Shahin Mustafayev, the Acting Provost of Nazarbayev University, Loretta O’Donnell, the Acting Dean of the School of Sciences and Humanities of Nazarbayev University, Anton Desiatnikov, the President of the 36th annual meeting of PIAC (in Almaty), Yerden Kazhybek, and the Secretary General of PIAC, Oliver Corff. Following this, the PIAC Medal (formerly the “Indiana University Prize for Altaic Studies”) was awarded – this year’s laureate is Prof. Dr. Barbara Kellner-Heinkele – and the “Confessions”, i.e. the reports on the completed, ongoing and future work of the participants, were held.
Napil Bazylhan, representing the President of the International Turkic Academy, opened the circle of lectures with his contribution “The results of joint archaeological expeditions of ‘Nomgon-2019’ and ‘Nomgon-2022’”, which preceded the first panel. In the lecture itself, the speaker reported on the results of the excavation campaigns and for the first time publicly presented several of the “Runic” Turkic inscriptions on some of the monuments found. All in all, the discovered written testimonies should result in a new enrichment of the “Runic” Turkic corpus, considering that by far not everything has been unearthed at the excavation sites.
The first lecture of the 1st panel, “Cultural history of Inner Asia”, “Ilteris Kutlug Kagan – in written sources”, was given by Gulzhamal Dzhamankulova (Zhusup Balasagun Kyrgyz National University). In the paper, the speaker turned to the portrayal of Ilteris Kutlug Kagan in the “Runic” Turkic written testimonies, focusing on the different narrative devices describing the historical events. This lecture was followed by Ma Xiaolin’s (Nankai University) “Chinese sources on the Mongol shamans in the Yuan court”, in which the speaker dealt with the shamanic rituals at the court of the Yuán emperors. As the contributor rightly pointed out, this is a subject that has received too little attention so far, which is probably because the existing sources are almost all written in Chinese. The lecture dealt with several hitherto unnoticed documents or data from such sources on trance, fire worship, sacrifice, mantics, etc., and examined the data based on Mongolian and Persian material. Following this contribution, Qiu Zhirong (Renmin University of China) spoke on “Migration and identity: An Ölberli family in China in the 13-14 centuries”. This paper traced previous research on the name Ölberli, emphasising that the respective authors had so far paid no attention to a Chinese source of significance for the subject matter – the inscription of an Ölberli family from the 14th century – and dealt in detail with the migration route of this family from Central Asia to South China during the Yuán period, taking into account their ethnic, religious and cultural identity. In the lecture by Alice Crowther (École pratique des Hautes Études, Paris), “The atlas of the Mukden hunting grounds (Shengjing weichang quantu 盛京圍场全圖) in the Chinese collections of the Collège de France”, the speaker presented a collection of 104 handdrawn maps of these hunting grounds, which were probably produced around 1839, and placed this material in a cultural-historical context as well as in relation to the current topographical situation.
The 2nd panel, “The lost heritage”, was opened with a presentation by Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary) “Forgotten manuscripts and other Sino-Barbarica from Louis Ligeti’s unpublished works”, in which the speaker reported on the “Sino-Barbarica” in the collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. L. Ligeti’s estate has been catalogued by a commission of experts since 2018, of which the lecturer himself is a member. In this context, the lecturer presented the material (– both the groups to which they can be grouped in terms of content, as well as individual pieces –) and provided information on the extent, dimensions, character, years, places, etc. (if given), locations, etc. (where indicated) and the connections with other parts of the estate, including, of course, Ligeti’s published works. This lecture was followed by Junko Miyawaki-Okada’s (Toyo Bunko) presentation “Galdan Boshoqtu Khan’s mother was a Khoshuud, not a Torghuud”, in which the lecturer used the Mongghol-un ugh ekiyin teüke discovered in Xīnjiāng in 1983 as an example. The speaker discussed the origin of Galdan’s mother, presenting the various hypotheses regarding her ancestry and finally – following the dPag-bsam IJon-bzang (1748) – in favour of the assumption that she was the daughter of Güüshi Khan of the Khoshuud. The last contribution of the 2nd panel was the presentation of Hartmut Walravens (International ISMN Agency) “On the tracks of a lost book”, in which the significance of Manchu studies in Europe and for Sinology as well as for Tungusology were underlined, before H. Walravens turned his attention to the lost Manchu dictionary of H. J. (v.) Klaproth (1783–1835).
