AT the meeting of the Anthropological Institute on November 23, there was read a short but suggestive paper on these wayward children of the desert, contributed by Prof. Arminius Vambéry. The learned writer, who lias perhaps as great a personal knowledge of Eastern nations as any man living, regarded the Turkomans as on the whole the purest and most representative branch of the widespread Tûrki family and described their outward features as quite distinct from the Mongolian. His account was somewhat vague, but the inference evidently was that they belonged in his opinion ethnically to the Caucasian rather than to the Mongolian group. Nor did he attribute this to the gradual absorption of Iranian elements, but, on the contrary, stated that intermarriages with Persian women were much less frequent than is usually supposed, and that the Turkomans are now what they always have been, men of medium stature, like the Kirghizes and unlike the Usbegs and Osmanlis, amongst whom tall individuals are far from rare, with straight or o but very slightly oblique (“almond-shaped”) eyes, handsome regular features and fair complexion. He further stated that the Turkoman language was also one of the very purest Tûrki tongues still spoken, so much so, that an ordinary Seljukian Turk of Asia Minor would have less difficulty in conversing with a Tekke or Yomut Turkoman than with his nearer neighbours the Turki nomads of Azarbijan and other parts of Persia. In iact, such is the purity of their speech, that the Rev. James Bassett, of the American Mission at Tehran, is now putting through the press in London his trans-Jation of St. Matthew's Gospel in the Jagatai Turki for the special use of the Tekke Turkomans. Jagatai, it need scarcely be remarked, is one of the most cultivated of all the Tartar tongues and is still current in Bokhara, Khiva, Ferghana, and parts of Kashgaria. In it are written the Emperor Baber's memoirs, and being less affected by Arabic and Persian elements than the Osmanli of Constantinople, it may be taken as, on the whole, the most representative of Tûrki idioms. On the other hand, the Tûrki belongs undoubtedly to the same great linguistic connection as the Mongolian, both being recognised by modern philologists as collateral, though independent, members of the so-called Finno-Tataric or Ural-Altaic family of languages. Hence Vambéry's description of the physical characteristics of the Turkoman race places them in a sufficiently anomalous position from the anthro pological point of view, in so far as they would seem to belong ethnically to the Caucasian, but linguistically to the Mongol stock. Such anomalies are, no doubt, common enough, and instances abound of peoples having changed their language and adopted that of the races by whom they may have been subdued or otherwise influenced. But in the present case the difficulty cannot,be got over in this way, nor is it pretended that the Turkomans have adopted a Mongolian form of speech, or indeed that they ever spoke any other language than Tûrki. But Tûrki and Mongolian being offshoots of the same organic tongue, it follows that both races must have had a common origin, and that the Turkomans have since be come differentiated from the ethnical, while retaining the linguistic connection. Now this is entirely at variance with the commonly-accepted doctrine that physical traits are always more persistent than speech, in other words that, assuming absolute isolation, the process of linguistic will always be more rapid than that of racial evolution.
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Oct 2, 1886
George Stephens 
Open Access