Turco-Mongol tradition

Asia in 1335, showing including Turco-Mongol culture nations such as the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate.

The Turco-Mongol or Turko-Mongol tradition was a cultural synthesis that arose during the early 14th century, among the ruling elites of Mongol Empire successor states such as the Chagatai Khanate and Golden Horde. These elites adopted Turkic languages and different religions such as Buddhism and Islam, while retaining Mongol political and legal institutions.[1] Many later Central Asian states drew heavily on this tradition, including the Timurid Empire, the Kazakh Khanate, the Khanate of Kazan, the Nogai Khanate, the Crimean Khanate, and the Mughal Empire.

A much earlier Turco-Mongol tradition existed in prehistory as well, as evidenced by the extensive lexical borrowings from Proto-Turkic into the ancestor of Proto-Mongolic from around at least the first millennium BCE. Turkic and Mongolic languages share extensive borrowed similarities in their personal pronouns (e.g. the *b-, *s-, *i- paradigm for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, respectively), among other lexical similarities of the type, which seem to date to before this era and already existed before the breakup of Turkic around 500 BCE.[2] Turkic and Mongolic peoples shared a common religion, Tengrism, which dates at least from this ancient period.

A still more ancient period of prolonged language contact between Turkic and Mongolic is indicated by further and more fundamental phonotactic, grammatical, and typological similarities (e.g. synchronic vowel harmony, lack of grammatical gender, extensive agglutination, highly similar phonotactic rules and phonology).[2] In the past, such similarities were attributed to a genetic relationship and led to the widespread acceptance of an Altaic language family. More recently, due to the lack of a definitive demonstration of genetic relationship, these similarities have been divided into at these three known periods of language contact. The similarities have led to the proposal of a Northeast Asian sprachbund instead, which also includes the Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic language families, although Turkic and Mongolic display the most extensive similarities.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Beatrice Forbes Manz (1989). The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane. Cambridge University Press. pp. 6–9. ISBN 978-0-521-34595-8.
  2. 1 2 Janhunen, Juha (2013). "Personal pronouns in Core Altaic". In Martine Irma Robbeets; Hubert Cuyckens. Shared Grammaticalization: With Special Focus on the Transeurasian Languages. p. 221.
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