Orkhon runes

Orkhon runes
Font	Abdschad
languages	Old Turkish
Emergence	600 AD
Used in	Central Asia
Officially in	Octurk Empire
ancestry	Protosinaitic script  →  Phoenician script   →  Aramaic script    →  Syriac script     →  Sogdic script ( controversial )      →  Orkhon runes
relative	Old Hungarian script Proto-Bulgarian script Khazarian script
Unicode block	U + 10C00 - U + 10C4F
ISO 15924	Orkh

Orkhon runes , also known as Turkish runes or Turk runes , are an alphabet used to write the early Turkic languages . The old Turkish script ( Orhun Yazıtları in Turkish ) was generally written from right to left. However, some inscriptions have been written with letters rotated 90 degrees vertically. They are then read from bottom to top. In this rune-like script, the old Turkish inscriptions from northern Mongolia, on Orkhon and Selenga and others from the upper Yenisei are written. Similar writing systems from Talasjoin them. But Turkish - Nestorian manuscripts with the same rune-like style have also been found, especially in the Turfan oasis and in the Miran fortress . The use of two dots to separate the words makes the texts clearly close to the Central Asian runes.

Names and relationships

Because of their similarity to the Nordic-Germanic runes , the characters are called runes . The term Orkhon runes refers to the main location of the inscriptions on Orkhon . The characters are called Turkish runes or Koek- Turkish runes after the Kök Turks who lived on Orkhon at that time . The language written with these characters is also known as "Runic Turkish".

In many places in Tuwa such runic inscriptions are still preserved on rocks, slabs and stone pillars, which prove that the Turkish-speaking population there also wrote in runes. This Turkic-speaking population is now counted among the Yenisei Kyrgyz.

The inscriptions on the upper Yenisei, which are also written in Turkish runes, are much younger and probably of Kyrgyz origin, but more primitive in thought and language compared to the Koek-Turkish monuments.

The Hungarian and Proto-Bulgarian runes also seem to have a great formal resemblance to the Orkhon runes. The Urbulgarian runes even use almost the same sound value as the Old Turkish alphabet and can therefore be read by anyone who knows the Orkhon alphabet, whereas the Hungarian runes mostly use a different sound value. However, research suggests that the Proto-Bulgarian runes retained the oldest form.

The fact that the Aramaic alphabet is native to Georgia leads to the fact that the runes come from the far west of the Old Turkish area. One can assume that these writing systems are related to each other. To what extent they influenced each other or even from whom they originally come cannot be proven beyond doubt with today's knowledge.

The font is available as Old Turkic in Unicode and occupies the area U + 10C00 – U + 10C4F.

origin

Kul Tigin Monument

There are essentially three theories about origin:

1. The Koek-Turkish script developed from the various clan badges of the tribes that grew up in the pre-Christian centuries.
2. The Orkhon runes were taken from the Central Asian Sogdian script and further developed by the Kök Turks.
3. Combination of the first two theories; Iranian, Greek and newly invented characters were then added to the characters created in this way. This theory was mainly represented by Vilhelm Thomsen .

Today it is widely assumed that the Koek-Turkish alphabet developed from a Semitic one and that it came to the Koek -Turks through the mediation of the Iranian- speaking peoples of Central Asia. However, this assumption has little prospect of being confirmed, as the takeover for the origin of the first runes of the Orkhon I type in the Talas valley must have taken place shortly before AD 600. The lack of clear agreements speaks against a derivation from the Sogdian script.

history

The earliest examples of these Turkish runes from the 5th century AD were discovered in Kyrgyzstan in 1970 . They come from a princely grave near Lake Issyk and are therefore also known as the Issyk script . A narrower variant of the Orkhon runes from the 8th century was found in Siberia. According to where they were found, they are called Yenisei runes .

The most important inscriptions originated in the time of the second khanate (682-745), especially in the 20s and 30s of the 8th century and during the Uighur khanate (745-840). In the 9th century, the Orkhon runes were replaced by the Uighur script derived from the Aramaic script . Other old Turkish relics are rock carvings with notched animals, mostly as ibex, and human figures, with Turkish runes.

Franz Altheim suggests that it is not the Turkic tribes in the east that could be considered as creators of the Old Turkish runes, but only the Huns , namely those from the 3rd century in the Caucasus.

discovery

Kyzyl inscription in the Yenisei runes related to the Orkhon runes (approx. 730 AD)

When the young King of Sweden Charles XII. Suffering a heavy defeat against the Russians in the Battle of Poltava in 1709 , some Swedish officers were taken prisoner by the Russians. Among them was Philip Johan Tabbert , who later became the family name Strahlenberg accepted. The journey of these prisoners to Western Siberia ended in Tobolsk (Siberia) in 1711 .

