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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Oct 5, 2008 0:07:44 GMT 3
For detailed information about those Soghdian letters, please check this article (you can download it from JSTOR or I can send it to you by e-mail):
Henning, W. B., "The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 12, No. 3/4, Oriental and African Studies Presented to Lionel David Barnett by His Colleagues, Past and Present (1948), pp. 601-615.
Btw, Ammianus Marcellinus, a Western Roman (not Eastern), actually did not see any Hun in his life. He gives his description of the Huns according to what he heard from the Goths that fled to Roman lands.
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Post by keaganjoelbrewer on Oct 5, 2008 7:15:13 GMT 3
Yep. He was writing things down based on what he heard from others.
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Post by jstampfl on Oct 18, 2008 17:09:10 GMT 3
I have been trying to trace the Northern Huns after their exodus from the area of modern Mongolia. It seems that they went to the Xinjiang area. They were pushed out of that area and their where abouts seems to be difficult to determine. Some reports say they went to the Talas area of Kyrgyzstan. There is the Kenkol Cemetery at the confluence of the Kenkol and Talas Rivers that is reported to be a Hun cemetery. I would be interested if anyone has any information on this cemetery.
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Post by hjernespiser on Nov 21, 2008 23:30:12 GMT 3
I recommend the book "Mounted Archers" by Laszlo Torday for those of you with advanced English reading skills (if you can find a copy of the book that is). Torday doesn't do the research himself. Instead he summarizes the latest research (pre-21st century) on several Central Asian topics. On the Xiong-nu, the prevailing theory is that they and the Huns were not ethnically related, but culturally related.
This topic is somewhat tricky because a lot of nationalist sentiment gets tied up in it in total contradiction with what the data actually shows. It is a bit like we all know the modern French are culturally and linguistically dominated by Celtic/Latin influences yet their ethnic name is the name of a German tribe. We don't think of them as German. Yet this is precisely what certain folks do with the Huns and Xiong-nu.
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Post by hjernespiser on Nov 21, 2008 23:49:00 GMT 3
On the Xiong-nu name, one of the mistakes is drawing conclusions between "Hun" and "Xiong-nu" based upon the modern pronunciation of these words. While Chinese _written_ language has not changed much, the pronunciation has. This is talked about in "Mounted Archers" more extensively. One of the records extant from China is a pronunciation dictionary! This allows scholars to try to reconstruct the original pronunciation of the Chinese characters that today are pronounced like "Xiong-nu". One of the reconstructions results in something like "Flong-Nakh". That is quite different from "Hun"! If I recall right, the "Flong" element is related with the idea of a dragon and the "Nakh" is an arrow (not in Chinese). The Chinese apparently made tongue-in-cheek transliterations of ethnic names so it may mean one thing in Chinese but phonetically is close to the actual ethnic name. The arrow symbolism here in nakh is to also be translated as tribe, along the line of ok/oghur/oghuz/etc. But specifically the nakh isn't any old arrow. It is a whistling arrow. The book has a table showing the word for arrow among a variety of north asian languages along side the word for whistling arrow in those languages. The words for arrow are all different but the words for whistling arrow are all similar linguistically, pointing to a loanword. And the language group the loanword comes from? It isn't Turkic. It was either a paleosiberian language or yeniseian (i.e., Ket).
I'm sorry if I'm being vague. I'm not at home right now so don't have physical access to my source.
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Nov 22, 2008 2:06:23 GMT 3
Yes, you said it's just one of the reconstructions, but there are plenty others that are closer to the name "Hun". Plus, as earlier mentioned in this thread, we have the 4th-century Soghdian letters who give the name of Xiongnu 匈奴 in China (those who captured and destroyed Luoyang 洛陽) as xwn. I don't think there is any doubt in thinking that the Chinese characters 匈奴 (modern Mandarin pronunciation Xiongnu / Hsiung-nu) are related with the word recorded in Latin as Hun, which is probably Qun or Kün meaning "People" in Old Turkic. As for the language of these Asian Huns, Peter Boodberg, Louis Bazin, Muhaddere Özerdim and Talât Tekin have done extensive and satisfactory researchs which show us that it was Turkic. I don't think Peter Boodberg or Louis Bazin had any Pan-Turkic concerns, as well as Talât Tekin (who is a hardcore leftist, to be exact, and quite unpopular among nationalist historians-linguists in Turkey). I simply do not buy to this Paleosiberian/Yeniseian theory first made up by Edwin Pulleyblank.
