Modern Uyghur Research Articles

Modern Uyghur evidentials in interrogative sentences

Modern Uyghur evidentials in interrogative sentences

Aspects of early Chinese global lexical copies surviving in Modern Uyghur

Abstract The Modern Uyghur language has a large number of lexemes copied from Chinese in different periods of Uyghur. Amongst them, there is a special group of lexemes globally copied from Chinese first into the Old Uyghur literary language which is documented in the texts written in various scripts from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Some of these global lexical copies were transmitted to the next stages of Uyghur and are established in Modern Uyghur as part of its lexicon. This paper discusses aspects of this special group of lexemes from the four points, semantic reinterpretation, fusion in form and meaning, multiple copying of the same lexeme, and additions to the lexicon. The aim is to illustrate some important aspects of the historical Sino-Uyghur linguistic and cultural contact reflected in these copies and to provide Uyghur examples to understand aspects of diachronic development of copied lexemes in the recipient language.

Uyghur–Chinese early successive adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion events

AbstractTalmy’s motion event typology has served as a fruitful framework for exploring bilingual cognition and language use. The present study extends this line of research to the bilingualism situation of an underrepresented Turkic language, i.e., Modern Uyghur, and Mandarin Chinese, and it does so by focusing on a relatively understudied type of motion, i.e., caused motion. The two languages are genetically and typologically distinct, and yet they share verb-framing as an important lexicalization pattern in encoding motion. This study, therefore, investigated whether and to what extent this structural overlap contributes to crosslinguistic influence in Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion. Thirty Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ verbalizations were analyzed with respect to the number of semantic components expressed and the way they were syntactically packaged. Results were compared with relevant monolingual data, which showed that Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals displayed a strong L1 to L2 influence in syntactic packaging by overusing the verb-framed strategy in Mandarin Chinese. However, further comparisons with previous research on Uyghur–Chinese child and adult bilinguals’ motion construal revealed that, while structural overlap is a key factor motivating crosslinguistic influence, a coherent explanation of this phenomenon must consider more general principles of bilingual language processing and use.

Oʻzbek va uygʻur-arab alifbosining qarindoshlik munosabatlari (Abdulla Qodiriyning “Oʻtkan kunlar” asari uyg‘urcha tarjimasida aks etgan singarmonizm hodisasi misolida)

During the early 20th century, most literary works were written using the Perso-Arabic script. Abdullah Qodiriy, the pioneer of modern Uzbek literature, also extensively used the same script in his early writ-ings. However, the first edition of his novel “Bygone Days” was printed in the new Uzbek-Arabic script that emerged in the 1920s. This script later evolved into the Uyghur Arabic alphabet. In other words, Qodiriy’s work sheds light on the transitional period of the Chagatai Turkic literary lan-guage, which was on the brink of splitting into the modern Uyghur and Uz-bek dialects. This research briefly compares the new Uzbek-Arabic script used in “Bygone Days” to the Uyghur-Arabic script used in the 1982 Uy-ghur translation of the same work. Through this study, the ethno-linguistic relations between the two nations can be traced to some extent. Addition-ally, the phonetic changes in the Uyghur language, particularly the umlaut phenomenon, were analyzed in the context of historical backgrounds.

Caused motion events in Modern Uyghur: a typological perspective

AbstractTalmy’s motion event typology (Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Towards a cognitive semantics: Conceptual structuring systems, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has served as an influential framework for exploring event representation across languages. While confirming its basic premises, many studies argued that the typology cannot fully capture the vast intra- and inter-typological variations. Consequently, proposals have been made to expand the typology and/or reconceptualize it as a typology of constructional strategies for encoding events. This article furthers this line of inquiry by examining caused-motion expressions by adult speakers of an understudied Turkic language, Modern Uyghur. Systematic analyses of lexicalization patterns, that is, which components are typically selected for expression, how frequently they are selected, and how they are packaged in syntactic constructions, show that Uyghur is a prototypical verb-framed language. It differs most strikingly from English (considered satellite-framed) in terms of lexicalization patterns. Detailed comparisons with French and Turkish (putatively verb-framed) reveal intra-typological variations in that Uyghur speakers systematically used verb-framed constructions while French and Turkish speakers exhibit much flexibility and a general preference for satellite-framed constructions. Overall, our data lend support to Talmy’s typology conceived as a strategy-based typological framework.

