Turkic Ethnic Realities in the Medieval Manuscript of Kipchak Origin

Abstract

The purpose of our work was to analyze the ethnic realities of the Kipchak language in order to establish its similarities and differences with modern Turkic languages for which this medieval language was a proto-language. The written medieval manuscript in Arabic “Al-Tuhfa al-Zakiyya fi al-Lugha al-Turkiyyah” (Genuine wonder about the Turkish language) was one of the most important and most valuable source for studying the Kipchak language. The main feature of the work was that the original version was written in the Kipchak, as the anonymous author pointed out on the first page of the manuscript, stored in Istanbul, in the Beyazit state library. When studying objects that were far apart from each other in a temporary sense, such as medieval and modern languages, we used the comparative-historical method, and as a result concluded that in some cases there were only phonetic differences, while the syntactic and semantic commonality of lexical and phraseological units persisted. To classify ethnic realities, the statistical method of analysis was used. Ethnographic, cultural and mental realities testified to direct kinship and a single nomadic culture of the speakers of the languages of this group and provided an opportunity to restore the historical stages of the development of the Turkic languages from the Middle Ages to the present day.