Talk:Orkhon script
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Why are Mongolian and Arabic script discussions on this page? There are articles about both already. Evertype 10:39, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
- Most likely relicts from a rename or merge. E.g. an article Old turkic alphabets was merged into this page. So it's somewhat like an article "scripts used by turkic people before using latin script". Strange mix. Either the lemma or the content has to change. --Pjacobi 10:48, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
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- I removed it once, only to have it restored. So perhaps we need a discussion about what is appropriate for this article. kwami 17:35, 2005 July 25 (UTC)
- THis article is about the Orkhon script, not about the Arabic script or the Mongolian script, and not about Turkic writing systems in general. Evertype 17:53, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
- I removed it once, only to have it restored. So perhaps we need a discussion about what is appropriate for this article. kwami 17:35, 2005 July 25 (UTC)
[edit] Tone of Article and Sources
This article keeps going from being flippant in tone to glorifying. Perhaps a balance could be found. It would also be useful to start stating sources in the talk page. --Son of the Tundra 09:25, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Orkhon Script and Runic Script
The historical connection between The Orkhon Script and Runic Script is not known. The similarity is quite clearly there and cannot be dismissed simply by saying that both were cast in stone. Cuneiform was also cast in stone and bears no similarity to Runes. --Son of the Tundra 09:29, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
- Cuneiform was not cast in stone, it was pressed into clay with a stylus. Runiform scripts were not cast in stone either, they were carved. The Latin and Greek alphabets were runiform when carved in stone too: that's an artifact of the method of inscription. Runes are related to the Latin script, and Orkhon to the Sogdian, as far as we now know. The article mentioned that some letters were similar, but the claims were spurious. It gave the letter M as an example, but the letter M in Orkhon looks like a fish and nothing at all like runic M. So unless there is some source demonstrating similarities, yes we can dismiss it. kwami 18:20, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
Why have you removed the see also section? Anyone researching this topic may also be interested in looking at those sections as well. Also, if you look at Old Hungarian script and runic alphabet, you will see that Orkhon and Old Hungarian are referred to as being related; and they are referred to as runiform. Why have you removed the link to http://www.turkicworld.org ? That site contains a huge amount of information on this subject and is a great place to research. --Son of the Tundra 10:05, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
- I'm sorry! That must have been an editing error when I added my ref. I have a sticky 'shift' key, and sometimes select a block of text when I only mean to insert the cursor. Maybe I was looking at the hard copy and didn't notice the highlighting on my screen. kwami 18:18, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi Kwami, I'd be grateful if you could take a look at this article http://www.antalya-ws.com/futhark/index.htm and tell me what you think. It attempts to prove a connection between old Runic and Orkhon. I would certainly be very interested in reading your analysis of that paper and then perhaps discuss it with you. --Son of the Tundra 08:46, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
- Sorry, not impressed. They take letters in Futhark and Orkhon that look superficially similar, then convert samples of written Norse into the alleged Orkhon equivalent, and see if they can make any sense of it in Turkic. That's like taking this sentence, matching the letters to their closest graphic equivalents in katakana, and trying to make sense out of it in Japanese, then claiming that proves English and Japanese share a common ancestry! There are hundreds if not thousands of crackpot decypherments like this out there. (The last debate I got in was the claim that the Micmac Indians wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphs; there were just such superficial similarities as we have here, and I ended up being called a racist because denying the connection meant I was denying the Micmac their civilization. A couple years ago in Togo I heard a lecture by someone claiming that the hieroglyphs could be read in Ewe, which proved that Togolese built the pyramids. Never mind the fact that the Ewe language didn't exist yet!)