The 3rd panel, “Sources and traditions” was introduced by Pierre Marsone’s (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) lecture “The sacrifices of the Khitan and sacred mountains in Khitan culture. The Liaoshi as an exceptional documentary source on the culture of an Altaic people”. In the presentation, the author focused on the Liaoshi, which, although it contains the usual shablo-like characterisations of the “northern barbarians”, also contains some revealing information. With regard to the Khitan religion, some inscriptions (for example in Buddhist temples) provide information, but also the Longkan shoujing. Taken together, these sources form enough material to create an impression of Khitan imperial rituals and the places where they were performed. In the following contribution, Saule Tazhibayeva (L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University) spoke about “New sources for study of the Kazakhstani Turkish community”. In fact, it was about the Meskhetian community in Kazakhstan and its situation. The Meskhetians of the country are descendants of the Turks deported from the Transcaucasian region to Kazakhstan in 1944. The speaker discussed their linguistic situation, their interethnic relations, but also those with today’s Turkey, whose language policy in Kazakhstan contributes to the endangerment of the Meskhetian variety in the form of its displacement by modern Turkish. This lecture was followed by the contribution of Michal Schwarz (Masaryk University), “Data collecting and analytic approaches towards the oral memory of the human landscape relations in the Mongolian Altai”, in which the speaker presented the results of his many years of field research in the Altai region (especially with regard to the Urjaŋchai). The current field research also presented here aims on the one hand to investigate the relationship between humans, animals, and landscape in the identity-forming oral tradition of the ethnic groups of the Altaj region, and on the other hand to stimulate research into comparable processes among Altaic peoples in the more distant past. This 3rd panel was concluded with the contribution of Zsuzsanna Olach (Jagiellonian University), “New sources in Karaim language history: The Karaim Bible translations”, in which the speaker reported on the progress of the project to study the Karaim Bible translations. She paid special attention to the use of the suffix -(X)p, but also to the peculiarities of the lexis and above all to the deviations of the various Karaim translations from the Hebrew Bible, which are significant for the understanding of the Karaim world of faith.
In the first lecture of the 4th panel, “Issues in interpreting Turkic languages”, Ekaterina Grudzeva (University of Helsinki) spoke about “Turkic languages of Russia: Current issues of taxonomy and vitality” and presented the results of a project on the number and socio-linguistic situation of the Turkic languages in Russia, which make up one-fifth of the 155 languages spoken there. The Turkic languages were divided by the speaker into seven groups. The compilation was based on linguistic, ethnic, demographic, and geographical criteria. One aim of the project presented here was to determine the degree of preservation/endangerment of the respective languages. In the following contribution, “The features of Turkic proverbs and their parallels in European languages”, Raushangul Mukusheva (Sarsen Amanzholov East Kazakhstan University) explored the poetic character of some Turkic proverbs (from Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkish, Tatar, Azerbaijani, etc.). In addition, the speaker discussed the possible Turkish origins of some Hungarian proverbs, which are partly mediated by other European languages but could also be borrowed directly from Turkish languages, whereby the mediating role of Bulgarian and Slavic languages was also discussed. In the last lecture of the panel, Murat Işık (Szeged University) spoke about “The interpretation of infinitival paronomastic usage in Biblical Hebrew within Karaim Bible translations”. In the Karaim texts – here already the earliest translations of biblical texts into Karaim – a morpho-syntactic formation is found which is commonly referred to as “paronomastic construction”. In this construction, an infinite verb precedes the same finite verb. In the past, there have been various attempts to explain the possible models for this – among other things, a Slavic influence has been suggested. However, this can be largely ruled out due to the fact that corresponding constructions can already be found in the earliest translation texts. Rather, as the speaker convincingly explained, this seems to be a loan translation (strictly speaking, an example of loan syntax).
