Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XVI.djvu/76

 TURKISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE fective and in part redundant; to construct the spoken alphabet and phonetic form of the language from the published grammars is well nigh impossible. It is also sometimes written with the Armenian alphabet, which represents it much more faithfully. It has nine vowels : four hard, a, 0,, and a peculiar guttural i; and five soft, a (a flat), e, , o (French eu), and u (French w). In the same word, as a general rule, only vowels of one or of the other of these classes are allowed to succeed one an- other ; the dominant syllable, which is usually the final one of the root or theme, assimilating to its own character all that follow it. The consonants are y, r, I; ng, n, m;, 2, *A, zh; kh, gh,f, v; k, g, t, d, p, b; h; and the com- pounds tch, j. The language has no proper articles, although its numeral " one " and its demonstrative are sometimes used nearly as articles. The adjective is uninflected. The nouns have no distinction of gender; their plural is formed by the addition of lar or ler. There is no nominative case ending; the un- changed theme is employed as subject, in ad- dress (vocative), and also as indefinite object of a verb. Of cases, formed by inseparable affixed particles, which may properly be re- garded as terminations of declension, there are an accusative, in i; a genitive, in ung ; a dative, in e ; an ablative, in den ; an instrumental, in le ; and a locative, in de. These affixes are, saving certain slight euphonic changes, invari- able ; they are appended to the simple theme in the singular, and to the plural sign ler in the plural. The numerals are : I, Mr; 2,iki; 3, utch ; 4, dort; 5, besh; 6, elti ; 7, yedi; 8, sekiz ; 9, dokuz; 10, on; 11, on J/r, &c. ; 20, yeyirmi; 3Q,otuz; 40, kirk; 5Q,elli; 60, elt- mish ; 70, yetmish ; 80, seksen ; 90, doksan; 100, yoz; 1000, bing. To form the ordinals, inji is added. The personal pronouns, which alone offer some anomalies of declension, are : I, ben; we, bis; thou, sen; ye, iz. In the third person we have rather a demonstrative than a personal pronoun: that one, ol; those, anlar. Possessive pronominal suffixes are : OT, my; wife, our; n, thy; niz, your; * or si, his, hers, its; lari or leri, their. These are appended directly to the nominal theme, singular or plural, and the affixes of case follow them, as baba-lar-um-dan, from my fathers. There is no relative pronoun, except the Persian ki. The verbal roots are not al- ways reducible to a monosyllabic form. From each root are formed a number of themes of derivative conjugation, by adding conjugational affixes; these are: for the passive, il; for the reflexive, in; for the reciprocal, ish; for the causal, der; and for the negative me; which last, by prefixing e, becomes a sign of impossi- bility. Any or all of these affixes may be com- bined at once with a verbal root, so far as the idea admits of their combined modification ; so that in theory we may have as many as 86 themes from one root, each conjugated through- out in the same manner as the simple root : e. g., from sev-mek, to love (mek is infinitive affix), come sev-il-me-mek, not to be loved ; sev-der-il-mek, to be made to love; sev-ish-il- eme-mek, not to be able to be loved by one another, &c. The root of the verb, without affix, is the second person singular imperative: e. g., sev, love 1 The tenses and moode are of two kinds, simple and periphrastic. The for- mer are formed either by appending a predi- cative pronominal suffix to a participle (except in the third person, which is left without suf- fix), or by adding a possessive suffix to a noun of action ; thus, from dogmak, to strike : pres. part, dogur, striking ; pres. dogur-um, striking- I, i. e., I am striking, I strike ; pret. dogd-um, striking-mine,. e., I have struck. The peri- phrastic tenses are formed by combining a par- ticiple or noun of action with an auxiliary verb ; as dogmish idum, having struck was I, i. e., I had struck. By these means, a great variety of more or less genuine verbal forms is produced, in the admission and classifica- tion of which, however, grammarians greatly differ ; and the verbal paradigm is a very rich one as regards the number and nicety of its distinctions. What are prepositions in other languages are in Turkish postpositive affixes; but many proper prepositions are borrowed by it from the Arabic and Persian, and are placed and construed according to the usage of those languages. It is almost entirely des- titute of any conjunctions except those of Arabic and Persian origin, some of which as those for and, but, or, if, as, that are in frequent and familiar nse, although more in the formal and written style than in the con- versational. The place of conjunctions is supplied by gerundives and possessive forms, through means of which the different mem- bers of a compound sentence are twined into one, with the principal verb always at the end. This position of the verb, together with the operation of the rule that the determining word must precede the determined, gives the Turkish construction an inverted form which often seems very strange. LITERATURE. The earliest literature produced by any of the divis- ions of the Turkish race is that of the Uigurs, a remote eastern branch of the family, who originally occupied the country south of Lake Baikal, but later established themselves about the Tangnu Tagh, and played a conspicuous part in the contests and migrations of central Asia during several centuries, until their nationality was swallowed up in the Mongol empire, about A. D. 1200. Something of culture and Chris- tianity was communicated to them from Syria, doubtless by Nestorian missionaries ; and their scanty alphabet, of 14 characters, formed from the Syriac, became later the parent of the Mon- gol and Mantchoo alphabets. Most of the Uignr literature is lost, and of what remains only a few relics have found their way to Eu- rope; little is known of it in detail, although it has been made to yield some information respecting the history of the people. They are