Avrasya Uluslararası Araştırmalar Dergisi

Abstract

Old Turkic texts in Sogdian script differ in many ways from the orthography and fonts of the standard Uyghur alphabet used in classical Buddhist Uyghur texts. These texts exhibit interesting features that distinguish them from the standard Old Uyghur Buddhist corpus not only in terms of script and orthography, but also in terms of phonological, morphological and lexical features. In this article, certain sound changes occurring in Old Turkic texts in Sogdian script, which have a special place among Uyghur texts, will be discussed. It is understood that the sound changes encountered in the texts in question are generally early linguistic features. In addition, the study will show that some of the sound changes observed in the texts in the Sogdian script represent relatively advanced linguistic features for Old Turkic, and that this is related to interference of dialectical features. Since there was no standard orthography in Old Turkic texts in the Sogdian script, unlike in the classical Buddhist works, it can be understood that the scribes of these texts did not write the words according to an established spelling tradition, but rather attempted to reflect the forms as they spoke or heard them. Therefore, it is possible to identify some dialect characteristics through these texts. In addition, when the Old Turkic texts with Sogdian letters are compared with other Old Uyghur texts, the presence of phonetic events that occur much more intensely in the texts under study is also noteworthy. As a result of all these analyses, it becomes clear that these texts occupy a special position for Old Turkic studies.