Caused motion events in Modern Uyghur: A typological perspective

Caused motion events in Modern Uyghur: A typological perspective

Phonologically motivated orthographic variation in Modern Uyghur: the voicing of h

In this paper, I present data from three corpora of written Uyghur showing that the conventionally voiceless letter h, which occurs in words of Arab-Persian etymology, sometimes patterns as voiced in stem-final environments where it is a trigger for morphophonemic voicing assimilation in a following segment. Results indicate that when authors omit root-final h from the spelling, they tend to use voiced suffix-initial consonants, but when the h is written there is considerable variation both between and within authors and lexemes. No other phonological or functional factors were identified as being strong predictors of the variation. I interpret this as reflecting a probabilistic process of lenition or deletion of root-final /h/ in the adaptation of these loanwords that has diffused at different rates across the lexicon for different speakers.

“Green-Colored Uyghur Poet”: Religion, Nostalgia, and Identity in Contemporary Uyghur Poetry

There is wide consensus that Islam is an important rallying point for the Uyghurs and an essential component of their national identity. Yet despite its centrality in Uyghur culture, there is only marginal reference to religion in modern Uyghur poetry. In this article, I argue that poets such as Adil Tuniyaz, Tahir Hamut Izgil, and others, most of whom are secular and urban, choose to relate to religion through mysticism and nostalgia in reaction to the Chinese state’s characterization of Islam as identified with violent fundamentalism and terrorism. By avoiding the use of separatist symbols, these poets contribute to a broad national ethos that strengthens contemporary Uyghur identity.

Features of the Ethnogenesis of the Uyghur National Minority on the Territory of the Modern PRC

The Uyghur issue has been an extremely topical topic for the past few years, which has been paid attention, first of all, by Western democratic countries. This article examines the prehistory of the emergence of the modern Uyghur issue in the PRC, an attempt is made to investigate and summarize previous studies on this topic, as well as to identify the factors that slow down the successful solution of this issue by the central government of the PRC.

The suffix {-(Ị)š} in comparison with other action nominals in Modern Uyghur

This paper deals with the main functions of Uyghur action nominals in {-(Ị)š} as compared to the less productive infinitive suffix {-mAK} as well as the participial subordinators {-GAn}+({-lỊK}) and {-(y)(ị)dịɣan}+({-lỊK}). Some types of complement clauses are discussed where these suffixes are used in complementary distribution. Uyghur {-(Ị)š} has two basic functions. First, it derives nouns from verbs. Secondly, it appears as a subordinator in different types of subordinate clauses. In complement clauses, it competes with the participle {-GAn}. The paper systematizes complement-taking predicates in Uyghur according to their choice of action nominal or participial suffixes. Case forms of action nominals in {-(I)š} are grammaticalized as converbs. In converb clauses, there can be a choice between {-GAn} and {-(Ị)š}. Moreover, the paper discusses what semantic and syntactic features Uyghur action nominals in {-(Ị)š} share with Turkish action nominals in {-mA} and how they differ from Turkish {-(y)Ịš}.

The suffix {-(Ị)š} in comparison with other action nominals in Modern Uyghur

The suffix {-(Ị)š} in comparison with other action nominals in Modern Uyghur

Bir Dil Üç Alfabe: 20. Yüzyılın Başından Günümüze Uygur Türklerinin Kullandığı Alfabeler

Alphabet in Turkestan geography in 20th century is a notion which was directed by political authority, presented and transformed with modernization and improvement ideals, yet utilized as a significant means of cultural assimilation system. In context with the invasion of USSR of the lands on which Turkic people are living and the policies imposed on there afterwards, Uyghur Turks who live in East Turkestan as a considerable population has shared generally the same fate with other Turkish kins in terms of alphabet policy. On the other hand the alphabet used by Uyghur Turks in East Turkestan depended on the political and social conditions of China, the country which they are bound to. In the 20th century, Uyghurs used Arab, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The politicies adopted by the States governing Uyghur people forced Uyghurs to use different alphabets and frequently change alphabets for Modern Uyghur Turkish at the same time. Currently East Turkestan Uyghurs use Latin alphabet unofficially besides Uyghur-Arab alphabet. Kazakhstan Uyghurs and Kyrgyzstan Uyghurs both use Uyghur-Arab alphabets unofficially besides Uyghur-Cyrillic alphabet. And Uyghurs in Turkey make publications using Uyghur-Arab alphabet. Our study focuses on the alphabets that have been used by Uyghurs from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. The purpose of our study is to reveal the alphabet matter of Uyghurs since the 20th century and to examine the reasons of change of alphabet. Furthermore the study draws attention to the matter of alphabet, which is one of the unsolved problems at present. Qualitative research method has been used in the study. Secondary sources have been used for the information unavailable due to the cencorship on the sources in East Turkestan.

