Customer Reviews

The Turkic Languages (Routledge Language Family Series)

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This book is like a big piece of candy for anyone interested in the Turkic languages. Routledge's Language Family Descriptions series offers single-chapter summaries of the grammars and lexicons of the major members of a family, and their Turkic volume published in 1998 continues the tradition with strong contributions from the leading Turkologists of our time.

There are six chapters on the family as a whole: The Speakers of Turkic Languages (Hendrik Boeschoten), The Turkic Peoples: A Historical Sketch (Peter B. Golden), The Structure of Turkic (Lars Johanson), The Reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the Genetic Question (Andras Rona-Tas), The History of Turkic (Lars Johanson) and Turkic Writing SYstems (Andras Rona-Tas). The contributions of Johanson and Andras-Rona Tas are extremely helpful for understanding the isoglosses which divide the Turkic family into its various subfamilies, and they give a good overview of the controversies on the reconstruction of proto-languages.

Then there are single chapters on each language or, in a few cases, collections of unstandardized dialects. These are Old Turkic (Marcel Erdal), Middle Kipchak (Arpad Berta), Chaghatay (Hendrik Boeschoten and Marc Vandamme), Ottoman Turkish (Celia Kerslake), Turkish (Eva A. Csato and Lars Johanson), Turkish dialects (Bernt Brendemoen), Azerbaijanian (Claus Schonig), Turkmen (Schonig), Turkic languages of Iran (Gerhard Doerfer), Tatar and Bashkir (Berta), West Kipchak languages (Berta), Kazakh and Karakalpak (Mark Kirchner), Nogay (Eva A. Csato and Birsel Karakoc), Kirghiz (Kirchner), Uzbek (Boeschoten), Uyghur (Reinhard F. Hahn), Yellow Uyghur and Salar (Hahn), South Siberian Turkic (Schonig), Yakut (Marek Stachowski and Astrid Menz), and Chuvash (Larry Clark).

There's also a chapter on the Turkish language reform written by Bernt Brendemoen, though I feel that Geoffrey Lewis' The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success is the best popular introduction to the affair. I should also note that Marcel Erdal's presentation of Old Turkic is vastly expanded in his later monograph A Grammar of Old Turkic (Amsterdam: Brill, 2004).

My only complaint about this delightful reference is that a number of typos are present, especially in Arpad Berta's contribution on Tatar and Bashkir. These pose little problem for those with some previous experience with the Turkic languages, but may confuse many readers. Shame on Routledge for not correcting these even in the paperback reprint of 2006. Still, this is *the* contemporary introduction to the Turkic family in English, and I recommend it to all linguaphiles.

This is a good source for readers to get a feel for the Turkic language family as a whole, as well as an introduction to the various languages that make it up. The depth of coverage varies from one language to another: Turkish and Uzbek are the most extensively described, while some of the others get more cursory treatment. All of the descriptions are written in accord with the approach propounded by the major editor of the book, Lars Johanson. His own analysis is not always accurate, however, as can be seen in some places in this book.

The price of the book, at 320 dollars, is outrageous, and has doubled since it was first published. I thus suspect most potential readers will seek copies in libraries and then photocopy the parts that are of most interest to them.

Great source from prominent scholars... Unfortunately, Turkic languages have been neglected for a long time for several reasons... The only thing missing in this nice reference book is a nice map. The map that was provided at the beginning is really bad.