[Published as: “V Oraz oquları: Türki örkeniyetiniŋ ğılım men bilimdi damıtuğa qosqan

ülesi”. Xalıqaralıq ğılımi-täciribelik konferentsiya eŋbekter cıynağı. II Tom: 30 Qazan

(Shymkent: Älem, 2019), pp. 25-31. This manuscript incorporates corrections to the earlier
draft which was published before I could submit the final corrections.]

“Some Problems in the History of the Kipchak Written Languages”

Uli Schamiloglu
(Nazarbayev University &
University of Wisconsin-Madison)

0. Introduction
In this paper I would like to offer a few thoughts about the history of the
Kipchak Turkic literary languages. The history of the Turkic literary
languages has attracted the attention of many distinguished Turkologists.
There is an extensive literature devoted to the classification of the modern
Turkic languages, as is well known [see Arat 1953; Menges 1968; Tekin 1989;
Schönig 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1998; and for the Soviet tradition see Baskakov
1969; Tenishev 1997]. There is also a not insignificant body of scholarship on
the history of the Turkic languages and their periodization [see Caferoğlu
1970-1974; Clauson 1962; Róna-Tas 1982, 1991; Johanson 1998; Ercilasun
2004; as well as Menges 1968; Baskakov 1969; Tenishev 1997]. It is not my
task here to offer a detailed overview of the literature devoted to either of
these distinct topics, though I would like to return to them one day to offer a
more detailed survey. Less has been written, however, about the history of
the Kipchak Turkic literary languages per se. Its history is more convoluted
in comparison to the Central Asian Turkic literary tradition and the Ottoman
Turkish tradition, since it does not represent a single unbroken path of
development going back 1000+ years.

1. The Codex Cumanicus as a Transkriptionstext

We are very fortunate indeed to have a major source such as the Codex
Cumanicus, which was compiled by German and Italian missionaries at the
beginning of the 14th century. This work was published by Géza Kuun in the
19th century with the apparatus and translations in Latin (which was of
course the literary language used in Hungary at the time). It is an overview

1
of the grammar of the language of the Cumans together with translations of
Christian teachings and psalms into Cuman. It was studied in great detail by
Lajos Ligeti (1981), who argued that it was written by representatives of two
separate language traditions. Since it was written in the Latin alphabet
(though with variations), it was able to record the language of the Cumans
quite accurately. As Ligeti notes, we are able to distinguish different portions
of the manuscript, different content, and even different dialects.
After a description of the history of the study of the Codex Cumanicus
until the time of his article, he notes that the manuscript originally consisted
of 3 facsicules which were bound together only much later. The “Italian part”
comprises pages 1-110 in the modern pagination. This part includes an early
date of 11 June 1303, but the watermark of the extant Codex was around
1330 (so presumably a copy). Based upon the names of the months of the
Christian and Muslim calendars, he believes the earliest date for this work
was possibly around 1294, its first copy dates from 1303, and the current copy
dates to around 1330. The second or “German part” may have been produced
between 1340-1356, but this is less certain [Ligeti 1981, 1-7].
After a discussion of who might have written the parts and where,
Ligeti turned to an analysis of the content, which in the Italian part consists
of a grammatical outline of Cuman and Persian (based upon translations of
the original paradigms in Latin) followed by vocabulary items organized by
semantic categories, many of them related to items of commerce. The German
part has similar content, but with Latin and German translations [Ligeti
1981, 14-16]. What is more, the German part also gives a substantial body of
religious literature, such as the prayer “Ave Maria” beginning on p. 137
(modern pagination).
Ligeti turns next to a discussion problems in the transliteration
systems, errors in the text, and issues related to the multiple editions of the
text [Ligeti 1981, 16-20]. He also discusses the question of the study of the
Turkic material found in the Codex Cumanicus, especially as it relates to the
dialects of Cuman. The most important features reflected in the text include:

1. dialect differences in the retention of the liquid /r/ (CCI birlä – CCG
bilä ‘together’);
2. dialect differences in the distinguishing of “closed ė” (CCI keräk –
CCG kerek ‘necessary’);

2
 3. fronting of vowels after /y, ç/ (CCG çäx ‘time’, yäy ‘summer’);
4. front suffixes in back vowel words (yarlılergä ‘for the poor’,
yarqınındä ‘in its light’. (In my view these are features which must go
back to Old Turkic.);
5. final -ğ > -w, -g > -w (CCI yağ – CCG yaw ‘fat, oil’; CCI bitik – CCG
bitiw ‘writing’).