IDIOMS FORMED BY USING ORGAN NAMES IN MODERN UYGHUR TURKISH

Bu makalede genel olarak Yeni Uygur Türkçesinde, yani şu an Doğu Türkistan bölgesindeki Uygur Türklerinin organ adlarıyla kullanmakta olduğu deyimler hakkındaki çalışmalar ele alınmıştır. Deyim, Uygur Türkçesindeki deyişiyle “İdiyom”, diğer Türk lehçelerinde de olduğu gibi “az söz ile çok anlam ifade etmenin” dilbilimindeki birimidir. Deyimlerin birçoğu söz sanatıdır; anlatıma güzellik, canlılık ve çekicilik katmak için kullanılır. Uygur Türkçesinde sadece deyimler üzerine çalışılmış bir sözlük veya kitap yoktur. Dolayısıyla, doğrudan erişebileceğimiz bir kaynak yoktur. Bu çalışma ile bu boşluk az da olsa doldurulmaya çalışılacaktır. 
 Bilindiği gibi, Çağdaş Türk lehçelerinde deyimler hakkında ortak bir görüş yoktur, Deyimler, Türkçe dil araştırmalarında sıklıkla karşılaştığımız, her devrin kültürel özelliklerini kendinde yansıtan önemli bir dil unsuru olarak hep dikkat çekmektedir. Uygur Türkçesi kültür, edebiyat ve söz varlığı açısından, Çağdaş Türk lehçeleri içinde önemli yer tutmaktadır. Uygur Türkçesindeki deyimler, özellikle de organ adlarıyla kullanılan deyimler, gerek yazı dilinde gerekse halk dilinde çok yaygın olarak kullanılan bir deyim türüdür. Çalışmamızda, Uygur Türkçesinde organ adlarıyla kurulmuş deyimler derlenerek anlamları, Türkiye Türkçesindeki karşılıkları veya yaklaşık anlamı açısından değerlendirilecektir.

Uyghur customs: the genesis, popularity, productivity and demise of a modern Uyghur topos

ABSTRACT This article traces the development of the modern concept of ‘Uyghur customs’ in Xinjiang, its rise to popularity in the 1980s-2010s and its demise after 2016. It argues that a certain modern notion of customs took shape in Xinjiang within the frame of modernization policies and the strengthening of formal bureaucracy. This notion, built on ideas introduced in the early twentieth century, defined customs as being distinct from politics, religion and economy. It provided Uyghur intellectuals with a politically safe space to write about local practices and construct Uyghur identity. These intellectuals were bridge builders between modern Chinese society and Uyghur communities. They used discourses around customs formulated in articles, books, TV-shows and teaching to envision a specifically Uyghur modernity. This cultural production ended abruptly with the detention of many of its protagonists and a general security clampdown on minority people and culture in Xinjiang from 2017.

Representation and the misidentification of economic and ethnoreligious conflict in Republican Xinjiang

ABSTRACT The era spanning the late Qing and early Republic of China (1877–1933) is regarded as a period of extensive change in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), Chinese Central Asia, particularly with regard to the emergence of modern Uyghur national identity, and therefore of ethnonational conflict. However, the tendency to focus on ethnic identity obscures other dimensions of conflict, among them the tensions that emerge during periods of rapid economic change. This article shows how violence in the oasis of Kucha in 1918 stemmed from conflict between two competing groups of landowners. However, systems of information-gathering within the provincial government and the representation of the events to the outside world promoted the idea that this violence stemmed instead from ethnic or religious difference and international conspiracy. Those power-holders advanced representations of the society they governed that were useful to their politics and, in turn, to modern Chinese politics as well.

Loanwords in Uyghur in a Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective

Modern Uyghur is one of the Eastern Turkic languages which serves as the regional lingua franca and spoken by the Uyghur people living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China, whose first language is not Mandarin Chinese. The number of native Uyghur speakers is currently estimated to be more than 12 million all over the world (Uyghur language is spoken by more than 11 million people in East Turkistan, the Uyghur homeland. It is also spoken by more than 300,000 people in Kazakhstan, and there are Uyghur-speaking communities in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Mongolia, Australia, Germany, the United States of America, Canada and other countries). The Old Uyghur language has a great number of loanwords adopted from different languages at different historical periods. The loanwords come from sources such as ancient Chinese, the ancient Eastern Iranian languages of Saka, Tocharian and Soghdian of the Tarim Basin. Medieval Uyghur, which developed from Old Uyghur and Karakhanid Turkic, is in contrast to Old Uyghur, is a language containing a substantial amount of Arabic and Persian lexical elements. Modern Uyghur was developed on the basis of Chaghatay Turki, which had also been heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian vocabularies. After the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the strong Arabic and Persian lexical influence weakened and, instead, modern scientific and technological vocabulary got borrowed from European languages via Russian and Central Asian Turkic languages began to increase in proportion. From the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, the lexical influence of Chinese became increasingly stronger. Since the middle of the 1980s, on the other hand, there has been a tendency to replace Chinese loanwords with indigenous word formations, loaned translations or international terms copied from Russian. This paper will discuss the loanwords in the Uyghur language and their historical and socio-cultural backgrounds. At the same time, we will clarify these loanwords by looking at the basis of current Uyghur studies and other sources for the purpose of elucidating the historical and socio- cultural backgrounds of Uyghur linguistic development.

