Old Turkish language
| Old Turkic | |
|---|---|
| Old Uyghur | |
| Region | Central Asia and Mongolia |
| Era | evolved into other Turkic languages |
|
Turkic
|
|
| Old Turkic, Uyghur alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Either: |
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 AD 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 that were spoken during the late 1st millennium AD.
Sources of Old Turkic are divided into three corpora:
Rounded vowels may only occur in the initial syllable. This vowel inventory is preserved in contemporary Turkish.
Old Turkic is highly restrictive in which consonants words can begin with: /p/, /d/, /g/, /ɢ/, /l/, /ɾ/, /n/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/, /m/, /ʃ/, and /z/ are not tolerated in a word-initial position. The only exceptions are (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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