Ancient Turkic Conlang

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Bob
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Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Bob »

The last few days, I made a conlang based on the Turkic language family, its historic writings, and names from the history of central Asia which use Latin and Greek spelling conventions. I think the words are from some Indo-European or Iranian languages, though. Oh well.

I translated a sizeable text into this conlang, the section on ursurers from Dante's Inferno. I also made a quick interlinear gloss of the associated 1300s Early Modern Italian text because I know Romance Languages that well.

For its grammar, I used a short grammar occuring in a primer called "Colloquial Turkish" from maybe the 1960s. It lacked any treatment of subordination and coordination, though, so I just used what I remember from recent studies in "Introduction to Typology" by Whaley. I otherwise tried to make the language interesting and a contrast to Okrand Atlantean - which I have noticed before to be very similar to Modern Turkish.

As usual, my priorities for grammar are more like morphology. Though I spend way more time on writing systems than most people. Not here and recently, though. But for Ferengi.

See, the main interest of this language is that it uses books I have onhand about modern related languages to make some quick - yet expert - approximation of historic languages drawing my 15 years' knowledge of historical linguistics semantic changes and etymology. Languages like this that I've been making are like "Poor Man's Ancient Languages", what I do because my time, budget, and library are limited in various ways. Often I'll have major ancient and medieval texts in English translation but the original will not be online or I won't have time to make much use of it.

And then I interject into it various interesting things from my own studies, so far back as I can remember. Not all of which I have time to explain in accompanying notes or what brief internet write-up's I can manage.

Maybe it's of interest that I invented a way of adding umlaut to vowels to either make them reverse front or back characteristic, with reference to overall word vowel harmony, or to create alternative and confusing orthographic situations. Which are one of the great delights of ancient orthographies, variants and rabbit holes.

Otherwise, though, conlangs of this sort by me recently do not show off what little ability I have regarding remembered (and not reading) phonology. I added one instance of assimilation in this one, though.

The Greek and Latin spelling and patronymic word endings were fun because of my previous vast studies in modern medical terminology and my own vast experience with and ability with Greek and Latin, and even with the ancient and obscure languages which touch upon them or connect with them.

https://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.co ... w=flipcard

http://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.com ... w=flipcard

Along with making the conlang, I did quick survey work of what's online about historic Turkic language writings. Notably, the Old Turkic Script inscription - which is actually very large, as far as medieval or ancient epigraphic texts go, is entirely online. But I lacked time to use its words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_la ... en_records

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkhon_inscriptions

...

People express the desire on my threads that I post the work that I'm making. I might make the time to quickly photograph and get online at least this conlang. But I go online and read what various moderators and members have to say in response to my work, not here necessarily, and it takes the air out of my balloon. Doing a post like this already takes me a lot of time.

...

And then I also made prepared many selections from the major historic Turkic language 12 epic compendium, The Dede Korkut. These I may translate some other day, enthusiasm and research schedule permitting. I am well aware that these are more appropriate texts into which to translate sections of Dante's Inferno. However, I've been studying Dante's Inferno for my Ferengi Studies and did not feel like doing more translations into the My Ancient Southeast Asia Conlang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Dede_Korkut

...

I also have been dreaming for some years now of making conlangs based on Mongolian, Manchu, and Amazon languages. We'll see if I'll ever get to it, though.

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...

( Quick thoughts on Dante's Inferno. I've read lots of writings from around this era in Europe and outside of Europe and I really think that scholars and non-scholars generally misunderstand the original place and meaning of Dante's Divine Comedia. I think it's like a mix of medieval Passion Play, Morality Play, and then like a fairy tale and political satire. I actually don't know so much about 1300s Italy as far as surviving writings go, but it's actually very distinct from what I've read from c 1300s England or Germany. I have read the Latin "Aeneid" by Virgil, though, and it does remind me of that a lot. I keep forgetting that Dante was a big-time politician in his day. It's a huge, huge work, and it's encyclopedic, typical of any ancient or medieval text of any length, and poetic and so very rich in historical and anthropological details. But even after reading the commentaries and working with the texts, I still generally avoid studying the Inferno because it's gory and saddening. I prefer the Paradismo and haven't managed to spend much time over the years studying that, either. There is also a great sense of medieval courtly love about these works which does not help me in making time to further examine them. This was some sort of bizaare fad in medieval Europe which is very challenging for me to explain even with my extensive reading and amateur field work in anthropology. There's just some things that writing does not sufficiently explain, that you'd really have to have a time machine to understand. Is it satirical? What's that all about? )


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...

Things I did for this conlang:

Made words for the English prose version of the text.
Made a grammar for it.
Used the "reverse gloss" words of the English prose version and the grammar, plus additional invented grammar, to write an unglossed "translation".
Make a quick gloss of all of the original 1300s Early Modern Italian text, a passage from Dante's Inferno.

...
...

Image:
Here's the image I made for this post. It's of the Old Turkic Script inscription.

