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The Name Uyğur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Gerard Clauson
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Extract

For nearly nine hundred years Uyğur, the name of a Turkish tribe which played an important part in the history of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan from the 8th until perhaps the 13th century, and spoke at any rate one of the Turkish dialects which have at one time or another been called Uyğur, has exercised a fatal fascination for those who like to find meanings for Turkish tribal and proper names.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 95 , Issue 3-4 , October 1963 , pp. 140 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1963

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References

page 140 note 1 The two verbs are practically synonymous, with the meaning “to betray, be treacherous”.

page 144 note 1 There is nothing surprising in this; his work is full of false etymologies, for example the Mongolian name or title Otçigin which he explains as a Turkish phrase “prince (tégin) of the (domestic) fire (ot)”; whereas it is actually a Mongolian phrase, ot, the basic form of otqan (diminutive) “youngest” (Kowalewski p. 390) çgin(from Turkish tégin) ‘prince”.

page 144 2 There are in fact two forms of this suffix, taken from different Mongolian dialects, -ul/-ül and -ğul/-gül, which in some Turkish languages became -kul/-kül, and alternative forms of the same Mongolian word appear in different Turkish languages. For example a word quoted in the Sanglax, kara'ul ‘sentry” (dīda-bān), has survived in Republican Turkish as karakol, the change in the third vowel probably due to a false etymology from kara ‘black”, kol ‘arm”.