In the first contribution of the 5th panel, “Interpreting sources in Altaic languages”, Erbol Munai (L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University) spoke on “Lexical semantic analysis of occupational names in Temür Qutlugh Khan’s yarlïğ”. The yarlïğs are official documents of the rulers of the Golden Horde, which were written in Middle Qypčak. The documents, or rather their language, which was (were) subjected to closer examination here, originate from the chancellery of Temür Qutluġ Ḫān and were addressed to the members of the Giray dynasty at the end of the 14th century. In the lecture, the speaker presented his research on the semantics of the occupational titles in these documents. In the following contribution by Liu Ge (Shaanxi Normal University), “A general survey of the conditional suffixes in 82 Uyghur contracts”, the author investigated the use of the shortened conditional suffix -sa, -sä, -za, -zä in Uyghur documents of the Yuán period and critically examined L. V. Clark’s assumption that these suffixes could provide information about the possible age of the documents. According to the speaker, Clark’s assumption represents a rather one-sided treatment since the shortened conditional suffixes are found in the same documents alongside the non-shortened ones (-sar, -sär), the latter occur more frequently in these documents and the texts of the documents also contain different conditional suffixes. In addition to the fifteen documents previously studied, 82 other manuscripts were occasionally subjected to patterning by the speaker, who presented this work and the results. The panel continued with the lecture of Haruna Tanikawa (Waseda University), “Mongolian as a Lingua franca: Documents sent from Russia to Khalkha Mongolia during the Qing period in The Mongolian National Central Archives”. The paper did not focus on the diplomacy of the governments of the Russian Empire and China from the 17th to the early 20th century, but rather on the more “local” level of exchange between representatives of the Tsarist Empire in Siberia with Mongolian dignitaries. Written evidence of this exchange can be found today in the Mongolian National Central Archives and, as explained in the lecture, shows that the medium of this diplomatic intercourse was the Mongolian language and that Russian documents and letters were usually accompanied by Mongolian translations. In the following contribution, Kyoko Maezono (Jena University) presented the “Case Suffix -Ø in Mongolian and Manju”. Here, a common feature of written Mongolian and Manchu, namely the non-marking of the casus, was discussed using examples from Mongolian Erdeni-yin Tobči and its Manchu translation. In the last contribution of the panel, Assyltas Kaltenova (L. N. Gumilov Eurasian National University) dealt with the “Contrastive analysis of food industry terms in Kazakh, English, and Russian languages on the basis of legislative documents”. In the lecture, the results of the comparative analysis of more than 100 terms from the field of food industry, which appear in various documents in the languages mentioned, were presented. As the speaker explained, it plays a role here that there are various ways of transferring the terminology in question (direct borrowing, indirect borrowing), in which the historical development of the Kazakh language is reflected (here above all through the transfer of Russian terminology into Kazakh, but also such a transfer from English as a reflection of globalisation processes).
The following 6th panel, “Sources for Chinggisid history”, started with the presentation by Emma Usmanova (Buketov Karaganda University), “The mausoleum of Jochi Khan as legacy of the Sufi movement in Central Asia”. The presentation highlighted the history and significance, but also the specifics of the Mazar of Jöči, the ancestor of the Ḫāns of the Golden Horde. As the speaker pointed out, there seems to be a contradiction between the Muslim architecture and the religious affiliation of the čiŋγisḫānid prince buried in the building. Due to the similarity of the building with other mausoleums in Turkestān, the presence of a mixture of pre-Islamic and Islamic rituals can be assumed. In the following contribution, “Contextualising the Yarlıqs from the Golden Horde and the Later Golden Horde”, Uli Schamiloglu (Nazarbayev University) discussed the documents of the Golden Horde (13th–14th centuries) and the so-called “Later” Golden Horde (15th–18th centuries) known as Yarlıqs. As explained by the speaker, these documents have repeatedly attracted the interest of Turkologists ever since J. v. Hammer-Purgstall. In the lecture, U. Schamiloglu mainly addressed the question of the use of various titles and terms over the centuries and their changing contexts from the perspective of social and economic history, but also from a political perspective. In the following lecture by Sándor Papp (Szeged University), “Sources to the Eastern diplomacy of the Ottoman Empire (15th–17th centuries)”, the interest then turned to the language of the Ottoman Empire’s diplomacy with the dominions of “the East”. Starting from the fact that the language of diplomacy in Central Asia was a Turkic idiom and that this tradition was also shared with the Ottoman Empire, the speaker traced the conventions of Ottoman diplomatic intercourse based on Ottoman, Persian, and Turkic “documents” in hitherto unpublished collections in archives in Istanbul, Vienna, and Tashkent. Barbara Kellner-Heinkele (Free University of Berlin) dealt with the “Steppe diplomacy: The Kazakh Lesser Horde and its neighbours in the mid-18th century”. Since Kazakhstān’s independence, as the speaker pointed out, numerous works have been published on the history of the country, including works dealing with traditional empire-building. In the meantime, historians have opened up and analysed numerous sources. The lecturer presented two letters written by Nur Ali, Ḫān of the Lesser Horde, to Tsarina Elisaveta in 1755. These had escaped historians because they were found misallocated in the Archives of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (AVPRI). The two manuscripts were described in detail by the speaker and placed in their historical context.
