Turkic Database at Elegant Lexicon

Work has been busy! I’ve been doing more research in the library world, so this site has not been updated as often as it used to be.

The maps page is all messed up. There’s something wrong with the script I had been using to create them, so I’ll have to fix that.

In my spare time I’ve been working on an artistic map showing the Turkic languages. Perhaps I’ll even offer it up for sale as prints. It’s very time-consuming as I’m making it in SVG using Inkscape. You can do some cool map effects, and I’m hopeful that it will look as good when it’s done as I imagine. I’m nearly done with the country borders and am working on the major bodies of water. After that, I’ll do rivers and lakes, cities and place names, then finally I’ll add the languages. I’ll likely have to create a couple of insets. I’m thinking of doing one for the Caucasus and one for the Altay-Sayan region.

I’m still collecting books and articles and other resources, so whenever I have time I’ll continue to add new entries.

I would love to turn this into a more etymologically-based project. It would be neat to see not only reconstructions of Proto-Turkic, but also reflexes of borrowings from various sources and points. We’ll see – I’d have to rethink the entire database structure.

There is a new freely(!) available glossary of Old Uyghur that has been published:

Wilkens, Jens. 2021. Handwörterbuch des Altuigurischen: Altuigurisch – Deutsch – Türkisch / Eski Uygurcanın El Sözlüğü: Eski Uygurca – Almanca – Türkçe. Göttingen: Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2021-1590.

Accordingly, I have begun to add entries from this source and have added Old Uyghur as a new language. It’s tricky because Orkhon Turkic is already in the database, and not all sources clearly differentiate between the two. They do appear to be different, especially as Old Uyghur has clear influences from Chinese and Sanskrit and was affiliated with very large kingdoms. Orkhon, on the other hand, is a bit more limited and found mostly on stela in Mongolia. I may need to revisit this.

I’ve been occasionally working through the rest of Khorasani Turkic. It’s a bit of a mess. I’ve been very busy with work, so this project has become a low priority for the time. I’ve added the first 50 words from Old Uyghur and should have this completed sometime soon.

I’m at 19750 entries, so I’ll hit the big 20000 milestone soon. I’ve been working on Khorasani Turkic as of late. Because Doerfer likes to provide very narrow transcriptions, it will be challenging to synthesize all of his data into something that is true to what he presents, but is also usable in this format. I have ideas and will see how they pan out soon.

I have ideas for even more terms to add. Some ideas are fast, slow, pigeon, bird cherry, sword… We’ll see. Returning to languages that I’ve “completed” can be very tedious.

I would also like to include more kinship terms. However, there are a variety of kinship systems that are employed, so it could get complicated. Sister-in-law, for example, could mean elder brother’s wife, younger brother’s wife, husband’s sister, wife’s sister (elder and younger)… I don’t know that my current format would be ideal for this kind of data. I’ll have to think of a new way to display all of these possibilities.

I decided to make a background for the site, rather than just having it be white. I’m happy with the result. I took a bunch of tamgas, slightly stylized them, and had them tiled across the background.

I haven’t done much work on the site beyond that. I’ve considered adding a few new glosses: maybe strawberry, cherry? Walnut? We’ll see…

At any rate, I’m still here, still doing the occasional update…

I was rather upset when Tehlikedeki Diller Dergisi disappeared from its original home on the web. I’m pleased to report that it has returned!

https://dergipark.org.tr/tdd

I’ll update the links to articles that I have in my references.