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The Turkish Numerals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Gerard Clauson
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Extract

The Turkish Languages are unusually rich in numerical series, and there are pecularities in their numerical system which are, I believe, unparallelled elsewhere. The main facts are well known, and it might be thought that there was nothing more to be said about them; but several interesting points have never been properly discussed. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to them.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 91 , Issue 1-2 , April 1959 , pp. 19 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1959

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References

page 19 note 1 I use this term to include all languages of the Turkish family from eighthcentury Türkü, the language of the “Orkhon Inscriptions” written in “Runic” scripts, which are the earliest substantial remains of Turkish, down to the modern languages of this family still spoken in Turkey, Persia, the Soviet Union, and N.W. China. By “early Turkish” I mean Türkü and Uyğur and the Manichæan dialects, which are very close to Türkü and, in their earliest known forms, practically contemporary with it. In an article, “The Turkish Y and Related Sounds,” in Stadia Altaica, Festschrift für Níkokvus Poppe (Ural-Altaische Bibliothek, Wiecbaden, 1957), I explained at some length what languages I have covered in my studies and the terminology employed. I use here the system of transcription explained in that article, roughly the Turkish Official Alphabet, with a few added letters and signs to represent sounds not adequately represented by it, notably x for the unvoiced velar fricative, the closed é, distinguishable from open e in early Turkish, and the use of an attached colon to indicate long vowels (a: is long a, and so on).

Roman numerals indicate a century of the Christian era from VIII onwards.

References to the Türkü inscriptions are to the texts published in H. N. Orkun's Eski Türk Yazitlari, T.D.K., Istanbul, 1936–1941.

Kaṣ. is an abbreviation for Mahmūd al-Kāṣğari's (XI) Dīwanu'l-Luğati'l-Turk; references by volume, page, and line are to Besim Atalay's Turkish translation published by the Türk Dil Kurumu, Ankara, 1939 and foll.

References to the (XI) Kutaḏğu Bilig are to the critical edition by Arat, R. R., T.D.K., Istanbul, 1947Google Scholar.

References to the (XV/XVIII) Sanglāx are to the MS. belonging to the Gibb Memorial Trust, a reproduction of which will, it is hoped, be published shortly.

page 21 note 1 See Dmitriev, N. K. and others, Russko-Chuvashskiy Stovar', Moscow, 1961Google Scholar.

page 22 note 1 This fundamental difference between these languages and Turkish is an important argument against the theory that they are genetically connected.

page 23 note 1 See van Eys, W. J., Outlines of Basque Grammar, London, 1883, p. 27Google Scholar.

page 23 note 2 See Malov, S. E., Yazyk zheltykh Uygurov, Alma Ata, 1957, p. 178Google Scholar.