Customer Reviews

Studies in Turkic and Mongolic Linguistics (Royal Asiatic Society Books)

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I gave this 4 stars only because I don't know enough about the topic to really have a critical opinion of the work, but I am finding it very useful for my own purposes.

This book is the reprint of Clauson's 1962 volume on the linguistic relationship between Turkic and Mongolic languages. I bought the book because I am a speaker of Turkish as a second language, and am trying to use my Turkic studies as a bridge to learn Mongolian. I felt right at home when Clauson describes his experience, reading the Secret History of the Mongols for the first time, being struck by the fact that Mongolian didn't seem to resemble Turkish in any way. Exactly how I felt when I picked up one of Nicholas Poppe's transcriptions of a buddhist sutra in pre-classical Mongolian.

The subtext to this book, that I'm not competent to comment on, is the fight between the two academic opinions that Turkic and Mongolic languages do or don't stem from a common ancestor. Clauson makes the argument that they don't, specifying that the large number of common words are due to a borrowing of Turkic words by the early Mongol peoples. I believe other scholars would argue for a relation based on what seems me to be very similar grammar and syntax of the two branches. Since this work was originally published in 1962 I am sure that further research has been done on the topic, and the debate may now be a moot point.

Either way, I am enjoying this very much as a nice historical overview of the Turkic and Mongol peoples and languages, and I'm learning a lot that will at least help me recognize what Clauson considers to be the borrowed Turkic words in Mongolian. It would have been nice to have a map or two, but I'm sure the author assumes that anyone reading the book already has a good grasp of Asian geography.