Turkic

[Stefan Georg]

>Indeed.  Uyghur is one of the most divergent Turkic languages, and a
>glance through a comparative vocabulary of the Turkic languages reveals
>a very modest proportion of shared vocabulary between Turkish and Uyghur.
>It is inconceivable that speakers of the two could communicate at anything
>beyond the most rudimentary level, if even that.  I doubt that speakers
>could get much beyond the stage of smiling, nodding, pointing, and trying
>to guess what the other guy might be saying.

Well, this isn't "Altainet", but, while Larry is right that the degree of
"mutual intelligibility" of the Turkic languages is often overemphasized,
the scene depicted is not as inconceivable as it may seem. Provided, both
speakers are educated to some degree (which implies that they'll know more
words than the average peasant, including some literary and specialized
registers of their language, which usually are characterized by marginal
vocabulary on the one hand, and by a larger amount of Arabo-Persian
cultural "chic" words on the other), and given further that they'll have
some time to acclimatize (i.e. one of them had some time to adjust to the
language of the other  by, say, travelling in the other's country) and
further the goal-oriented awareness that speaking fast, over-idiomatic and
using only the dialect of ones home-village will not help, they *will*
pretty soon be able to communicate, if not perfectly, but considerably
beyond the smiling-nodding-pointing stage. Enough to make an appointment at
a certain place and time and say whether they do or don't like the food and
a bit more as well. Whether they'll be able to discuss the question of
mutual intelligibility of the Turkic languages and the reasons for its
limits in a very sophisticated way is of course a different cup of tea.

"Uyghur" is, for the record, not really one of the most divergent languages
of the family, it is fairly mainstream, the really odd-one-out is Chuvash
on the Volga (which is completely unintelligible to any speaker of the
other languages) or Yakut. I once taught a Yakut class which was attended,
curiously enough, by one speaker of Ottoman Turkish and another one of,
well, Yakut. Needless to say, comparing the languages was fun and
educational for all of us, and, though these two languages are *really*
wide apart the Ottoman speaker started soon to make up Yakut words and
forms of herself, applying some fairly straightforward (but sometimes
drastically surface-changing) sound-laws (without me having even introduced
the notion). Well, I pointed them to these sound-laws, but a speaker of
Ottoman and one of Uyghur will find out themselves after some time. They
won't start writing poems in the other language soon, though.

St.G.

Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstraße 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
Tel./Fax +49-228-691332