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This article explores the linguistic diversity in the Amdo province of historical Tibet, now part of China. It focuses on the previously undocumented Sinitic language called Zhoutun, spoken by a small population in Qinghai. The article discusses the linguistic features of Zhoutun, including its phonetic notation, tonal system, vowel system, and morphological and morphosyntactic apparatus. It also highlights the cultural identity of Zhoutun speakers, who identify as ethnic "Chinese" and have a mix of Tibetan Buddhist and Chinese traditional beliefs. The publication of this description fills a gap in our understanding of linguistic diversity in the Amdo Sprachbund, and further research is needed to comprehend the Sprachbund as a whole. [Extracted from the article]

The article has two aims. The first is to show on what historical and methodological basis it is possible to link the history of the Kipchak type Bashkir language in the Volga-Kama region with the pre-Mongol trends of phonetic and phonological changes in certain Middle Turkic varieties. The second one is to outline a possible framework for Bashkir–Volga Bulgarian language contacts. The main results of the paper are as follows: The history of Turkic languages is not a linear order of descent. The occurance of some Kipchak tribal names among them the ethnonym Bashkir in written sources of the 11th century does not mean the existence of a homogeneous Bashkir ethnic community speaking its own Bashkir language before the 13th century. The formation of the Bashkir language has begun in the 13th century and it was determined by three factors: the ongoing tendencies of change initiated on the basis of the multiple Kipchak varieties of the South-Russian steppe; the tendencies of change in linguistic area of the Volga-Kama region; and the modifying influence of substrate language elements. The author analyzing the spelling of the Codex Cumanicus, (the early 13th century source of Kipchak language varieties) points out threefold phonological change of word medial and word final /g/, having regular correspondences up to the contemporary Bashkir. She calls also attention to a specific feature of the spelling of the Codex: the unmarked lack of the vowel i / ï in non-first syllable structures which is interpreted as presence of the vowel reduction on the phonetic level. Concerning the Bashkir-Volga Bulgarian language contact she comes to the conclusion that in lexical copies not a direct Volga Bulgharian → Bashkir interaction took place, but the transmission of the substrate language lexical elements of the dominant language (Central Kazan Tatar), sometimes Volga Bulgharian, into the ancestor of Bashkir. The substrate influence of the Eastern Volga Bulgharian dialect can be seen as a phonemicization of the reduction of closed vowels in Early Middle Bashkir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dolgan language is a Turkic variety, closely related to Sakha but differing from it due to contact, primarily with Evenki (Tungusic). We analyze the linguistic identity of translocal Dolgan communities in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Anabar District, which is home to a minority of the larger group of Dolgan people. Linguistically, Anabar Dolgan is best classified as a northern Sakha variety with significant lexical borrowings from Tungusic. Anabar Dolgans consider it a separate language, and see themselves as speaking Dolgan, Sakha, or a mixture of the two. Their strong sense of Dolgan identity comes from an attachment to language, culture, and territory, an identity reinforced by social ties with and ongoing migrations to and from the Taimyr Dolgan-Nenets District, home to the majority of Dolgans. Data come from sociolinguistic questionnaires, structured interviews, and linguistic elicitation with 50 respondents, and a subset of open-ended interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores language contact in north-eastern Siberia, focusing on the indigenous groups and the consequences of linguistic and cultural mixtures in the region. It discusses factors such as Russian colonization, nomadic populations, and economic cooperation that have contributed to language contact. The article provides an overview of the physical landscape, languages, and people of north-eastern Siberia, highlighting the changes brought about by colonization and assimilation processes. It also examines the impact of language contact on various indigenous languages in the region and discusses the complex processes of linguistic and cultural intertwining. The article concludes by discussing the dynamics of multilingualism and the negotiation of identities in the Anabar District. [Extracted from the article]

