The ’Pagan’ Oġuz-nāmä

Balázs Danka

The ’Pagan’ Oġuz-nāmä

(60th Meeting of the PIAC, Székesfehérvár 2017)

The ’Pagan’ Oġuz-nāmä (Bibliothèque Nationale, Suppl. Turc. No. 1001, further on, PON) is a Middle-Turkic text written in Uygur script. The manuscript has not yet been dated precisely; it is thought to be written in the fourteenth century. The script version is written with a simplified orthography compared to those that we know from the well-known Uygur Buddhist manuscripts. It does not differentiate, for example, between voiced and voiceless consonants, and front and back vowels, the script version may be some kind of shorthand. Despite this fact, it provides important linguistic information about the Turkic idiom which the manuscript preserves, such as y- ~ ǰ– alternation word-initially. Certain strangely spelled words allude to traces of secondary vowel-lengthening, diphthongization. The thorough examination of the vowel-marking in the text show that the vowel system of the idiom shows a similar shift to the one observable in modern Volga-Kipchak languages, ultimately allowing the conclusion that in spite the text being an Oġuz-nāmä, its language is a Kipchak variety. The proposed presentation aims to demonstrate the above mentioned and further phonological features of the PON, and solve the apparent contradiction.