Artistic and aesthetical transformation of the Uyghur literature of Kazakhstan in the period of Independence

The modern Uyghur literature of Kazakhstan during the period of Independence evolves in the context of two interconnected and interdependent literary forms of its artistic and aesthetic transformation, in which the historical and cultural experience of the people themselves, their customs, folklore and written traditions are clearly manifested. Along with this, also it is influenced by the processes of interweaving, mutual influence with different national verbal cultures of Kazakhstan and the rest of the world as well. It enters a completely different stage of the artistic and cultural transformation, which taking place in a multi-vector Kazakhstan society. Uighur writers comprehend the new sociopolitical reality, as a different, modernizing artistic and aesthetic reality, which significantly distinguishes it from the previous Uyghur Soviet literature. On the one hand, they participate in the new literary polyphony of Kazakhstan (translations, mutual translations and literary contacts). This leads to the formation of a special binary verbal national culture, leading, in general, to a multicultural literary tradition: in particular: Kazakh-Uyghur, Turkish-Uyghur, Russian-Uyghur, etc. On the other hand, modern literature is objectively moving towards to a variety of cognition methods of aesthetic reality. New literary trends, new methods of depicting reality, etc. appear.

Voluntary motion events in Uyghur: A typological perspective

Previous decades have seen many studies on the expression of motion in language. Most are based on Talmy's (1985) motion event typology. While providing robust support for the typology, variations within and across typological groups have also been reported, leading to proposals to either expand the typology (Slobin, 2004; Ameka and Essegbey, 2013) or to understand it as a set of strategies that languages avail themselves of (Beavers et al., 2010; Croft et al., 2010). To further contribute to this line of research, this article examines the expression of voluntary motion by adult speakers of a Turkic language, modern Uyghur. Our analyses reveal that Uyghur is a prototypically verb-framed language. It is different from English (considered satellite-framed) at all levels of analysis and is systematic in adopting verb-framed lexicalisation patterns alike Turkish and to a lesser extent French. Our data lend support for Talmy's (2000) typology as conceived in a strategy-based typological framework (Croft et al., 2010; Hendriks & Hickmann, 2015).

Modern education and literary traditions: a comparative view on the development of modern Uyghur and Tibetan literature

ABSTRACTIn 1949, illiteracy among both Uyghurs and Tibetans was similar to that throughout China and estimated as higher than 90%. Since then, the rate of illiteracy in Xinjiang has shrunk considerably, while in Tibet it has remained the highest in China. This gap can explain the difference between the small volume of literature published annually in Tibet and the extensive literature that appears yearly in Xinjiang. A major reason for the high literacy rate and the emergence of a thriving modern literature in Xinjiang is the system of modern education that developed in the region at the start of the twentieth century. In contrast, in Tibet, the religious conservatism of the Buddhist elite prevented the introduction of modern education in order to retain local cultures. The comparison of the influences of modern education on the creation of literary traditions allows us to examine the continuity of Uyghur and Tibetan cultures in the context of contemporary China.

UYGURCA SÖZCÜKLER VE GELİŞMESİ

In contemporary Uyghur language, though Uyghur or other Turkic origin words have majority in percentage, still adopted words from other languages have effects that cannot be neglected. The usage of adopted words is increasing continuously. Reasons of these situations are, cannot be created new Uyghur words that describe contemporary life or satisfy modern Uyghur literature perfectly. Instead of creating new words, some foreign words have been translated into Uyghur language. Because of some translated words not effective or usable, people prefer to use more effective or short foreign words directly. Uyghurs live in the Sinkiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China and Turkic republics in the Central Asia mainly. Except these, Uyghur live in Turkey, Europe, USA and Australia. Therefore, many words accepted into Uyghur language. Uyghurs live in different regions in the world and prefer to use local language with Uyghur language together. Because of this reason, there are many adapted words began to be used in contemporary Uyghur language even those words have the same meaning. In this article, adapted words analyzed in Uyghur language and some efforts about creating new words explained briefly