When Strahlberg returned to Sweden in 1722, he published the observations collected in Russia and Siberia in a large work entitled: "Europe and the northern and eastern parts of Asia" (Stockholm 1730). The knowledge shared by Strahlberg aroused great interest not only in Sweden but throughout Europe. The book was quickly translated into English, French and Spanish.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of information that Strahlberg made related to a cluster of stones, which he believed to be gravestones, on the banks of the Yenisei. Since he did not know whether the characters carved on them were letters, Strahlberg contented himself with a hand-drawn example of these drawings for his book.

In 1889 the Finnish Archaeological Association collected the almost forgotten, scattered monuments in an atlas and sent it to interested scientists. The characters on the stones were identified as writing, and the unknown language caused a stir in scientific circles.

As in 1889 Nikolai Jadrinzew from Irkutsk two similar inscriptions at the mouth of the Orkhon in the Selenga found (Northern Mongolia), the interest continued to rise. The Irkutsk Geographical Society immediately sent a delegation to the area. The value of the find was determined within a short time. On behalf of the Finno-Ugric Society, Heikel went to the Orkhon Valley from 1890–91 and copied all the inscriptions he found. A new album with the collected copies and pictures was published in 1892.

In 1891, chaired by the German Turkologist Wilhelm Radloff , the Russian scientists began to work on these stones and also soon released an album.

The situation had changed unexpectedly as a result of the finds from Orkhon Valley. Two long inscriptions were added to the stones that were inscribed by Strahlberg. One was on a stone 332 cm high that stood in its original place; The lettering was 231 cm high. The other monument was scattered around the base in four separate fragments.

There were also Chinese texts on both monuments. From these one could see that the memorial stones came from the Kök Turks . Accordingly, an old Turkic language had to be hidden in the unknown inscription .

Now the race to decipher the letters began among linguists, which was won in 1893 by the well-known Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen (1842–1927). He sent his solution to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences . This important discovery stated that it was a 38-character font. The inscriptions date from 732 and 734 and are of great value as the oldest documents of the Old Turkish language .

Letter board

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Old Turkish or Kök-Turk alphabet (classic age of the Kök-Turks)

use			Symbols		Transliteration		IPA transcription
Vowels					A.		/ a / , / e /
					I.		/ ɯ / , / i / , / j /
					O		/ u / , / o / , / w /
					U		/ ø / , / y / , / w /
Consonants	harmonized	with (¹) - behind, (²) - in front vowels			B¹	B²	/ b /
					D¹	D²	/ d /
					G¹	G²	/G/
					L¹	L²	/ l /
					N¹	N²	/ n /
					R¹	R²	/ r /
					S¹	S²	/ s /
					T¹	T²	/ t /
					Y¹	Y²	/ ʤ /
		only (¹) - Q only (²) - K			Q	K	/ q /	/ k /
		with all vowels			-Ç		/ ʧ /
					-M		/ m /
					-P		/ p /
					-Ş		/ ʃ /
					-Z		/ z /
					-NG		/ ŋ /
	Cluster	+ Vowels			IÇ, ÇI, Ç		/ iʧ / , / ʧi / , / ʧ /
					IQ, QI, Q		/ ɯq / , / qɯ / , / q /
					OQ, UQ, QO, QU, Q	ÖK, ÜK, KÖ, KÜ, K	/ oq / , / uq / , / qo / , / qu / , / q /	/ øk / , / yk / , / kø / , / ky / , / k /
		+ Consonants			-NÇ		/ nʧ /
					-NY		/ nʤ /
					-LT		/ lt / , / ld /
					-NT		/ nt / , / nd /
Word separation symbols					no
(-) - no end of sentence characters

Reading example

???? - enrollment

T²NGR²I - transliteration

/ tari / - IPA transcription

tanrı - equivalent in modern Turkish

'The sky god' or 'the eternally blue sky' - this means the highest god in the old Turkish sense

'God' - modern meaning

The first sentence on the Orkhon rune stones as a transcription into the Latin alphabet:

“BILGE: TONYUKUK: BEN: ÖZÜM: TABGAC: ILINGE: KILINDIM: TÜRK: BODUNU: TABGACKA: KÖRÜK: ERTI”

“My name is Bilge Tonyukuk . I was born in the kingdom of China ( Tabgatsch ). The Turkish people belonged to the Empire of China (Tabgatsch). "

Unicode

The Old Turkish Unicode block is U + 10C00 – U + 10C4F. It was added to the Unicode standard in October 2009 with version 5.2. It includes separate Orkhon and Yenisei variants of the individual characters.

