The Turks: Origins And Expansion

要旨

This essay does not intend to present a full history of the Turkic peoples, a task that would require many volumes. Rather, its emphasis will be on ethnogenesis and the forces that have shaped the history of the present day Turkic peoples. The latter, currently inhabiting territories extending from Siberia, Mongolia and northwestern China to the Balkans, derive from a grouping of tribes that spoke dialects or perhaps already differentiated but closely related languages that belong to the Turkic sub-grouping of the Altaic language “family.” The latter is usually reckoned to include Mongolie, Manchu-Tungusic and perhaps Korean and Japanese. The classification of the various languages that now comprise Turkic remains a matter of scholarly debate. 2 Indeed, the nature of the relationship of the languages constituting the larger Altaic language “family,” is even more contentious. Some linguists propose that the Altaic languages are, like the Indo-European or Semitic languages, genetically related and may even be part of a larger language family (“Ural-Altaic,” “Nostratic” or “Eurasiatic”). Others view these connections as resulting from convergence, i.e. the product of prolonged periods of intense interaction and borrowing. 3 Some recent studies would do away entirely with the concept of an Altaic language family. 4 Adherents of the “Altaic hypothesis” have explained its difficulties as resulting from the early break up of Proto-Altaic (late 6th millennium BCE) and the fact that the oldest written remains of Altaic (the Turkic inscriptions of the Orkhon) are relatively modern, dating only to the early 8th century. 5 Whatever the nature of the relationships between these languages, it is clear that they were in contact in ancient times. As the earliest homeland for these languages or their area of contact and mutual influence, except for Turkic, appears to be Manchuria, 6 it follows that the early Turkic peoples most probably lived near that region.

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