- The single biggest fallacy is assuming that letters must be related just because they look similar, even though you ignore their sound values. If you take handwriting variants over several centuries, you can make any script you want look like any other script. What would convince me is if you took an early Futhark k and early Orkhon k and they looked similar, then t from both and they looked similar, etc. Or else structural irregularities. (For example, both Greek and Armenian write the vowel /u/ with the letters <oy>. Just that detail indicates that there was likely some connection between the Greek and Armenian alphabets, though it doesn't prove one actually derives directly from the other.) I would consider anything else to be an "extraordinary" claim, and like Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Going by Occam's Razor, I expect that your author is seeing animals in the clouds, and believes they're real. kwami 09:22, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
Thanks Kwami, You provide some very amusing anecdotes. I do see your point though. It does seem a bit silly to try and take this sentence, as you say, and match the letters to their closest graphic equivalents in some other script, and then try to make sense out of it. Just curious though, can’t one script be derived from another without taking the sounds, i.e. just taking the shapes? On another note, the article Old Hungarian script says that it is derived from Orkhon. Does that mean that the sounds and the shapes were taken from Orkhon? Does that also apply to other scripts, for example if one can read Arabic would that mean that one would also be able to read (but not necessarily understand) other languages that use the Arabic script?--Son of the Tundra 10:09, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
- Yes, there are scripts like you describe. Take a look at the Cherokee alphabet, where an illiterate man used the Latin alphabet without understanding how it worked. For example, letters that look very much like 'CWY' are pronounced tsalagi ("Cherokee"). However, not only are the sounds different, but so is the structure of the script: it's a syllabary rather than an alphabet, because Sequoyah didn't understand the alphabetic principle. When illiterate people come up with their own writing systems, they're almost always syllabaries. And when they're literate, they almost always follow the values and structure of the model script. This has been the case for hundreds and hundreds of scripts. After all, they've learned that it is the correct way to write, and they don't want to be ignorant! When the sound values change, it's usually because of differences in the languages. Greek, for example, didn't have an /h/ or glottal stop, so when the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, they used the /h/ and glottal stop for the vowels A and E. But when the two languages had sounds in common, like /k, l, r, m, s/, the letters kept their sound values.
- Unlike Runic, Orkhon is consonant-based, and tends to drop out vowels, so that sabımın "my word" was spelled <sbmn>, and ešid "listen" as <sid>, missing an entire syllable! (Vowels do tend to be written in final syllables.) This is similar to the Aramaic-derived scripts of SW Asia, but not very much like Runic. It implies that either Orkhon was a gradual development out of the Aramaic family, or else that whoever invented it was literate in one of those scripts, such as Sogdian. Likewise, Runic clearly comes from the Latin family. So a connection between them is improbable, and would require some good evidence to be convincing.
- You're right, though, a script could be borrowed without paying any attention to sound values, like Cherokee. The question is, how would you ever prove it? In the case of Cherokee, Sequoyah immitated the little details of the Latin letters, such as the serifs and little bulbs at the ends of the lines, plus we have historical records, and we know that he invented his script in a sea of Latin-alphabet literacy. However, the little serifs etc. could have been a cultural influence after the script was invented. If Cherokee and Latin were only preserved in crudely written notes, from different continents and written centuries apart, it would be very difficult to show that they were related, or to decide whether Cherokee came from Latin, Cyrillic, or Hebrew, or from the Japanese kana syllabary.
- As for Hungarian runes, we can't prove they're related to Orkhon. But a relationship looks promising: the Hungarians had strong Turkic cultural influence, so the opportunity was there, and they likely would have looked to the Turks for their ideas rather than, say, the Germans or Slavs. Also, many of the letters with similar sound values also looked similar, although there is so much variation that it's a bit of a guessing game. For example, one form of /s/ looked like an I in both scripts, /n/ like a reversed C, /i/ like a Γ, /d/ like an x or a +, etc. There's about as good a connection between Old Hungarian and Orkhon as there is between Orkhon and Sogdian - not a great match, but good enough to make a reasonable hypothesis. kwami 22:37, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
You might look at my article "The Mystery of the Szekely Runes: Provenence of a script" in the Occasional Papers of the Epigraphic Society, Vol. 19, p. 184-? if you can get your hands on it at your library. It summarizes the state of knowledge on the development of the Szekely/Hungarian "runes" at the time I wrote the article. Doc Rock 11:46, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Sogdian
This alphabet is not a form of Sogdian alphabet. Here some letters and their origins:
→ B came from Balık (Fish in Turkish)
→ Y came from Yay (Bow in Turkish)
→ Oq or Ok came from Ok (Arrow in Turkish)
→ Ök came from Ök (Ram in old Turkish) but that letter is vertical version, horizontal version can be found other scripts
