r and s

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
>>And there is the Bolghar-Turkic Rhotacism, which changes Common Turkic
>>*-z-, -z to -r-, -r in the languages of the Bolghar branch, viz. Volga
>>Bolghar and Modern Chuvash.
>
>Of course!  But can we be sure it went from z to r, and not the other
>way around?
 
I expected some sort of objections to this, and my answer has to be that we
can*not* be sure. In fact, within Turkology, two positions exist, one
taking the sibilant as original (the "Rhotacists") and the other - more at
home with the proponents of the Altaic theory, but also supported by its
chief critic, Gerhard Doerfer, that the Rhotic is (the "Zetacists").
While consensus is still to be waited for, it might be a safe approach to
watch out for loan-words which entered either branch of Turkic *before* the
particular sound change (-z-/-z > -r-/-r or the other way round) occurred.
For the zetacistic position, this seems to be lacking (i.e. a clear example
of an Iranian/Chinese/Tokharian, you name it) word with -r-/-r ending up
zetacised in Common (= non-Chuvash) Turkic. For the rhotacistic position,
there seem to be a few examples. Among those which I regard as most
convincing is Chuvash /pir/ "linen" or the like, going back to Arabic baZZ
and ultimately to Greek byssos (a Mediterranian-Oriental Wanderwort which
really went places). I don't want to make this mootest of Turkological
problems seem more easy than it is (it isn't), the bottomline should,
however, be that both positions are defendable at the moment and that any
account which states that the problem is "solved" once and for all, is
therefore in error (hereby I explicitly complain about some pro-Altaistic
works of the 90's which simply forget to tell their readers that the other
position exists at all, or, in more belligerent passages, that it is a
malevolent idee fixe of rabid anti-Altaicists; that this is not the case
should be clear from Doerfer's position).
And *even* within the framework of "zetacistic pro-Altaistics", it is of
course commonplace that the input for Commot Tk. /z/ and Bolgh. /r/ cannot
be simply /r/ (since Common Tk. *does* have /r/ in native words and
morphemes), but something usually labeled as /r2/, /r'/ or the like,
sometimes with the implication that it might have been something like Czech
/R/ in DvoRak. Maybe. But isn't that multiplicare entia praeter
necessitatem ? Rhotacism is able to make do with *one* proto-phoneme, viz.
/z/, zetacism needs two /r, r'/.
The whole /z-r/-mess is  paralleled by a similar Lautgesetz, by which
Common Tk. /sh/ and Bolgh.-Chuv. /l/ are connected. Again, the direction of
the change is the object of often fierce discussions (between lambdacists
and sigmatists, you guessed it), though good (and old) loanwords which
might help to decide seem to be lacking even more (A. Rona-Tas presented
some candidates in the corpus of words which he views as Tokharian
loan-words in Proto-Turkic, but, although I personally happen to like some
of them, I don't expect them to stand a real chance of ever getting
generally accepted; it might surprise few at this stage that they seem to
support lambdacism).
 
 
 
And: the rhotacistic process has been called rather exceptional, not very
wide-spread in this thread. I'm not so sure whether we've already found all
prominent examples, I think there must be more. On the other hand, what is
the evidence for r > z being more wide-spread" or, well, "natural" ? What
parallels can be found ?
 
For the general subject of this thread the conclusion is: *part* of the
Turkological community views the Chuvash-Common-Turkic /r,z/ relation as
just another example of Rhotacism. St.G. says: right they are, though the
opposite opinion is never far away. That's life in Altaic studies.
 
St.G.
 
Stefan Georg
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