Old Turkic

Old Turkic
Old Uyghur
Region	Central Asia and Mongolia
Era	evolved into other Turkic languages
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Karluk Old Turkic
Writing system	Old Turkic, Uyghur alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: otk – Old Turkish oui – Old Uighur
Linguist list	otk Old Turkish
	oui Old Uighur
Glottolog	oldu1238

Old Turkic (also East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic, Old Uyghur) is the earliest attested form of Turkic, found in Göktürk and Uyghur inscriptions dating from about the 7th century to the 13th century. It is the oldest attested member of the Orkhon branch of Turkic, which is extant in the modern Western Yugur language. However, it is not the ancestor of the language now called Uighur; the contemporaneous ancestor of Uighur to the west is called Middle Turkic.

Old Turkic is attested in a number of scripts, including the Orkhon-Yenisei runiform script, the Old Uyghur alphabet (a form of the Sogdian alphabet), the Brāhmī script, the Manichean alphabet, and the Perso-Arabic script.

Old Turkic often refers not to a single language, but collectively to the closely related and mutually intelligible stages of various Common Turkic branches spoken during the late first millennium.

Sources of Old Turkic are divided into three corpora:

Old Turkic has nine vowel qualities;

Rounded vowels only occur at the first syllable

The consonantal system;

Old Turkic is highly restrictive in consonants that words begin with. In the consonant inventory of Old Turkic; d, g, ɢ, l, n, ɲ, ŋ p, ɾ, ʃ, z and m are not tolerated in word initial position. The only counter examples would be (ne, “what, which”) and its derivatives, and some early assimilations of word initial /b/ to /m/ following a nasal in a word such as (men, “I”).

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