Tuvan language
Tuvan, also spelt Tyvan, is a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in South Central Siberia, Russia. There are small groups of Tuvans that speak distinct dialects of Tuvan in China and Mongolia.
History
The earliest record of Tuvan is from the early 19th century by Wūlǐyǎsūtái zhìlüè, Julius Klaproth 1823, Matthias Castrén 1857, Nikolay Katanov, Vasily Radlov, etc.The name Tuva goes back as early as the publication of The Secret History of the Mongols. The Tuva have historically been referred to as Soyons, Soyots or Uriankhais.
Classification
Tuvan is linguistically classified as a Sayan Turkic language. Its closest relative is the moribund Tofa.Tuvan, as spoken in Tuva, is principally divided into four dialect groups; Western, Central, Northeastern, Southeastern.
- Central: forms the basis of the literary language and includes Ovyur and Bii-Khem subdialects. The geographical centrality of this dialect meant it was similar to the language spoken by most Tuvans, whether or not exactly the same.
- Western: can be found spoken near the upper course of the Khemchik. It is influenced by the Altai language.
- Northeastern, also known as the Todzhi dialect, is spoken near the upper course of the Great Yenisey. The speakers of this dialect utilize nasalization. It contains a large vocabulary related to hunting and reindeer breeding not found in the other dialects.
- Southeastern: shows the most influence from the Mongolic languages.
One subset is the Jungar Tuvan language, originating in the Altai Mountains in the western region of Mongolia. There is no accurate number of Jungar-Tuvan speakers because most currently reside in China, and the Chinese include Tuvan speakers as Mongolians in their census.
Phonology
Consonants
Tuvan has 19 native consonant phonemes:Vowels
s in Tuvan exist in three varieties: long, short, and short with low pitch. Tuvan long vowels have a duration that is at least twice as long as that of short vowels. Contrastive low pitch may occur on short vowels, and when it does, it causes them to increase in duration by at least a half. When using low pitch, Tuvan speakers employ a pitch that is at the very low end of their modal voice pitch. For some speakers, it is even lower and using what is phonetically known as creaky voice. When a vowel in a monosyllabic word has low pitch, speakers apply low pitch only to the first half of that vowel. That is followed by a noticeable pitch rise, as the speaker returns to modal pitch in the second half of the vowel.The acoustic impression is similar to that of a rising tone like the rising pitch contour of the Mandarin second tone, but the Tuvan pitch begins much lower. However, Tuvan is considered a pitch accent language with contrastive low pitch instead of a tonal language. When the low pitch vowel occurs in a multisyllabic word, there is no rising pitch contour or lengthening effect: 'his/her/its horse'. Such low pitch vowels were previously referred to in the literature as either kargyraa or pharyngealized vowels. Phonetic studies have demonstrated that the defining characteristic of such vowels is low pitch.
In her PhD thesis, "Long Vowels in Mongolic Loanwords in Tuvan", Baiarma Khabtagaeva states that the history of long vowels is ambiguous. While the long vowels may originate from Mongolic languages, they could also be of Tuvan origin. In most Mongolic languages, the quality of the long vowel changes depending on the quality of the second vowel in the conjunction. The only exception to this rule is if the conjunction is labial. The ancient Tuvan languages, in contrast, depended upon the first vowel rather than the second to determine the long vowels.
Khabtagaeva divided the transformation of these loanwords into two periods: the early layer and the late layer. The words in the early layer are words in which the Mongolic preserved the conjunction, the VCV conjunction was preserved but the long vowel still developed when it entered the Tuvan language, or the stress is on the last syllable and a long vowel in the loanword replaced a short vowel in the original word. The late layer includes loanwords in which the long vowel does not change when the word entered Tuvan.
Vowels may also be nasalized in the environment of nasal consonants, but nasalization is non-contrastive. Most Tuvan vowels in word-initial syllables have a low pitch and do not contrast significantly with short and long vowels.
