Turkic-Slavic bilingualism in Kyiv Rus
Paul Goble’s Russian political blog Window on Eurasia recently featured a post whose linguistic ramifications are intriguing:
Olzhas Suleymenov, the Kazakh author of a book that some have helped lead to the rise of perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, says that he welcomes its translation into Ukrainian because Ukrainians will understand that book’s argument about the close ties between the Slavic and Turkic peoples at the time of Kievan Rus’.
Speaking in Kyiv on the occasion of the appearance of the Ukrainian translation of “Az i Ya,” a 1975 book that sparked controversy in the Soviet Union because of its argument that the author of “The Tale of the Host of Igor” knew both a Turkic and a Slavic language, Suleymenov said Ukrainians are well-placed to understand his point.
… “It seems to me,” he said in Kyiv, that the Tale reflects the complex bilingual culture of the 12th century. But in the 19th century,” he continued, Russian scholars, who were “monolingual,” did not understand the Tale’s ‘Turkisms.”
I hope I’ll eventually have a chance to read Suleymenov’s book on the Слово о плъку Игоревѣ, as I’ve often thought that the Turkic peoples left remarkably few linguistic traces in Ukraine and surrounding countries in spite of their substantial presence.