In addition to discussing a number of other features, Ligeti also compares

these and other vocabulary with the evidence from Mamlūk Kipchak [Ligeti
1981, 20-24]. Finally, in the remaining sections of his article Ligeti treats at
length the features of the Persian, Latin, German, and Italian languages as
well [Ligeti 1981, 24-54].
One more thought on why the Codex Cumanicus was written and what
the response to it might have been. Clearly it was a handbook useful for
merchants involved in the Black Sea trade with the Golden Horde which
went through the colonies of the maritime republics of Venice, Genoa, and
Pisa. I think it is also a document of the competition between religions at the
time, especially the missionary efforts among the Cumans. I see the Muslim
Turkic Qısas ül-enbiya’ of Rabğuzi composed in 1313 as a response to this
missionary activity. Whether Rabğuzi knew of the Codex Cumanicus or not,
we can see both as documents of proselytizing activity in the early 14th
century in the territory of the Golden Horde. One difference between the two,
however, is that while the Codex Cumanicus cannot be seen as part of a
Christian Cuman literary tradition, the Qısas ül-enbiya’ is centered squarely
within the literature of the Golden Horde, thereby continuing the Islamic
Turkic literary language tradition in Central Asia.

2. A Note on the Black Death and the Rise of Vernacular-based

Languages (with Reference to Mamlūk Kipchak)
Something very fundamental happens in the development of Turkic literary
languages in the mid-14th century, though it hardly impacts Kipchak Turkic
languages adversely. I have argued elsewhere that beginning in the mid-14th
century we see the sudden disappearance of a number of Turkic literary
languages, including Syriac Turkic near Issıq-Köl, Volga Bulğarian along the
Volga-Kama confluence, and the literary language of the Golden Horde as
well [Schamiloglu 1991]. I tie this to the spread of the waves of bubonic

3
plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The first pandemic of bubonic
plague in recorded history took place in the 6th-8th centuries, the second
wave (known in the mid-14th century as the “Black Death”) continued for
several centuries, and the third wave of modern plague began in the late 19th
century. Today we do not worry about bubonic plague very much because of
penicillin and other antibiotics.
Benedictow claims that that 60% of Europe’s population died in the
period 1346-1353 [Benedictow 2004, 380–384]. In some areas the population
could have been reduced by up to 90% in a short time, while other sites could
have escaped the ravages of the Black Death completely. While in Europe
this could have speeded the rise of vernacular languages, very few literary
languages, if any, died out because of the plague. This is in contrast to the
Turkic languages of Eurasia, which did not have deep roots yet.
The pandemic of bubonic plague affected the Middle East as well. It
did not lead to the wiping out of Arabic or Persian, of course, but I believe it
did lead to the end of the Central Asian Islamic literary tradition in Anatolia,
which scholars refer to as “Old Anatolian Turkish”. It led to a major
transformation to an orthographic system closer to that of Arabic and
Persian. This is the language which would be known later as “Ottoman
Turkish”.
What about the Kipchak language of the Middle East, namely Mamlūk
Kipchak? It is premature for me to make a well-grounded and detailed
statement on this language, but I would like to suggest that the history of
Mamluk Kipchak over the 14th-15th centuries can also be tied in several
possible ways to the Black Death as well. The best-known lexico-grammatical
works are listed below:

1. Kitāb al-idrāk li-lisān al-atrāk (1312)

2. Kitāb-i macmūc-i tarcumān-i turkī va-acamī va-muġalī (1245, but
according to Flemming it should be dated *1343)
3. At-tuḥfa z-zakīya fī luġa t-turkīya (before 1425)
4. Kitāb bulġat al-muştāq fī luġat at-turk wa-l-qifcāq (before 1451)
5. Al-qawānīn al-kullīya li-ḍabṭ al-luġa t-turkīya (early 15th century)

First of all, some of these works are from the early 14th century but their
sources may date even earlier [Ermers 1999, 26]. Flemming considers that

4
the dating of Kitāb-i macmūc-i tarcumān-i turkī va-acamī va-muġalī by
Houtsma as 1245 is a mistake, in part because of the orthography of the
work. She considers it to be 1343, since it is consistent rather with the later
Mamluk Kipchak works [Flemming 1968]. In this regard, I would like to
investigate further the possibility that, like with the shift from Old Anatolian
Turkish to Ottoman Turkish, the Black Death may have had consequences
for the orthographic system of Mamluk Kipchak as well. After all, it is not to
be excluded that the authors of some of these earlier works (like many other
authors living in Egypt and Syria in the mid-14th century) died during the
waves of the Black Death. (This is a topic to which I hope to return in the
future…)