Regardless of the modern settlement of their speakers, the South Siberian Turkic languages evidence the largest number of Mongolic loanwords. At the same time, the layer of the loanwords in these languages varies greatly. Interestingly, the Kirghiz language has quite a few Mongolic borrowings, following the number of borrowings from South Siberian Turkic languages. According to my preliminary compiled materials, more than 300 words are indisputably of Mongolic origin. Most of these Mongolic loanwords were most likely borrowed in the early Yenisei period. As with the South Siberian Turkic languages (Tuvan, Khakas, Yakut, etc.) in Kirghiz, it is difficult to distribute the Mongolic loanwords into earlier and later layers. For example, Kirghiz has an early characteristic feature in the length patterns - a γ u-, -a γ a-, -o γ a-, i γ u-, -egü-, -öge-, -u γ u -, -igü- , which can be attributed to the middle period of the Kirghiz language. In Kirghiz, strong labial vowel harmony is clearly and consistently implemented, especially in the Northern Kirghiz dialect. This might have influenced the long vowel patterns in Mongolic loanwords. This type of vowel harmony affected the development of the long vowels in the Mongolic loanwords due to the loss of intervocalic guttural consonant g. Long vowels in Mongolic loanwords in Kirghiz are observed only in those cases where the long vowels arose from the patterns -a γ u-, -a γ a, -o γ a-, -i γ u-, -egü, -öge-, -u γ u, -igü-. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a unique trilingual (Hebrew, Turkic, and Slavic) religious literary work from the personal archive of Avraham Firkowicz (National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg). The text, containing 129 lines (verses) in Hebrew characters, is written in Firkowicz's own hand. Its author has not been reliably identified, but it is assumed that he could be a Karaite Jew from Łuck / Lutsk (Wolhynia, present-day Ukraine) with a good speaking-level knowledge of Slavic and Turkish (e.g., Joseph-Solomon Lutski or Mordechai Sultanski). The language of the Turkic version is a variety of Crimean Judeo-Turkic with many Turkish (Oğuz) features; the language of the Slavic version is based on standard Russian of the early 19th century with Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, and Polish elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Armenian Philologist, writer, and cultural Armenologist Artsvi Bakhchinyan interviews Polish researcher of Turkic languages at Uppsala University in Sweden, Elżbieta Święcicka. This interview takes place during the recent war waged attack on the people of Artsakh by the Azeri and Turkish governemnts in the fall of 2020. Bakhchinyan's interview delves into significant questions around language, authorship, and translation as it connects to the intercultural relations between Armenians and Turks from the medieval to the contemporary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"[I]t is far from a prototypical passive construction" (p. 181, similar p. 221) since "the agent is expressed and is topical" already in Late Eastern Aramaic (p. 116). In my opinion, C. mixes up cause and effect when she states that the association which constructions with "passive" participle have with tense-conditioned ergativity in the past or perfective "appears to be due to the resultative aspect that passive participles tend to have, which implies a past event" (p. 21, similar on pp. 174, 223). The crucial question is why the same construction has a fixed orientation (to P with transitive verbs) in Eastern Aramaic, while it is neutral in Western Aramaic (which seems to be an innovation, cf. p. 296). The Old Iranic verbal adjective in - I ta i - was used for transitive and intransitive verbs and its construction did not show semantic differences depending on aspect or Aktionsart in contrast to Aramaic (e.g. pp. 283, 287, 290, and for the modern Aramaic perfect see e.g. p. 281). [Extracted from the article]

The article presents an analysis of the place-names with the formants -(v)īγ/-(w)yq / and - vīǰ , attested in the South Caspian and the north-western provinces of Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate and assess Turkic loanwords in the vocabulary of Nor-Nakhichevan dialect of Armenian. Turkic loanwords include borrowings of ultimate Turkic origin, as well as Persian, Arabic, Greek, and Italian words that were borrowed through Turkish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have documented language varieties (either Turkic or Indo-European) spoken in 23 test sites by 88 informants belonging to the major ethnic groups of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan (Karakalpaks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Yaghnobis). The recorded linguistic material concerns 176 words of the extended Swadesh list and will be made publically available with the publication of this paper. Phonological diversity is measured by the Levenshtein distance and displayed as a consensus bootstrap tree and as multidimensional scaling plots. Linguistic contact is measured as the number of borrowings, from one linguistic family into the other, according to a precision/recall analysis further validated by expert judgment. Concerning Turkic languages, the results of our sample do not support Kazakh and Karakalpak as distinct languages and indicate the existence of several separate Karakalpak varieties. Kyrgyz and Uzbek, on the other hand, appear quite homogeneous. Among the Indo-Iranian languages, the distinction between Tajik and Yaghnobi varieties is very clear-cut. More generally, the degree of borrowing is higher than average where language families are in contact in one of the many sorts of situations characterizing Central Asia: frequent bilingualism, shifting political boundaries, ethnic groups living outside the "mother" country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the etymology and dialectology of Turkic armut, Persian armud 'pear'. The interrelations of these phytonymical families were treated a few years ago by Prof. Uwe Biasing who considered the Turkic words borrowed from a Middle Iranian language (viz. Pahlavi, because of some isolated attestation in this language), but also the Iranian words probably borrowed from a third (unknown) language of the Irano-Caucasian area. On the basis of an extensive areal study (with original materials from the archive of the Balochi Etymological Dictionary Project, L'Orientale University, Naples) the author argues for a back dating of the Iranian attestations, and the preservation in many modern Iranian dialects of a lexical type believed to be isolated in Middle Persian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although nobody doubts today that a Ural-Altaic protolanguage is an obsolete idea there still exists some peculiar conformity between Uralic and Altaic that cannot easily be explained by simple borrowings. In this article some similarities between Turkic and Uralic pronouns are to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a short study of some Old Uigur words of fragrances. Based on the analysis of several passages in the texts the meanings of yıd yıpar and other words are discussed. Special focus is laid on the relationship of fragrances and remedies. Notes on etymological considerations of the treated words and their embedment in the history of Turkic languages are added. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin of the Turkic-speaking population of the north-western provinces of Iran, the so-called Azaris, is the subject of long-year debate. Here, we present preliminary results on testing of several hypotheses concerning their origin: 1) the Azaris are the descendants of the Turkic ethnic groups migrated from Central Asia; 2) they have an autochthonous origins; 3) they are of Iranian origin; and 4) they have mixed ethnic origin with unknown proportions of source populations' contribution. The results show that Azaris have much weaker genetic affinity with the populations from Central Asia and the Caucasus than with their immediate geographic neighbours. Relying on these outcomes one can suggest that language replacement (change) with regard to Azaris occurred through "elite dominance" mechanism rather than "demic diffusion" model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]