Image
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Man in Space
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Man in Space »

You say you have little time, yet you drone on at length about Dante’s Inferno and made an image for the post. Not doing those two things, which distract from the actual content, would save you some.
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J Reggie
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by J Reggie »

Is there somewhere that we can see this translation?
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by clawgrip »

Or the quick gloss of all of the original 1300s Early Modern Italian text you mentioned?
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by jimydog000 »

It is a very nice image though, made with a meme image macro generator if I'm not mistaken. I'm sure we are all very jealous of it.

Is there somewhere that we can see this translation?
Bob
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Bob »

J Reggie wrote: 27 Aug 2020 16:44 Is there somewhere that we can see this translation?
Linguifex wrote: 26 Aug 2020 21:11 ...
clawgrip wrote: 28 Aug 2020 11:10 ...
jimydog000 wrote: 28 Aug 2020 12:55 ...
Yeah, sure, I'll try to take a photo of it all and get it up here. In the next few days.

I'm "getting busy" here and might not be able to post much more to Conlang Bulletin Board. I've said earlier I don't have much time to post, keep re-reading the rules, and do my best with what little time and energy I have. I've got to try to avoid repetition and keep it to the point.

I just came back to this post to say that I worked on this Ancient Turkic Conlang today. I'm going to translation the selections from the "Dede Korkut" into it now.

I went through the translations I made last week - which are unglossed but have the glosses facing them (those in prose English word order) - and took notes on the movements I did of phrases and words.

Oh! And this is a bit exciting: Back in the day, I actually bought the Dothraki CD and book and may use its horse color terms for the Dede Korkut. Because of them and other things, the world of the Ghenghis Khan-like "Dede Korkut" book is similar to that of the Dothraki Language.

Otherwise, though, and I may have mentioned this and don't remember, this Ancient Turkic language is tiresome to me because Okrand Atlantean (from the 2001 film "Atlantis The Lost Empire") is a lot like it and the Turkish language that it's mostly based on. I spiced it up a bit but it's a hard feeling to shake.

(And then for the Star Trek Ferengi language, I'm still working on it and not done with it yet. )

So this reply is not so grammar-light, I think I'll say that in one place I reduplicated the negation verb suffix -me to -meme probably because its verb was -m final.

And then in another place, I made it even more clear that "I am" is not "I" by reduplicating the -im suffix which is usually "I", -imim.

...

So give me a day or so and I'll try to photograph and have it up here.

The grammar is not that impressive, it's just like a simplified version of Turkish. What's neat about the language are the little touches I added that make it distinct from Turkish, and then how I did studies of old Turkic words in the Dede Korkut and obscure Greek / Latin orthography place names from Ptolemy's Geography. Again, it's like "a poor man's Ancient Turkic Language", it's just based on what I have in my library and what I can call to mind. It took a lot less time than going to a nearby university library and getting a copy of a Romanized Dede Korkut or trying my hand at the c 1300s Arabic Script version. I already said some things like this.

( You know, the last 3 years have seen me and my students do unique studies on Elamite, which is also somewhat Central Asian, maybe Elamo-Dravidian and related to Indus Valley Script. And then along with it, I dabbled in the nearby Sprachbund of Hattic, Hurrian, Urartian, and Hittite, maybe one other ... they ruled Babylon for 500 years ... are known from kuduru boundary stones ... ah, yes, the Kassites. So I wish I had the time, but don't, to make the language more interesting and more like those languages. But it's a silly thought, it's fine like it is. Maybe some day, though. And I really want to spend serious time making a conlang from what we have of Hattic grammar. )

Oh, and then the other major standout feature of the language is how I changed the meanings of the words that I could find in such a way to reflect my own vast experience with historical linguistics and etymology.

I accidentally own a giant 1970s dictionary of Cambodian, plus two major dictionaries of Pali, so my Ancient Southeast Asia Conlang actually has a lot more going into it than this one. Yet owning and studying the "Dede Korkut" is a big deal. It's huge and c 1300s and very ... exciting and amazing. Especially for Women's Studies, it's one of those texts you hear gleeful rumors about in Sinology. Yeah. That little Turkish grammar I mentioned is also quite a thing to own, quite detailed though small. And the finding a way to use the c 200s AD place names in Ptolemy's Grammar, that's not so shabby.

But I feel like I'd do better to spend this sort of time on my Ancient Southeast Asia Conlang, given what I have in my library for it. You know what I mean?
Last edited by Bob on 31 Aug 2020 05:40, edited 1 time in total.
Bob
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Bob »

jimydog000 wrote: 28 Aug 2020 12:55 ...
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by clawgrip »

I get that you're busy, but I'm baffled as to why you spend so much time in this thread talking about other things: Atlantean, Ferengi, Elamite, Hattic, Khmer, Southeast Asian conlang, etc. etc. etc....in the entirety of this thread, the only concrete information you've given about the language to which this thread is supposedly dedicated is that the negative is -meme, and the 1PSG ending is -imim, which are just reduplicated modern Turkish suffixes.

