Abstract
The Phonetic Features of 19th Century Altai Turkic According to Radloff's Work Named Opıt Slovarya Tyurkskih Nareçiy I: Vowels
Radloff published his dictionary named Opıt Slovarya Tyurkskih Nareçiy (OSTN) as four volumes at six years interval between 1893 and 1911. In this dictionary, there are approximately 68 thousand headwords belonging to many Turkic dialects historical and contemporary. The vocabulary belonging to historical dialects in the book was mostly taken from previously published studies. The words of contemporary dialects are generally compiled from the spoken languages of that period. Especially the fact that the vocabulary of Turkic dialects, which was not known until today, was compiled in this work for the first time makes very valuable in the work. Almost all the words of the Altai dialects in OSTN were compiled by Radloff himself in the 1860’s. At the same time, these words form the basis of the dictionary. A total of 11286 headwords belonging to Altai Turkic dialects (Altai Kiji, Teleut, Tölös, Lebed, Kumandy and Tuba) were identified in OSTN. There are also many sample sentences in the dictionary.
In this study based on the rich language material in OSTN, the phonetic features about vowels of 19th century Altai Turkic and its dialects have been discussed. Normal, long and short vowels have been evaluated separately and have been given informations about vowel harmonies in Altai Turkic.
Keywords
Radloff, dictionary, Altai Turkic dialects, Teleut, Tölös (Teless), Lebed (Chalkan), Kumandy, Tuba,