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Post by hjernespiser on Nov 22, 2008 2:28:14 GMT 3
Yes, you said it's just one of the reconstructions, but there are plenty others that are closer to the name "Hun". Plus, as earlier mentioned in this thread, we have the 4th-century Soghdian letters who give the name of Xiongnu 匈奴 in China (those who captured and destroyed Luoyang 洛陽) as xwn. I don't think there is any doubt in thinking that the Chinese characters 匈奴 (modern Mandarin pronunciation Xiongnu / Hsiung-nu) are related with the word recorded in Latin as Hun, which is probably Qun or Kün meaning "People" in Old Turkic. As for the language of these Asian Huns, Peter Boodberg, Louis Bazin, Muhaddere Özerdim and Talât Tekin have done extensive and satisfactory researchs which show us that it was Turkic. I don't think Peter Boodberg or Louis Bazin had any Pan-Turkic concerns, as well as Talât Tekin (who is a hardcore leftist, to be exact, and quite unpopular among nationalist historians-linguists in Turkey). I simply do not buy to this Paleosiberian/Yeniseian theory first made up by Edwin Pulleyblank. "Mounted Archers" talks about the Sogdian transcription. I didn't write about it because I don't remember what the book said about it. The Yeniseian theory was first hinted at by Lajos Ligeti who noticed a similarity in the word for boot with modern Ket. Pulleyblank's theory was later backed up by Alexander Vovin. It is based upon a Chinese transcription of the Jie member tribe of the Xiong-nu confederacy. Granted, the language of one member tribe doesn't necessarily mean that all of the confederacy spoke that language. Attempts to link the transcription with Turkic has not been satisfactory. I'll post examples later.
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Post by hjernespiser on Nov 22, 2008 2:32:03 GMT 3
As for the language of these Asian Huns, Peter Boodberg, Louis Bazin, Muhaddere Özerdim and Talât Tekin have done extensive and satisfactory researchs which show us that it was Turkic. Could you provide the names of articles/books written by these guys on this?
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Nov 22, 2008 3:28:49 GMT 3
Ok Thanx for the correction. Ok, waiting for the examples. Sure Bazin, Louis, "Un texte proto-turc du IVe siecle: le distique Hiong-nou du 'Tsin-chou'", Oriens, Vol.1, No.2, Dec. 31, 1948, pp.208-219. __________, "Recherches sur les parlers T'o-pa", T'oung Pao, Second Series, Vol.39, No.4/5, 1950, pp.228-329. Boodberg, Peter A., "The Language of the T'o-Pa Wei", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol.1, No.2, Jul. 1936, pp.167-185. I have a xerox copy of Talât Tekin's work titled Hunların Dili ("Language of the Huns", deals with Asian Huns only), but unfortunately I could not find the entire tag of this work. I would post here as soon as I find it, but still it's in Turkish, I don't know if you know the language. Muhaddere Özerdim has some articles about poems written by Turkic peoples in 4th-4th century North China, but I still haven't read them yet (among my huge pile of articles-waiting-to-be-read-by-me), and actually I am not sure if she deals with Turkic poems recorded in Chinese or poems written by Turks in Chinese. I have to check the articles first. Oh and yes, all those articles are in Turkish.
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Post by hjernespiser on Nov 22, 2008 9:59:27 GMT 3
I don't know Turkish. The closest thing is rather simple knowledge of Tuvan.
Vovin, Alexander. "Did the Xiongnu speak a Yeniseian language?". Central Asiatic Journal 44/1 (2000), pp. 87-104.
In this article, Vovin examines Pulleyblank's theory using newer data on the Ket language and Starostin's and Baxters newer reconstructions of Old Chinese and Starostin's comparative vocabulary of Yeniseian. He finds support for this theory.