Also, surely there are better ways than photography to share information about this language, e.g. text.
Last edited by clawgrip on 31 Aug 2020 14:46, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Salmoneus »

clawgrip wrote: 31 Aug 2020 14:42 I get that you're busy, but I'm baffled as to why you spend so much time in this thread talking about other things: Atlantean, Ferengi, Elamite, Hattic, Khmer, Southeast Asian conlang, etc. etc. etc....in the entirety of this thread, the only concrete information you've given about the language to which this thread is supposedly dedicated is that the negative is -meme, and the 1PSG ending is -imim, which are just reduplicated modern Turkish suffixes.

Also, surely there are better ways than photography to share information about this language, e.g. text.
Actually, my reading was that he only doubles the negative morpheme for one word, on an ad hoc basis, and likewise he doubles the personal ending to make up for the 'missing' copula in one sentence. Bob has spoken before about how he thinks that complicated things like consistent "grammar" are bad for conlangs, because real people wouldn't speak like that.
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Vlürch »

Image

If the conlang is meant to be some kind of ancient Turkic, why would you be basing it on modern Turkish? I mean, if you're bragging about owning one of the three known copies (or a previously unknown fourth copy) of a medieval Oghuz Turkic book that you can use for reference, why not at least base the conlang on that medieval Oghuz Turkic instead? It's already more "ancient" than modern Turkish, at least.

The reconstruction of Proto-Turkic is fairly well-established too, so why not start with Proto-Turkic? I can understand not wanting to rely on other people's reconstructions if that's the reason, but there's a lot of vocabulary that has been lost over time and a lot of loanwords in modern Turkish that don't exist even in other Oghuz languages. Same goes for certain grammatical constructs too, like the progressive/continuative suffix -yor. Well, that did exist already in Ottoman Turkish and both Azerbaijani and Turkmen have -ır/-ir and -ýar/-ýär that I imagine could well be cognates, but this pdf says Salar uses -Ba(r) for that, which doesn't seem like a cognate, so it wouldn't go back to even Proto-Oghuz. Uzbek has a corresponding form too, but it (almost certainly) has a different etymology as well.

If by "simplification" you mean getting rid of those kinds of modern Turkish innovations, why not just start with the features shared between all Turkic languages (ie. Proto-Turkic features) and then come up with your own innovations? Like... working in such a backwards manner sounds really impractical and counterproductive when there's a more practical and less time-consuming alternative that'd probably also have more unique results.

Then again, it's your conlang so obviously you can do whatever you want. Maybe you're not going for realistic alt-historicity, which is perfectly fine, but the way you're describing it is just really confusing. Maybe it is just the way you're describing it, dunno...
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Bob »

Alright, so things are going slow for my proposed timeline. But I finished work on the new text and am going to photograph it next. I decided not to re-arrange the words in the native word order for this one, just to finish with making all the words as glosses to an English word order text, with many alterations so it's not a relex but not entirely avoiding the relex concept as a way to speed up the translation. But I made extensive notes on the "re-arrangement" that I did for the previous text.

Good news! I found a medium-sized Uzbek dictionary by Hippocrene among the books that I own and used it. So the new text contains a lot of Turkish and Uzbek cognates. They're all very similar but it's nice to have a much larger access to actual Turkic words because otherwise I'd just have to make them up based on what I have. ( It has heavy Russian influence on phonology, like spoken Mongolian, and probably in terms of borrowed words. )

I also have decided to make all sorts of terms for different colors and such or horses, inspired by Dothraki, which only actually lists 5 or so in its book but may include many more on the internet or something. But it's the thought that counts and the Dothraki book is small.

Sorry, I didn't have time to reply to the latest reply. Anyway, I should really focus on just taking pictures of what I did and making it accessible here and online.

Here's a song to go along with this update on this work. And it's a rare song that actually includes several horse colour terms, like how Billy Joel's "Downeaster Alexa" makes reference to boating terminology and coastal Martha's Vineyard area place names. Which is the area of a language I've studied a lot the past 3 years, 1600s Massachusett.

"blacks and bays, dapples and grays"

All the Pretty Little Ponies, lullaby Kenny Loggins, c 1994
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wdh_M-VtYo
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Re: Ancient Turkic Conlang

Post by Bob »

Vlürch wrote: 31 Aug 2020 17:20 ...
I read a little of what you wrote. I already answer the first two questions in what I wrote above.

...

I say I don't have a bilingual version of the Dede Korkut.

Even if I had a bilingual version of the Dede Korkut, without a full glossary I couldn't make much accurate use of it. And bilingual versions of historic epics usually lack full glossaries or even an outline of the grammar of the language.

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It's not based on Proto-Turkic because I'm doing this quick with just the books I have on hand, just some small primers, phrasebooks, and dictionaries for Turkish and now also Uzbek. Plus some other things I added in there.

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Among the purposes of the project is to get me to explore the Dede Korkut and other books I have, plus do a little quick research online about historic Turkic languages and writings. I found a complete grammar and glossary for the Old Turkic Script texts free online but still haven't had the time to use it. And probably will not, I don't have much time to spare for this conlang.
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