Lectures on The Science of Language 35

Lectures on The Science of Language 35

Another Turkish tribe are the Nogái, west of the Caspian, and also north

of the Black Sea. To the beginning of the seventeenth century they lived

north-east of the Caspian, and the steppes on the left of the Irtish bore

their name. Pressed by the Kalmüks, a Mongolic tribe, the Nogáis advanced

westward as far as Astrachan. Peter I. transferred them thence to the

north of the Caucasian mountains, where they still graze their flocks on

the shores of the Kuban and the Kuma. One horde, that of Kundur, remained

on the Volga, subject to the Kalmüks.

 

Another tribe of Turkish origin in the Caucasus are the Bazianes. They now

live near the sources of the Kuban, but before the fifteenth century

within the town Majari, on the Kuma.

 

A third Turkish tribe in the Caucasus are the Kumüks on the rivers Sunja,

Aksai, and Koisu: now subjects of Russia, though under native princes.

 

The southern portion of the Altaic mountains has long been inhabited by

the Bashkirs, a race considerably mixed with Mongolic blood, savage and

ignorant, subjects of Russia, and Mohammedans by faith. Their land is

divided into four Roads, called the Roads of Siberia, of Kasan, of Nogai,

and of Osa, a place on the Kama. Among the Bashkirs, and in villages near

Ufa, is now settled a Turkish tribe, the Mescheräks who formerly lived

near the Volga.

 

The tribes near the Lake of Aral are called Kara-Kalpak. They are subject

partly to Russia, partly to the Khans of Khiva.

 

The Turks of Siberia, commonly called Tatars, are partly original

settlers, who crossed the Ural, and founded the Khanat of Sibir, partly

later colonists. Their chief towns are Tobolsk, Yeniseisk, and Tomsk.

Separate tribes are the Uran’hat on the Chulym, and the Barabas in the

steppes between the Irtish and the Ob.

 

The dialects of these Siberian Turks are considerably intermingled with

foreign words, taken from Mongolic, Samoyedic, or Russian sources. Still

they resemble one another closely in all that belongs to the original

stock of the language.

 

In the north-east of Asia, on both sides of the river Lena, the _Yakuts_

form the most remote link in the Turkic chain of languages. Their male

population has lately risen to 100,000, while in 1795 it amounted only to

50,066. The Russians became first acquainted with them in 1620. They call

themselves Sakha, and are mostly heathen, though Christianity is gaining

ground among them. According to their traditions, their ancestors lived

for a long time in company with Mongolic tribes, and traces of this can

still be discovered in their language. Attacked by their neighbors, they

built rafts and floated down the river Lena, where they settled in the

neighborhood of what is now Yakutzk. Their original seats seem to have

been north-west of Lake Baikal. Their language has preserved the Turkic

type more completely than any other Turco-Tataric dialect. Separated from

the common stock at an early time, and removed from the disturbing

influences to which the other dialects were exposed, whether in war or in

peace, the Yakutian has preserved so many primitive features of Tataric

grammar, that even now it may be used as a key to the grammatical forms of

the Osmanli and other more cultivated Turkic dialects.

 

Southern Siberia is the mother country of the Kirgis, one of the most

numerous tribes of Turco-Tataric origin. The Kirgis lived originally

between the Ob and Yenisei, where Mongolic tribes settled among them. At

the beginning of the seventeenth century the Russians became acquainted

with the Eastern Kirgis, then living along the Yenisei. In 1606 they had

become tributary to Russia, and after several wars with two neighboring

tribes, they were driven more and more south-westward, till they left

Siberia altogether at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They now

live at Burut, in Chinese Turkestan, together with the Kirgis of the

“Great Horde,” near the town of Kashgar, north as far as the Irtish.

 

Another tribe is that of the Western Kirgis, or Kirgis-Kasak, who are

partly independent, partly tributary to Russia and China.

 

Of what are called the three Kirgis Hordes, from the Caspian Sea east as

far as Lake Tenghiz, the Small Horde is fixed in the west, between the

rivers Yemba and Ural; the Great Horde in the east; while the most

powerful occupies the centre between the Sarasu and Yemba, and is called

the Middle Horde. Since 1819, the Great Horde has been subject to Russia.

Other Kirgis tribes, though nominally subject to Russia, are really her

most dangerous enemies.

 

The Turks of Asia Minor and Syria came from Khorasan and Eastern Persia,

and are Turkmans, or remnants of the Seljuks, the rulers of Persia during

the Middle Ages. The Osmanli, whom we are accustomed to call Turks _par

excellence_, and who form the ruling portion of the Turkish empire, must

be traced to the same source. They are now scattered over the whole

Turkish empire in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and their number amounts to

between 11,000,000 and 12,000,000. They form the landed gentry, the

aristocracy, and bureaucracy of Turkey; and their language, the Osmanli,

is spoken by persons of rank and education, and by all government

authorities in Syria, in Egypt, at Tunis, and at Tripoli. In the southern

provinces of Asiatic Russia, along the borders of the Caspian, and through

the whole of Turkestan, it is the language of the people. It is heard even

at the court of Teheran, and is understood by official personages in

Persia.

