Prototurks as Pioneers in Language Creation and Their Role in World Culture
50th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Kazan 2007
Languages of the Altaic language family are considered to be among the most ancient ones. The famous Russian linguist N. Marr wrote about it yet in 1937. The same idea was reiterated by Olzhas Souleymenov in his book “AziYa”. Turkic words have been found in the languages of American Indians. Given that no other language on the Earth but Turkic has displayed the same lexical and grammatical diffusion into other languages, one may suppose that in a certain epoch this language was the world super language, something like linguistic Atlantida, which strongly influenced the process of formation of other, more primitive and younger languages.
It is common knowledge that the first words that appeared were imitations of sounds of nature. For example, a bird crying “kar-kar” was named “karga” (Tatar “crow”), and a bird that pecked at a tree with the sounds “tak-tok, tuk-tuk” was called “tukran” (Tatar “woodpecker”).
But Nature also consists of mute objects such as the sun, the moon, a mountain, etc. Ancient people made a kind of revolution in the cause of creating a human language by finding a mechanism for naming mute objects. And that mechanism was associative thinking. When ancient people pondered how to name the sun, they noticed a certain connection between this object and birds, in our particular case — with a woodpecker sounding “tuk-tuk”.
Firstly, birds flying in the sky are the nearest living beings to the sun. Secondly, every spring birds come from the south, that is from the sunny side. Thirdly, birds lay white and round eggs in their nests, which are very much like the sun and the moon.
Consequently, people began to use the sounds “tuk” not only to name a bird (“tukran”), but passed the name on to the sun, which did not create any sounds. This ancient name of the sun is found in words which have the features (shape, colour) of that object: (t)ak (Tatar “white”), tugerek (Tatar “round”), tegermech (Tatar “wheel”), Tukav (Tatar “small sun”).
The sun for the ancient people was also the first god. This is also proved by the old Turkic name “Tukbirde” (Turkic “God gave”) given to new-borns. It meant that the baby was given to the parents by God called “Tuk”.
It was the invention of this mechanism that made the revolution in the process of thinking of an ancient man. For the first time in history a sound having flown out of its material nest (from the bird’s throat) set on an independent sailing, in other words, having parted from the material it fell into the world of the ideal and the abstract.
When this mechanism started working, the language itself began to form; a man was forming in the modern sense of the word. Then with the help of associative thinking hundreds of notions and words denoting these notions were made from the root “tuk”.
For better understanding how the language of prototurks influenced the evolution of Indo-European languages let us turn to the most characteristic and typical names of the sun in Indo-European languages. These names can be conventionally divided into three types:
- type “huun/suun”: suun, soon, saan (protogermanic form) [l, p. 131], sunna (Old Icelandic), sun (English).
- type “haul/saul”: saule (Lithuanian), haul (Kimral), sol (Latvian), solntse (Russian).
- type “huar/suar”: suar (Vedi), svar (Sanscrit), hvare (Avest.).
These words are not of Indo-European origin, because the root of the Indo-European name of “sun” would necessarily have the phoneme “r”, as in the Kurd word “ra” (meaning “sun”).
All the three above mentioned types of words are the Turkic names of the sun which are derivatives of one of the oldest names of the sun “tuk/suk” or “tok/sok”: “tug,sug, sov, chok,huv,kov“. The endings “un, ul, ar” in their turn are the Turkic word-building and grammar affixes added to the initial stem “tuk/suk“.
In conclusion we may say that a rather developed system of views on the world of prototurks, with its rich nomenclature of names to call the sun, in certain historic epochs enriched the views of Indo-Europeans on Nature and Society, it elevated their utilitarian notions up to imagery-sacral level.
Notes
- Souleymenov O. Language of writing. – Almaty-Rome, 1998.