Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)

From: Yusuf B Gursey (ybg_at_theworld.com)
Date: 03/28/05 

Date: 27 Mar 2005 23:27:52 -0800

Mikael Thompson wrote:
> Comm wrote:
>
> > Yes. Uh, heh, English people render it Tartar. Tatar is a name
now used to
> > designate "those people" LOL.
>
> This is a garbled mess. "Tatar" might have been used as a cover term

> for numerous groups, but that doesn't mean they all spoke the same
> language; far from it.

tatar probably comes from turkic tat "subject foreigner" + -ar
collective suffix.

runic turkic mentions the "30 tatar" subject people. probably the
Mongolian subjects of the Tu"rk

Kashgari (11th. cent.) lists the Tatar among the people who know turkic
but have a language of their own, along with other such tribes known to
be mongolian from later sources.

Rashiduddin (early 14th. cent.) suggests that the military reputation
of the Tatars led to the generalization of the word to the Mongols and
their Turkic soldiery.

the turkologist Menges suggested that the turkic soldiery was assigned
to the decimated Tatar tribe but I don't know if this is justified by
documentation.

IMHO I'll suggest that Tatar was a turkic word for mongolian surviving
to the late middle ages.

Tat also became an ethnic name and even the Crimean Tatars had their
Tat population, remnants of the Goths, later adoping Ottoman turkish
mixt with qypchaq turkic.

in caucasia and Azerbaijan it denotes west iranian pockets under Azeri
or other turkic rule. nowadays mostly jewish azerbaijanis speaking an
idiom close to persian.

In central asia (11th. cent.) it was an uncomplementary name for Tajik
(central asian persian speakers)

Msgyars were also called "Turks" in medieval times because before
having an Atillid (so they claimed) king they had Turkic (Khazar) king.
Khazars had
an emperor from the Turkic line, even though their language was
Hunnic(chuvash-Turkic and were thus known as Turks.

>
> > Tatar is actually the name of one tribe.
>
> More than one. One group of Tatars were slaughtered by the Mongols
> around 1202 and the survivors (those shorter than a wheel-axle, as
the
> Secret History put it) were distributed as slaves to the various
Mongol
> tribes. It seems they spoke a Mongolic language; the later Tatars
spoke
> a Turkic language.

in the parlance of turkic people of the russian steppe "Tatar" is the
subjects of a chingizid prince of the Golden horde line, sometimes
incl. the Noghay, subjects of the descendants of the renegade prince
Noqay

>
> > And
> > Mongol is a BIG misnomer - very confusing. Mongol was also the
name of a
> > very tiny tribe once - but it got famous because Temujin was OF
that tribe.
>
> Rather, it got famous because Temüjin (Chinggis Khan) conquered a
> massive empire that he named after his tribe (the empire was Yeke
> Monggol, "Great Mongol"). Some of his descendants kept the name,
others
> didn't, and then you had such things as the wars between the Mongols
> (the tribes subject to descendants of Khubilai Khan after the
collapse
> of the Yuan dynasty, called "Dayan Khan" and related terms, from
Chinese
> da4yuan2, Great Yuan) and the Oirats (Mongols further west not ruled
by
> khans but by taishis, from Chinese taishi, "great preceptor") after
the
> 1420s; "Oirat" came to be used as a synonym for "rotten non-Mongol
> upstart," essentially. The term "Mongol" is fraught with history.
>
> > Still, most of the people in his army were Tatar - the most
numerous tribe.
> > Using Tatar or Turk as some BIG lump sum name for us - Onogurs and
Kumans
> > were also Tatars (they settled in Hungary).
>
> Europeans used the term "Tartar" as a cover term for all peoples of
the
> steppe (they heard "Tatar" and associated it with Tartarus), but
there's
> no reason to follow their misunderstandings. The present-day Tatars
are
> Turkic speakers, descendants of the major Turkic tribes in the Golden

> Horde's army; however, the rulers were Mongols and spoke an entirely
> different language. The Kumans were Qipchaq Turks who lived in the
> steppes north of the Black Sea, and you might want to keep in mind
that
> they were enemies of the Mongols--they fled into Hungary to escape
the
> Mongol invasions, which provided a pretext for the Mongols to invade
> Hungary in 1240. As for the Onogurs, they were largely speakers of
an

the name is turkic indicating 10 tribes, most of whom were uralic
magyars, and a minority (AFAIK 7 - 3 or 8 - 2) but the ruling ones
chuvash-type turkic.

> early form of Hungarian with many Turkic loanwords borrowed during
their
> centuries along the Volga before invading and settling in
Pannonia--in
> other words, their language is again something entirely different
from
> Turkic or Mongolic.
>
> > So were Huns and Avars - Avars
> > settled in Austria, mixed (I mean mated) with the people already
there.
> > Obviously, they spoke the same language as the others back home,
before they
> > roamed and settled in Hungary and/or before they intermarried with
anyone.
>
> If you mean they all spoke the same language originally, and all of
> these languages mentioned above developed into such vastly different

for one thing, they came at different times.