Vovin talks at length about the problems with Bazin's Turkic reconstruction of the Xiong-nu "poem" from the Jin shu. This "poem" was written down into Chinese by an Indian monk who was fluent in both Chinese and Xiong-nu. One of the main flaws is that Bazin divided the words up differently to how they are written in the Jin shu. He was assuming that the Chinese usually did this with foreign languages. But the transcriber had to have known how to write the words down correctly since he was a "close confident" of Shi Le and familiar with the Xiong-nu language. Additionally the monk, Futo Cheng, provided a Chinese translation of the "poem". It is "These words mean that army/armies will go out and capture [Liu] Yao." Reading the "poem" as Yeniseian provides a closer translation to the Chinese than Bazin's Turkic reading.
The Starostin-Baxter reconstruction renders the words of the poem like: s(l)u(s)-ke = army or armies thij?-re(ts)-kang = goes out, go out, went out, will go out bok-kok = barbaric title of Liu Yao ko-thok-tang = captures, will capture, or captured
The ? is supposed to be an IPA symbol that I can't type here...
Vovin writes the poem like this: suke t-i-r-ek-ang bok-kok k-o-t-o-kt-ang armies PV-CM-PERF-go out-3pp bok-kok PV-?-OBJ-CM-catch-3pp (PV - preverb, CM - conjugation marker, OBJ - object marker, PERF - perfective)
Armies have gone out. [They] will catch bok-kok.
More later...
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Nov 22, 2008 15:05:28 GMT 3
Ok, I see. Thank you for the share.
But you know, apart from all these, the Chinese also always associated Turkic peoples with the Asian Huns. How about that?
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Post by ALTAR on Nov 22, 2008 18:48:38 GMT 3
The Starostin-Baxter reconstruction renders the words of the poem like: s(l)u(s)-ke = army or armies thij?-re(ts)-kang = goes out, go out, went out, will go out bok-kok = barbaric title of Liu Yao ko-thok-tang = captures, will capture, or captured Two of the words you give are Turkic Su-ke: Its a word means army as you used . It was also used in Oghuzs as "Su" and "Subashi" which means head master of army. (X and XI th centuries) There is still alive a Turkish proverb from these centuries to current Turkish literature in Turkey. "Su uyur, düşman uyumaz" - "The army sleeps but the enemy doesn't" "Bok-kok" would be title of "Boko" in Kazaks Turks and also Mongolians. It means Dragon and Strong in Kazakh language and still used as name btwn Kazakh and Mongols suck as Boko, Böke etc.
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Post by hjernespiser on Nov 22, 2008 20:47:23 GMT 3
*s(l)u(s)-ke has a back vowel. Old Turkic sü contains a front vowel. Bazin assumes the -ke is a Turkic case. The Chinese translation would have used a preposition if it were the case. Additionally, this can be considered a cultural word, like titles.
bok-kok is indeed a title which makes us have to throw the word out as evidence because titles are considered useless for determining linguistic affiliation. Bazin says this is a Turkic title boqug based upon an attested Old Turkic personal name buqag.
The key words are the verbs in the poem, tirekang and kotoktang.
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Post by hjernespiser on Nov 22, 2008 20:59:29 GMT 3
Georgii Starostin shows Proto-Yeniseian verbs were formed this way:
preverb *k-, *t-, *p- + object marker *-w-, *-t-, *-k- + conjugation marker *-a-, *-i-, *-o- + aspect/tense marker *-r-, *-n-, + stem + plural marker *-n- (for 1pp and 2pp) + subject marker
Starostin shows the following for subject verbal agreement suffixes (these are really in IPA..):
1 person singular *-ng 1 person plural *-zeng (Kott -tong) 2 person singular *-[k]u 2 person plural *-[k]ong 3 person singular male *-a 3 person singular female *-i 3 person plural *-ang
*t-i-r-ek-ang "went out" preverb *t- + *-i- conjugation marker + perfective *-r- + *-ek-, stem + ang 3pp
*k-o-t-o-kt-ang preverb *k- + o? + object marker *-t- + conjugation marker *-o- + *-kt- "to catch" + ang 3pp
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Nov 23, 2008 2:12:54 GMT 3
Boquġ is a Turkic word meaning "Commander, Leader". It survived in Turkish as Buğ, now only used inside the word Başbuğ.
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