Khazar language

Khazar was the language spoken by the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia. It is also referred to as Khazarian, Khazaric, or Khazari. The language is extinct and written records are almost non-existent.

Description

It was long debated to what branch of the Turkic languages the Khazar tongue belonged, or even if it was a Turkic language at all. Some scholars postulated Iranian or Caucasic linguistic affiliation.

Arab scholars of the Middle Ages classified Khazar as similar to, yet distinct from, the type of Turkic spoken by other Turks with whom they were familiar, such as the Oghuz. They noted, however, that both the Khazar tongue and the more common forms of Turkic were widely spoken in Khazaria.

The consensus among scholars had long been and still is that the Khazars spoke an Oghuric Turkic language similar to Chuvash, Hunnish, Turkic Avar and Bulgar, possibly influenced by Old Turkic and Uyghur influences. The Oghur languages are characterized by sound correspondences such as Oghuric r versus Common Turkic z and Oghuric l versus Common Turkic š. Oghuric is sometimes referred to as Lir-Turkic and Common Turkic as Shaz-Turkic. It is not clear when these two major types of Turkic can be assumed to have actually diverged.

The Oghuric origin hypothesis for the Khazar language has been disputed by isolated scholarship suggesting that the Khazar language was a standard, "Shaz"-style Common Turkic language.^[2] Given the Göktürk origin of the Khazar khagans, it is possible that Göktürk-style Old Turkic was used as a courtly language early in Khazar history, though there is no direct evidence of this.

Very few examples of the Khazar language exist today, mostly in names that have survived in historical sources. All of these examples seem to be of the "Lir"-type though. Extant written works are primarily in Hebrew.

The Turkic runiform inscription on the Kievian Letter.

The only Khazar word written in the original Khazar alphabet that survives is the single word-phrase HWQWRWM, "I have read (this or it)" at the end of the Kievian Letter. This word is written in Turkic runiform script, suggesting that this script survived the conversion to Judaism. It is, however, conceivable that at various times and in different communities the Khazar language was written in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and/or Georgian scripts.

Notes

References

• Brook, Kevin Alan (2006). The Jews of Khazaria. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Dunlop, Douglas M. (1954), The History of the Jewish Khazars, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Erdal, Marcel (1999). "The Khazar Language". In: Golden et al., 1999:75-107.
• Erdal, Marcel (2007). "The Khazar Language." The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives. Brill, 2007. pp. 75–107.
• Golb, Norman & Omeljan Pritsak (1982). Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.
• Golden, Peter B. (1980). Khazar Studies: An Historio-Philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars. Budapest: Akademia Kiado.
• Golden, Peter B. et al., eds (1999). The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Jerusalem 1999 International Khazar Colloquium (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 Uralic & Central Asian Studies, vol. 17, 2007). Leiden: Brill.
• Johanson, Lars & Éva Agnes Csató (ed.) (1998). The Turkic languages. London: Routledge.
• Johanson, Lars (1998). "The history of Turkic." In: Johanson & Csató, pp. 81–125.[2]
• Johanson, Lars (1998). "Turkic languages." In: Encyclopædia Britannica. CD 98. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 5 sept. 2007.[3]
• Johanson, Lars (2000). "Linguistic convergence in the Volga area." In: Gilbers, Dicky & Nerbonne, John & Jos Schaeken (ed.). Languages in contact. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi. (Studies in Slavic and General linguistics 28.), pp. 165–178.[4]
• Johanson, Lars (2007). Chuvash. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier.

External links

• Khazaria.com

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