The following 7th panel, “Sources for traditional Altaic religions”, was opened by Michael Knüppel (Arctic Studies Center (ASC), Liaocheng University) with the paper “Dæmonologia Tuvinica – names and concepts of ‘intermediary beings’ in Tyvan language and culture”. In the presentation, the referee dealt with two issues concerning the Tyvan names of deities, spirits, and mythical beings. On the one hand, the collective concept of “Zwischenwesen” and the transfer of this concept to Tyvan conditions, and on the other hand, the problem of classifying these intermediate beings among the Tyvans in the context of the classifications/categorisations of intermediate beings among the Altaic peoples (here above all the early Turks, but also the Tungus) and the “northern” Buddhism that was also widespread among the Tyvan people. This panel was concluded with the lecture by Dávid Somfai Kara (Nazarbayev University), “The Majmūcat ul-tawārih. A Sūfi chronicle from the Farghāna Valley and the Kirghiz epic tradition”. In that contribution, a Persian manuscript from the 16th century, in which a mixture of pre-Islamic and Turko-Mongolian tradition with views of the Sūfis is shown, was discussed. This written monument is a testimony from the time of the Islamisation of the steppe nomadic population by the representatives of the Sūfis, the Xwājas, who described the struggle of the Muslim Kirghiz in the epic tradition of Manas against the “infidel” Kalmyks as a “holy war” to win over the members of the tribes.
The eighth and last panel, “New sources for Altaic studies”, was taken up with the contribution “Amuric – a new source for Altaic studies” by Juha Janhunen (University of Helsinki). In the lecture, the speaker presented how phenomena in the so-called “Altaic” languages can be explained based on the “internal” reconstructed Amuric, whose remaining members are the varieties of Nivkhi. Amuric, which may also have been the dominant language in southern Manchuria, possibly in connection with the Empire of Puyŏ (Buyeo), may have been both a donor and a taker language in the linguistic relations with the Altaic languages, both in lexical and structural terms. Several examples were given by J. Janhunen to support the assumptions. This contribution was followed by the lecture of Sami Honkasalo (University of Helsinki) and Chingduang Yurayong (University of Helsinki) “Quantification of verbal events: A new perspective for studying convergence and divergence across Altaic languages”, in which the speakers presented the results of their study of the distribution and implementations of the marking of the counting of events in the Altaic verbal system based on findings from about 40 Altaic languages as well as four hundred other languages of Eastern Eurasia. In fact, there are two different ways in which these markers of quantification can be typologically classified: (1.) the distinction between whether a language has a classification system for counting entities (noun classifiers) and occurrences (verbal classifiers), and (2.) the morphosyntactic realisation of the two remaining strategies of event counting: counted nouns and iteratives. In the following lecture, Julie Lefort (Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale (CRLAO), Paris) presented “Turkic vocabulary in Dongxiang Mongolian: a possible substrate?”. In Dongxiang Mongolian, whose genesis is not undisputed and for which a Turkic origin has even been assumed, there are indeed some Turkic words, which the referee has subjected to a closer examination. She divides them into (1.) common Turkic-Mongolian vocabulary and early Turkic borrowings in Middle Mongolian, (2.) regional vocabulary, which are secondary Turkic borrowings, and (3.) words that occur exclusively in Dongxiang Mongolian and have no equivalents in other Turkic languages. The latter is probably a substrate, as the speaker explained. Following the lecture, Ding Shiqing (Minzu University) spoke about “The conservation of Altai language resources in China: Current situation and problems”, presenting a project for the conservation of the language resources of the languages and dialects of China. In its first phase (from 2015–2019), the project was initially concerned with data collection, the evaluation of which is now being carried out in the second phase, which is currently underway. The presentation outlined general characteristics, existing difficulties, and future prospects with regard to the Altaic languages included in the project. The panel, and thus the series of lectures at the annual meeting, concluded with the contribution “Defining the new normal: Transformations of lexicon and grammar in two Manju dictionaries” by Oliver Corff (PIAC), in which the speaker presented the different techniques of revision of the Manchu dictionary Han-i araha Manju gisun-i nonggime toktobuha buleku bithe (printed 1772) compared to the first Manchu dictionary, the Han-i araha Manju gisun-i buleku bithe (printed 1708). As presented in the lecture, six different possibilities, all of which have been outlined, come into question and are also found when comparing the lemmas in the two versions of the dictionary.
The annual meeting was accompanied by various side activities, such as a visit to the Alzhir Documentation Centre, the National Museum, the Hazret Sultan Mosque, a city tour, and a guided tour of the Nazarbayev University campus.
This 65th Annual Meeting, which was excellently organised and attended by contributors from around a dozen countries, can be considered a remarkable success in terms of both the organisation and the quality of the presentations, and all participants and interested parties can look forward with great expectations to the next conference in Göttingen in June 2024, which was already announced at the annual meeting.