Old Turkish script

	0	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	A.	B.	C.	D.	E.	F.
U + 10C0x	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
U + 10C1x	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
U + 10C2x	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
U + 10C3x	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
U + 10C4x	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
Unicode version 6.1

literature

• David Diringer : The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind. Priority. Vol. 3. Philosophical Library, New York NY 1948, pp. 313-315.
• James G. Février: Histoire de l'écriture. Bibliothèque historique . Payot, Paris 1948, pp. 311-317.
• Hans Jensen : Sign, Symbol and Script. An account of ma's efforts to write. 3rd ed. Putnam, New York NY 1969, pp. 422-425.
• György Kara: Aramaic Scripts for Altaic Languages. In: Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (Eds.): The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press, New York et al. 1996, pp. 536-558. ISBN 0-19-507993-0
• Wolfgang-Ekkehard Scharlipp : The early Turks in Central Asia. An introduction to their history and culture. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1992. ISBN 3-534-11689-5
• Talât Tekin: A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic. Indiana University et al., Bloomington 1968. ( Indiana University publications - Uralic and Altaic series 69, ISSN  0445-8486 )
• Vilhelm Thomsen: Inscriptions de l'Orkhon. Déchiffrées. Suomalais-ugrilaisen seuran toimituksia. Vol. 5. Imprimerie de la Société de Littérature Finnoise, Helsingfors 1896, Bibliolife, Breinigsville PA 2010 (Repr).
• DD Vasil'iev: corpus tiurkskikh runicheskikh pamyatnikov Bassina Eniseya. Body of the Turkish runic monuments in the Yenisei Basin. USSR Academy of Science, Leningrad 1983.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl Jettmar: History of Central Asia. Vol. 5, Issue 5. Brill Archive, Leiden 1966, p. 163
2. ↑ Franz Altheim: Attila and the Huns. Baden-Baden 1951, p. 47
3. ↑ Georg Stadtmüller , Saeculum, Vol. 1, K. Alber, 1950, p. 302
4. ↑ Volker Adam, Jens Peter Loud, Andrew White, Bibliography old Turkish Studies, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000, p. 40
5. ^ University of Bonn. Department of Linguistics and Cultural Studies of Central Asia, Issue 37, VGH Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH Verlag, 2008, p. 107
6. ^ Klaus Röhrborn, Wolfgang Veenker: Runes, Tamgas and Graffiti from Asia and Eastern Europe. O. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1985, p. 5.
7. ^ ^{A b} Werner Leimbach: Geography of Tuwa. The area of ​​the upper reaches of the Yenisei. J. Perthes, Gotha 1936, p. 98.
8. ^ Herbert Franke: Saeculum world history. Herder, Freiburg 1965, p. 576.
9. ^ ^{A b c} Franz Altheim: History of the Huns. Vol. 1. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1959, p. 285.
10. ^ Proposal for encoding the Old Turkic script in the SMP of the UCS. (PDF; 1.1 MB) Retrieved September 19, 2011 . 
11. ↑ Unicode 6.0 Character Code Charts - Old Turkic. (PDF; 81 kB) Retrieved September 19, 2011 . 
12. ^ Franz Altheim: History of the Huns. Vol. 1, p. 118 f.
13. ↑ George Campbell, Christopher Moseley: The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets . Routledge, London / New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-56098-6 , pp. 40 (English).
14. ^ ^{A b} Franz Altheim: History of the Huns. Vol. 1, p. 271.
15. ↑ Ancient writings and cultures: Orchon script. In: online library. Retrieved January 17, 2008 .  
16. ↑ Central Asian Studies. Vol. 23-25. O. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1993, p. 27.
17. ↑ Wolfgang-Ekkehard Scharlipp: The early Turks in Central Asia , p. 11
18. ↑ Unicode.org chart (PDF; 81 kB)

Web links

• Orkhon / Old Turkic omniglot.com (English)
• Orkhon script and related scripts - brief description and TTF
• Ebbinghaus, Uwe: The Secret of the Old Turkish Runes, Frankfurter Allgemeine, updated on August 22, 2019
• Orkhon runic texts with transliteration and translation into today's Turkish (Turkish website)
• Old Turkish texts in runic script after Vilhelm Thomsen (1910)
• Coding application for the inclusion of the Orchon script in Unicode under the name "Old Turkic" (PDF; 1.02 MB)