3. The Rise of Old Tatar

As is well known, in the 13th-14th centuries the funerary inscriptions written
in the territory of modern-day Tatarstan (Russian Federation) and areas
adjacent were written in Volga Bulğarian. This language belongs to the
Western branch of the Turkic languages of which Chuvash is the only
surviving modern language. As I have argued elsewhere, the last inscriptions
in Volga Bulğarian date from 1356, after which inscriptions were no longer
produced in this epigraphic language. It is in the aftermath of this dying off
of the Volga Bulğarian population (I presume) that we see the Kipchakization
of the Middle Volga region. The 15th-16th centuries is the period of the
Khanate of Kazan (1430s-1552), whose center, Kazan, was located
approximately 100 km north of the town of Bulğar. Fewer gravestones were
produced than during the period of the Golden Horde, but these were in a
language we must consider to be Old Tatar. The 16th-17th centuries, the
period following the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan, has the smallest
number of gravestones associated with it. The following period from 18th
century on is the period coinciding with the largest number of gravestones
[Schamiloglu 2016]. During this period Tatar literary culture was an
extension of the Chağatay (türki) literary culture, but through the efforts of
Qayyum Nasıri (1825-1902) we see the development of a modern Tatar
literary language. While there are scholars who call him the “father of the
Tatar nation”, this is very misleading in my view. Nasıri was the Tatar
analogue of the folklorists and philologists who strove to create a modern
literary language across Europe in the 19th century. He wrote about Tatar

5
ethnography, he wrote a grammar of the Tatar language, he created a
regular annual publication (Kalendar or Taqvim, which I have never had the
opportunity to see), etc. He was trying to create a modern Tatar literary
language. The Kazakh literary language as well as a Bashkir literary
language were in response to the rise of a Tatar literary language, which was
accessible through the large number of Tatar medreses where Tatar was
used. Among the Kazakhs we associate the rise of a Kazakh literary language
in large measure with the career of Ahmet Baytursın.

4. Armeno-Kipchak as a Vernacular-based Language

Another important development in the history of early modern Kipchak
Turkic literary languages was Armeno-Kipchak, studied by scholars such as
Edward Tryjarski, Edmond Schütz, and more recent scholars like Aleksandr
Garkavets and Seisenbay Kudasov. Alongside Jewish languages like Karaim,
Armeno-Kipchak was a non-Islamic Kipchak Turkic literary language. It was
also a vernacular-based language as its language was based on the on the
spoken language. As demonstrated by Omeljan Pritsak, the fact that the
orthography did not distinguish between back and front vowels strongly
suggests that the orthography was actually reflecting the tendency in
Eastern European Turkic languages (including Armeno-Kipchak, Balkan
Turkish dialects, Gagauz, and even Mişär Tatar) to transfer the back-front
distinction in the vocalic system to a system of palatalized versus non-
palatalized consonants, as in at ‘horse’ ~ et ‘meat’ > at ~ at’ [Pritsak 1959].
Armenian Kipchak has died out and Karaim is now an endangered language.

5. Orthography versus Phonology in Modern Kipchak Turkic

Literary Languages: The Case of Kazan Tatar and Kazakh
The final topic I would like to raise is one problem facing modern Kipchak
Turkic literary languages, namely the way in which orthographic differences
mask a greater linguistic unity. This I have come to understand better since
coming to work in Kazakhstan at Nazarbayev University in 2016. The
questions facing Kazakhstan today include the question of a new Kazakh
Latin alphabet as well as the relationship of Kazakhstan and the Kazakh
language to the other Turkic states and languages. In most cases this close
relationship is obscured by orthographic differences which suggest differences
by masking similarities. These differences were less obvious during the time

6
when both Tatar and Kazakh were written in Arabic script and during the
era of the Yaŋälif ‘New Alphabet’ Latin alphabet introduced in 1928.
In this paper I would like to suggest the case of the lax vowels in
Kazan Tatar and Kazakh as examples of phonemes which are pronounced
identically, but written differently. (The Bashkir vowels are usually identical
with Kazan Tatar vowels.)
Kazan Tatar has the 9 vowel phonemes /a, ä, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü/; of these
/ä, e, ı, o, ö/ are lax. Their spelling in Cyrillic as ә, е, ы, о, ө is confusing; more
transparent is the way they are transcribed by colleagues at the Department
of Altaistics at Szeged University: ä, i, ı, ŏ, ö. In particular the Cyrillic Tatar
letters ы, е, о, ө are not pronounced the ways these letters might be
pronounced in other Turkic languages. Examples would be һәр här ‘each’, кыз
qız ‘girl’, тел til ‘language’, болыт bŏlıt ‘cloud’, and өч öç ‘3’.
I would argue that in this regard Kazan Tatar and Kazakh have a lot
in common. (I am not able to go into regional or dialectal Kazakh speech
here.) My main point is that the lax vowels in Kazan Tatar and Kazakh are
pronounced (more or less) identically, yet spelled quite differently in some
cases:

Latin
Kazan
Cyrillic Tatar Latin
Kazan (Szeged) Cyrillic Kazakh
Tatar Kazakh (Szeged) Definition
Һәр här әр är ‘each’
кыз qız қыз qız ‘girl’
‘tongue,
тел til тіл til language’
болыт bŏlıt бұлт bŏlt ‘cloud’
өч öç үш öş ‘3’

One question which could be asked, as the Kazakh language is in search of a

final version of the Latin alphabet (at this writing), whether there is an
interest in a greater orthographic unity among the Kipchak languages.