> languages only after they entered the European world, you're simply
> wrong. The Kumans, modern Tatars, and perhaps the Huns and Avars
spoke

a late Avar inscription was recently deciphered (if it holds) as Hunnic
(Bulghar / Chuvash)

> Turkic languages, but not even all necessarily the same branch. The
> Mongols spoke a language that might be very distantly related to
Turkic,
> though that's uncertain. The Hungarians didn't speak a related
language
> at all but one related to Finnish and Estonian.
>
> > But it changed VERY fast - which was my point about "distance
back." This
> > info about these people I just mentioned is not hard to find - and
it's
> > true. If the linguistics are hard to find - then that should tell
linguists
> > that something different is going on.
>
> No, it means you don't really know what you're talking about.
>
> > You know that Batu's people settled
> > near Moscow, more or less. Batu is not that far back in time - and
he
> > certainly could communicate with his parents and records show also
with
> > everyone else in the area.
>
> Yes, yes, Batu was a Mongol. However, most of his soldiers were from

> conquered Turkic tribes, and it was their language that prevailed.
It
> was the language of the administration of the Golden Horde, and thus
the
> source of most of the words borrowed into Russian from the time of
the
> Golden Horde (thus, tamozhn'a 'customs' from Turkic tamga
'stamp'--also
> borrowed into Mongolian; den'gi 'money' from denigi; and so on; the
only
> Mongolian word I can think of that made it into standard Russian is
> taiga). For instance, when John of Plano Carpini made his famous
trip
> to the Golden Horde for the Pope, he recorded a number of words he
heard
> around him. All of them are Turkic, none Mongolic. That's not
because
> the Golden Horde spoke a single unitary langauge that developed by
leaps
> and bounds after conquering Russia, it's because the leaders spoke
> Mongol, the greatest part of the troops Turkic, and the Turkic
speakers
> absorbed the Mongolian elite through intermarriage.

and culture, esp. after Islam.

>
> > Kumans and Onogurs are not that much further
> > back in time from Batu, either.
>
> But they weren't Mongols. This is obvious because we contain
> contemporary records of their languages in various sources (Persian
and
> Arabic dictionaries that distinguish Turkic and Mongolic--the Islamic

> world knew the difference quite well even though the Europeans who
> called them all Tartars didn't; Chinese sources; Hungarian documents;

> early Turkic documents from Central Asia; and so on). The Mongols
> themselves, I might add, knew the difference quite well, since there
was
> a legal division in China between Mongols and Central Asians (mostly
> Uighurs and other Turks from Central Asia, who served as the greater
> part of the Mongol administration, and were called semu "colored
eyes"
> in Chinese). (And below them were descendants of the peoples of the
Jin
> dynasty--Jurchens, Khitans, and numerous northern Chinese--and under
> them the fourth class, descendants of subjects of the Southern Song
> dynasty.) Hell, the Mongols distinguished themselves from other
> Mongolic-speaking peoples (including, probably, the Naimans and
others),
> from speakers of distantly-related Mongolic languages (the Khitans),
> Tungusic speakers (the Jurchen), and the various Turkic peoples.
> (Uighurs, for example, were highly trusted because they were the
first
> sedentary people to submit ot Chinggis Khan of their own free will,
as
> opposed to other Turkic peoples who had to be conquered, and so on.)
> It's sad that one of their descendants can't get beyond the ignorant
> stupidities of disdainful Europeans.

but West Mongol propaganda was also that Mongols were a branch of the
Turks split off many thopusands of years ago (I will have to look up
the date but IIRC it was not bad in comparision to a modern "Altaic
hypothesis"!). Rashiduddin begins with the legendary history (in
Islamic garb) of the Tu"rkmen and then places "Secret History"
characters into the setting of the Tu"rk "valley origin" legend.

Chinggis set himself up as a successor to the Tu"rk by moving his
capiutal to the sacred territory of the Tu"rk and Xiong-nu previously.

>
> > But the languages are so different now that
> > people doubt there is a connection?
>
> That's because most of the connections that we know of are due to
> loanwords from Turkic to Mongol (very heavy before the 13th century),
or
> the other direction (more common after the 13th century), or in the
case
> of Onogur/Hungarian, from Volga Bulgar into Hungarian between about
the
> 5th and 8th centuries.
>
> > Heh - I have NO doubt that there IS a
> > connection because of who those people are. Unless, they
completely
> > abandoned their language and took up another one - like immigrants
to the
> > USA mostly did.
>
> Excellent! YOU FINALLY GOT IT! Now apply what you just learned to
the
> facts, and you can give up this bundle of confusions.
>
> > Here is the kicker - Altaic nomads tend to blend into the
> > culture they conquer or live with - they assimilate. So one might
ask "what
> > happened to Hulagu Khan's people?" Well, they are still there, in
the genes
> > of the people living somewhere in the mid east right now.
>
> "What happened to Hulegu Khan's people?" is inaccurate; it should be
> "peoples" because he too had an army with many Turkic speakers. And
in
> any case, "What happened to Hulegu Khan's peoples?" and "What
happened
> to Huelegu Khan's language?" are two entirely different questions.
The
> language generally died out; many of his descendants remain there.

and a genetic study claims that the Chingisids were very prolific in
leaving descendants

>
> Mikael Thompson

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