A. S. Amanzholov
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. |
Altaj Sarsenovič Amanžolov (Алтай Сарсенович Аманжолов; Altay Sersenulı Amanjolov, born 1934 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR) is a Kazakhi Turkologist.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
He graduated in 1957 at the Eastern Languages Institute of Moscow State University, in Turkic philology. 1957-1960 and 1964-1966 at the Academy of Sciences, Kazakh SSR, 1966-1979 at lecturing in Kazakh language at the Kazakh State Women Pedagogical Institute. In 1975 he submitted his doctoral thesis on "Materials and research in the history of Old Turkic writing". 1979-1995 dean of the General Linguistics Faculty at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University
Amanzholov lectured for one year at the Black Sea Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey, in 1993/1994. Since 1995, he is a full member of the Kazakhstan Academy of Humanities.
[edit] Sumero-Turkic
In chapter 9 of his 2003 book on the Old Turkic script, Amanzholov presents "more than twenty indisputable lexical coincidences between the Sumerian and Turkic languages that ascend to a Proto-Turkic language or a status of the language even before the migration of the 'Sumerians' to the Mesopotamia", a statement that is untenable in mainstream historical linguistics, and reminiscent of the Pan-Turkist national mysticist "Sun Language Theory of Turkish nationalism, equating e.g. Sumerian UTU "Sun" with a reconstructed Proto-Turkic *ütü "to singe, sear". Consistent with the "Sun Language Theory", Amanzholov concludes that "Proto-Turks" migrated to Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC, giving rise to Sumer, the world's first literate civilization. After listing his proposed Sumerian-Turkic cognates, Amanzholov bemoans that he had been couselled against publishing these sensational findings in his PhD thesis of 1970, and that they had been stolen by Oljas Suleimenov who published them as his own in his Asia (Alma-Ata, 1975), and who later had to officially renounce the hypothesis, since Sumero-Turkic unity was "forbidden in Soviet Turkology".
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Amanzholov found himself free to pursue the Sumero-Turkic cause, communicating with Turkish author O. N. Tuna, who had published the same hypothesis in Turkey [1], where the authorities were more friendly towards pseudohistorical discoveries to the effect that "at least in 3500 BC the Turks are found in the eastern part of Turkey" (Tuna 1997, p.49).
[edit] Old Turkic alphabets
Somewhat less out-of-touch with mainstream chronology, Amanzholov also insists on reading two inscriptions of Scythia, found in the Irtysh and Issyk kurgans and dated to ca. the 4th century BC, as "Proto-Turkic runes" (p. 306). While mainstream scholarship assumes these inscriptions to record the Scythian language, accepting the Orkhon inscriptions of the 7th century as the oldest known traces of Turkic languages, the Orkhon script is likely derived from "Scythian" variants of the Aramaic alphabet, like the Sogdian script.
[edit] Publications
Amanzholov authored five monographs in Russian and Kazakh.
- Glagol'noe upravlenie v iazyke drevneturkskikh pamiatnikov ("Verbal inflection in the language of the Old Turkic monuments"), Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Nauka", 1969.
- "Turkic runic graphics", Almaty, KazGU, three parts, 1980-1985
- Babalar sözi, Peking: Ülttar baspasy, 1988, 70 pp. (Kazakh)
- Ortak asyl miras - Ortak asyl miras, Trabzon, 1994, (Turkish and Kazakh);
- Türki filologiyasy jene jazu Tarihi, Almaty, Sanat, 1996, 128 pp. (Kazakh);
- Qazaqsha-Oryssha Lingvistikalyq Terminologiia Sozdigi : Kazakhsko-Russkii Slovar Lingvisticheskoi Terminologii ("Kazakh-Russian dictionary of linguistic terminology"). Almaty, Qazaq universiteti (1997), ISBN 9965408017, 2nd ed. 1999.
- История и теория древнетюркского письма ("History and Theory of the Old Turkic script"), Mektep, Kazakhstan (2003), ISBN 9965162042.
[edit] References
- ^ Sümer ve Türk dillerinin târihî ilgisi ile Türk dili'nin yaşi meselesi ("Historical connection of Sumerian and Turkic languages and the problem of the age of the Turkic languages"), Ankara (1997)
