Khazar language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Khazar | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, Pontic steppes and parts of Central Asia | |
| Language extinction: | sometime between 1000 and 1300 CE | |
| Language family: | Altaic[1] (controversial) Turkic Oghur Khazar |
|
| Writing system: | variant of Turkic runiform; Hebrew alphabet; possibly others | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | – | |
| ISO 639-3: | zkz | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Khazar is the language spoken by the medieval Khazar tribe, a semi-nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia. It is also referred to as Khazarian, Khazaric, or Khazari.
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 that the Khazars spoke an Oghuric Turkic language similar to Hunnish and Bulgar, possibly influenced by Old Turkic and Uyghur influences. However, recent scholarship has called this Oghuric hypothesis into question.[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. Extant written works are primarily in Hebrew. 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.
[edit] Bibliography
- Kevin Alan Brook. The Jews of Khazaria. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006.
- Douglas M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954.
- Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.
- Peter B. Golden. Khazar Studies: An Historio-Philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars. Budapest: Akademia Kiado, 1980.
- Peter B. Golden, et al., eds. The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Jerusalem 1999 International Khazar Colloquium(Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch Der Orientalistik). Brill: 2007; contains, inter alia,
- Marcel Erdal. "The Khazar Language". The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives. Brill, 2007. pp. 75-107.
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