 

The rise of this powerful tribe of Osman, and the spreading of that

Turkish dialect which is now emphatically called the Turkish, are matters

of historical notoriety. We need not search for evidence in Chinese

annals, or try to discover analogies between names that a Greek or an

Arabic writer may by chance have heard and handed down to us, and which

some of these tribes have preserved to the present day. The ancestors of

the Osman Turks are men as well known to European historians as

Charlemagne or Alfred. It was in the year 1224 that Soliman-shah and his

tribe, pressed by Mongolians, left Khorasan and pushed westward into

Syria, Armenia, and Asia Minor. Soliman’s son, Ertoghrul, took service

under Aladdin, the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium (Nicæa), and after several

successful campaigns against Greeks and Mongolians, received part of

Phrygia as his own, and there founded what was afterwards to become the

basis of the Osmanic empire. During the last years of the thirteenth

century the Sultans of Iconium lost their power, and their former vassals

became independent sovereigns. Osman, after taking his share of the spoil

in Asia, advanced through the Olympic passes into Bithynia and was

successful against the armies of the Emperors of Byzantium. Osman became

henceforth the national name of his people. His son, Orkhan, whose capital

was Prusa (Bursa), after conquering Nicomedia (1327) and Nicæa (1330),

threatened the Hellespont. He took the title of Padishah, and his court

was called the “High Porte.” His son, Soliman, crossed the Hellespont

(1357), and took possession of Gallipoli and Sestos. He thus became master

of the Dardanelles. Murad I. took Adrianople (1362), made it his capital,

conquered Macedonia, and, after a severe struggle, overthrew the united

forces of the Slavonic races south of the Danube, the Bulgarians,

Servians, and Kroatians, in the battle of Kossova-polye (1389). He fell

himself, but his successor Bayazeth, followed his course, took Thessaly,

passed Thermopylæ, and devastated the Peloponnesus. The Emperor of

Germany, Sigismund, who advanced at the head of an army composed of

French, German, and Slavonic soldiers, was defeated by Bayazeth on the

Danube in the battle of Nicopolis, 1399. Bayazeth took Bosnia, and would

have taken Constantinople, had not the same Mongolians, who in 1244 drove

the first Turkish tribes westward into Persia, threatened again their

newly acquired possessions. Timur had grasped the reins fallen from the

hands of Chingis-khán: Bayazeth was compelled to meet him, and suffered

defeat (1402) in the battle of Angora (Ankyra) in Galatia.

 

Europe now had respite, but not long; Timur died, and with him his empire

fell to pieces, while the Osmanic army rallied again under Mahomet I.

(1413), and re-attained its former power under Murad II. (1421).

Successful in Asia, Murad sent his armies back to the Danube, and after

long-continued campaigns, and powerful resistance from the Hungarians and

Slaves under Hunyad, he at last gained two decisive victories; Varna in

1444, and Kossova in 1448. Constantinople could no longer be held, and the

Pope endeavored in vain to rouse the chivalry of Western Europe to a

crusade against the Turks. Mahomet II. succeeded in 1451, and on the 26th

of May, 1453, Constantinople, after a valiant resistance, fell, and became

the capital of the Turkish empire.

 

It is a real pleasure to read a Turkish grammar, even though one may have

no wish to acquire it practically. The ingenious manner in which the

numerous grammatical forms are brought out, the regularity which pervades

the system of declension and conjugation, the transparency and

intelligibility of the whole structure, must strike all who have a sense

of that wonderful power of the human mind which has displayed itself in

language. Given so small a number of graphic and demonstrative roots as

would hardly suffice to express the commonest wants of human beings, to

produce an instrument that shall render the faintest shades of feeling and

thought;—given a vague infinitive or a stern imperative, to derive from it

such moods as an optative or subjunctive, and tenses as an aorist or

paulo-post future;—given incoherent utterances, to arrange them into a

system where all is uniform and regular, all combined and harmonious;—such

is the work of the human mind which we see realized in “language.” But in

most languages nothing of this early process remains visible. They stand

before us like solid rocks, and the microscope of the philologist alone

can reveal the remains of organic life with which they are built up.

 

In the grammar of the Turkic languages, on the contrary, we have before us

a language of perfectly transparent structure, and a grammar the inner

workings of which we can study, as if watching the building of cells in a

crystal bee-hive. An eminent orientalist remarked “we might imagine

Turkish to be the result of the deliberations of some eminent society of

learned men;” but no such society could have devised what the mind of man

produced, left to itself in the steppes of Tatary, and guided only by its

innate laws, or by an instinctive power as wonderful as any within the

realm of nature.

 

Let us examine a few forms. “To love,” in the most general sense of the

word, or love, as a root, is in Turkish _sev_. This does not yet mean “to

love,” which is _sevmek_, or “love” as a substantive, which is _sevgu_ or

_sevi_; but it only expresses the general idea of loving in the abstract.

This root, as we remarked before, can never be touched. Whatever syllables

may be added for the modification of its meaning, the root itself must

stand out in full prominence like a pearl set in diamonds. It must never

be changed or broken, assimilated or modified, as in the English I fall, I

fell, I take, I took, I think, I thought, and similar forms. With this one

restriction, however, we are free to treat it at pleasure.

 

Let us suppose we possessed nothing like ou