Tugan tel
As I continue my studies of contact between Mari and other languages, I’ve lately been turning my attention to Tatar. In the introduction to Татарский язык: интенсивний курс by F.S. Safiullina and K.S. Fatkhullova (Kazan’: Tatarskoe Respublikanskoe izdatel’stvo ‘Kheter’, 1999) there’s the following little song:
That’s not a bad way to get into Tatar. From my experience with Mari, Chuvash and Kazakh, the first stanza is pretty transparent:
И туган тел, и матур тел, әткәм-әнкәмнең теле!
Дөньяда күп нәрсә белдем син туган тел аркылы.Oh native language, beautiful language, language of my mother and father!
I have learnt many things in this world through you, my native language.
The phrase туган тел [tuɣan tel] ‘native language’ is cognate with Chuvash тӑван челхи [təvan tʃelɣi]. The sound changes involved for the Chuvash are pretty elementary, ɣ > w/v like in umpteen other languages, and t before high vowels becoming č like in Manchester English. The word матур ‘beautiful’ was borrowed by Mari, becoming мотор. Дөнья ‘world’ I know from Kazakh дүние, which I saw on a few billboards. The verb form белдем is clearly the 1 sg. t-preterite of a root meaning ‘to know’ cognate with Chuvash пӗл.
Hopefully I’ll be able to read Tatar proficiently before the end of the year. Speaking, however, is another story. I suspect that the same experiences with other languages which enable me to read unfamiliar texts would cause interference in conversation.
October 7th, 2008 at 22:43
The Tatar would more appropriately be transcribed as [tʰuʁɑn təl]. Tatar high and mid vowels historically “flipped”, so *e → i, *o → u, *ö → ü and at the same time *i → e, *u → o, and *ü → ö. Long vowels (at least in the first syllable) were immune, so *tug- → *tuʁ- → *tuw- → tū-, or some such for “to be born”, but *til → tel for “language”.
What really happened was that high vowels reduced: *y → ʉ → ə˒, *u → ʊ → ə̙˒, *i → ɨ → ə. The mid vowels then raised to take their place. Kazakh is found in an intermediate stage of this, with /ʉ/, /ʊ/, and /ɨ/ phonemes standing for “/y/”, “/u/”, and “/i/”; and pre-dipthongised (“broken”) versions of those for “/ø/”, “/o/”, and “/e/”. It also is in an intermediate phase (from Tatar’s point of view) with the long vowel stuff—any high vowel followed by a /w/ is phonetically something very much like [u] or even [uː] for many speakers (and is even written with its own character, ‹у› (“/u/” /ʊ/ is ‹ұ›)), though it behaves morphologically as a vowel+consonant combination (алма+ны → алманы, but су+ны → суды; cf. тіл+ны→тілді, etc). The same is true of unrounded high vowels plus /j/; that is, it can result in something resembling [i] or [iː] (and is written ‹и›), but morpho-phonemically behaves as a vowel+consonant (ми+ны→миді, қи+ны→қиды).
I’m not sure how матур was borrowed, but I don’t think it’s been a part of Tatar all that long—other Turkic language I’m familiar with don’t have a cognate, and besides, a rounded vowel in non-initial syllables (except in cases of vowel harmony) is non-native in Qypchaq.
Btw, I recommend taking Сафиуллина with a grain of salt or two.
October 7th, 2008 at 22:45
Sorry, aspiration not distinctive, and hence I was inconsistent in my transcription ;) Do what you will there—the transcription isn’t meant to phonemic, but it’s not very tight either.
Also, pardon my mixed use of e.g. ‹ū› and ‹uː›.
October 9th, 2008 at 22:22
So that’s how a vowel flip-flop works. Fascinating.
October 18th, 2008 at 14:37
Chuvash matur/mattur/mattor is clearly a loan, unlike the Tatar variant it is not to mean “beautiful”, a meaning like that can only be gathered from a context mattur hĕr > pretty girl? — No! You are just being sexist! (A good girl is good if she’s pretty, huh?) :) So Ashmarin and Fedotov both make this mistake in their dictionaries. There’s no cognate of mattur either in Russian nor English. The awkward but still more appropriate would be ‘competent; brave’.
It seems to be a loan. And Fedotov suggests it is a phonetic variant of pattăr “brave, hero”; [m] ~ [p]). The word occurs in Chuvash, Tatar, Bashkir, and for some reason not in any other Turkic language, but Sagay dialect of Khakassian.