Orthographic Principles of the Kipchak Language in the Turkic Writing Tradition

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive historical and linguistic analysis of the orthographic system of Kipchak written monuments. In Turkology, the language of written sources of the ancient and medieval periods is regarded not only as a historical source, but also as valuable material for identifying the structural features of the vernacular. The study identified three main principles that shaped the writing tradition of Kipchak monuments: the phonetic, the invariant, and the citational (original) principles. The phonetic principle aimed at conveying as accurately as possible the features of spoken language in writing. The article presents specific examples of such phenomena as labial harmony, voicing of consonants, and the omission of short vowels. The invariant principle reflected the preservation of stable morphological forms: it was shown that instead of multiple variants of affixes, a single invariant form was consistently used. The citational principle was manifested in rendering Arabic-Persian loanwords in their original graphic form. As the main sources of the research, monuments such as Codex Cumanicus, Abu Hayyan’s Kitab al-Idrak, and Qutb’s Khosrow and Shirin were analyzed. It was established that these monuments had a significant influence on the old Kazakh written language and contributed to the preservation of elements of the vernacular within it. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the comprehensive analysis of the orthographic system of the Kipchak language in its interrelation with the spoken language. The writing tradition of the Kipchak monuments made a considerable contribution to understanding the stages of the historical development of the Kazakh language, the features of its phonetic system, and the processes of forming its national specificity.