7
6. Conclusion
In contrast to the Central Asian Islamic literary tradition, we cannot claim
that Kipchak languages share a similarly ancient tradition. What is
characteristic of their written forms (with the possible exception of Mamlūk
Kipchak, whose grammars are written along the principles of Arabic
grammars) is that they have been accurate in representing many aspects of
the phonology of these languages. Yet once we reach the Kipchak Turkic
languages in the Soviet period, the one example presented shows that there
is a great deal wanting in how these languages represent similar
phonological features.

Bibliography:
Arat, Reşit Rahmeti. 1953. Türk Şivelerinin Tasnifi. In: Türkiyat
Mecmuası 10, 59-138.
Baskakov, N.A. 1969. Vvedenie v izuçenie tyurkskix yazïkov. 2nd edition
Moscow.
Benedictow, O.J. 2004. The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete
History. Woodbridge, Suffolk, Boydell.
Caferoğlu, Ahmet. 1970-1974. Türk Dili Tarihi, i-ii. İstanbul: Edebiyat
Fakültesi Basımevi.
Clauson, Sir Gerard. 1962. Turkish and Mongolian Studies. London:
The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
Ercilasun, Ahmet Bican. 2004. Başlangıçtan Yirminci Yüzyıla Türk
Dili Tarihi. Ankara: Akçağ.
Ermers, Robert. 1999. Arabic Grammars of Turkic. The Arabic
Linguistic Model Applied to Foreign Languages & Translation of ’Abū
Ḥayyān al-’Andalusī’s Kitāb al-Idrāk li-Lisān al-’Atrāk. Leiden: Brill.
Flemming, Barbara. 1968. Ein alter Irrtum bei der chronologischen
Einordnung des Tarǧumān turkī wa `aǧamī wa muġalī. In: Der Islam 44, 226-
229.
Johanson, Lars. 1998. The History of Turkic. In: The Turkic
Languages, Lars Johanson and Éva A. Csató. (ed). London-New York:
Routledge. 81-125.
Kuun, G. (ed). 1981, Codex Cumanicus, ed. G. Kuun, Budapest Oriental
Reprints B1. Budapest.

8
 Ligeti, L. 1981. Prolegomena to the Codex Cumanicus. In: Acta
Orientalia Hungarica 35, 1-54. [Reprinted in: Kuun, 1981.]
Menges, Karl H. 1968. The Turkic Languages and Peoples: An
Introduction to Turkic Studies, Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica
42. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Pritsak, Omeljan. 1959. Das kiptschakische. B. Armenisch-
kiptschakisch”. In: Deny, Jean et al. (ed). Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta. I,
Wiesbaden: Fr. Steiner Verlag. 260–271.
Róna-Tas, András. 1982. “The Periodization and Sources of Chuvash
Linguistic History”, in: Chuvash Studies, Róna-Tas, András (ed). Budapest,
113-169.
Róna-Tas, András. 1991. An Introduction to Turkology, Studia
Uralo.Altaica 33. Szeged.
Schamiloglu, Uli. 1991. The End of Volga Bulgarian. In: Varia
Eurasiatica. Festschrift für Professor András Róna-Tas (Szeged), 157-163.
Schamiloglu, Uli. 2016. Gravestones and the History of Medieval Tatar
Civilization: A Brief Overview (Nadgrobnye kamni i istoriya srednevekovoy
tatarskoy tsivilizatsii: Kratkiy obzor). In: Islam i tyurkskiy mir: Problemy
obrazovaniya, yazyka, literatury, istorii i religii. Materialy VIII
mezhdunarodnoy tyurkologicheskoy konferentsii (Islam and Turkic World:
Problems of Education, Language, Literature, History and Religion. Materials
of VIII International Turkic Conference). Kazan: Yelabuga Institute of Kazan
Federal University—Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University. 76-80.
Schönig, Claus. 1997a. “A new attempt to classify the Turkic
Languages”: (1), Turkic Languages 1, 117-133.
Schönig, Claus. 1997b. “A new attempt to classify the Turkic
Languages”: (2), Turkic Languages 1, 262-277.
Schönig, Claus. 1997c. 1998. “A new attempt to classify the Turkic
Languages”: (3), Turkic Languages 1, 262-277.
Schönig, Claus. 1998. “A new attempt to classify the Turkic Languages”:
Turkic Languages 2, 130-151.
Tekin, Talat. 1989. “Türk dil ve diyalektlerinin yeni bir tasnifi”, Erdem
5:13 (Ocak), 141-168.
Tenishev, Ė. (ed). 1997. Yazïki mira: Tyurkskie yazïki. Bishkek.