Vowel harmony
Tuvan has two systems of vowel harmony that strictly govern the distribution of vowels within words and suffixes. Backness harmony, or what is sometimes called 'palatal' harmony, requires all vowels within a word to be either back or front. Rounding harmony, or what is sometimes called 'labial' harmony, requires a vowel to be rounded if it is a high vowel and appears in a syllable immediately following a rounded vowel. Low rounded vowels are restricted to the first syllable of a word, and a vowel in a non-initial syllable may be rounded only if it meets the conditions of rounding harmony. See Harrison for a detailed description of Tuvan vowel harmony systems.Writing system
Cyrillic script
The current Tuvan alphabet is a modified version of the Russian alphabet, with three additional letters: Ңң, Өө, Үү. The sequence of the alphabet follows Russian, but with Ң located after Russian Н, Ө after О, and Ү after У.The letters Е and Э are used in a special way. Э is used for the short sound at the beginning of words while Е is used for the same sound in the middle and at the end of words. Е is used at the beginning of words, mostly of Russian origin, to reflect the standard Russian pronunciation of that letter,. Additionally, ЭЭ is used in the middle and at the end of words for the long sound.
The letter ъ is used to indicate pitch accent, as in эът èt 'meat'.
Historic scripts
Traditional Mongolian script
From the late 18th century, when Tuva became part of the Qing empire, until the 1930s, all official documentation was kept in Mongolian using the traditional Mongolian script. By the late 1920s less than 1.5% of the total Tuvan population was literate in the traditional Mongolian script. Mongolian literacy was mainly possessed by the feudal nobility and officials. The absolute majority of Tuvans did not know the Mongolian language, and had long spoken only their native language.Draft scripts
In 1926, the government of the Tuvan People's Republic asked Soviet scientists to develop a native Tuvan script. The first draft of a Tuvan alphabet based on Cyrillic was compiled by Roman Buzykaev and B. Bryukhanov in 1927. This alphabet contained the letters Аа, Бб, Вв, Гг, Дд, Ёё, Жж, Ӝӝ, Зз, Ии, Йй, Кк, Лл, Мм, Нн, Ҥҥ, Оо, Ӧӧ, Пп, Рр, Сс, Тт, Уу, Ӱӱ, Хх, Чч, Шш, Ыы. The first Tuvan primer was published using this alphabet, but this project was not developed further.Tuvan Latin
The Latin-based alphabet for Tuvan was devised in 1930 by a Tuvan Buddhist monk, Mongush Lopsang-Chinmit. This project was proposed based on the German alphabet, albeit with a modified letter order. In this proposed system, all vowels were placed first, followed by consonants. This order is characteristic of the classical Mongolian script. Moreover, the pronunciation of several letters underwent significant alteration.A few books and newspapers, including primers intended to teach adults to read, were printed using this writing system. Lopsang-Chinmit was later executed in Stalinist purges on 31 December 1941.
In the USSR, Aleksandr Palmbach, Yevgeny Polivanov, and Nicholas Poppe were engaged in the development of the Tuvan Latinized alphabet. These researchers utilized the so-called New Turkic Alphabet as a foundation for their work. New Turkic Alphabet was designed with the intention of facilitating unification of writing systems among all Turkic peoples. In early 1930, the Tuvan alphabet was finalized and officially introduced on June 28, 1930, by a decree of the TPR government. The approved Tuvan alphabet was as follows:
The letter Ɉ ɉ was excluded from the alphabet in 1931.
Examples
By September 1943, this Latin-based alphabet was replaced by a Cyrillic-based one, which is still in use to the present day. In the post-Soviet era, Tuvan and other scholars have taken a renewed interest in the history of Tuvan letters.Transliteration
For bibliographic purposes, transliteration of Tuvan generally follows the guidelines described in the ALA-LC Romanization tables for non-Slavic languages in Cyrillic script. Linguistic descriptions often employ the IPA or Turcological standards for transliteration.Grammar
Tuvan builds morphologically complex words by adding suffixes. For example, теве teve is 'camel', тевелер teveler is 'camels', тевелерим tevelerim is 'my camels', тевелеримден tevelerimden is 'from my camels'.Nouns
Tuvan marks nouns with six cases: genitive, accusative, dative, ablative, locative, and allative. The suffixes below are in front vowels, however, except -Je the suffixes follow vowel harmony rules. Each case suffix has a rich variety of uses and meanings, of which only the most basic ones are shown here.| Case | Form | Meaning |
| Nominative | теве | "camel" |
| Genitive | тевениң | "of the camel" |
| Accusative | тевени | "the camel" |
| Dative | тевеге | "for the camel" or "at the camel" |
| Locative | теведе | "at the camel" or "in the camel" |
| Ablative | теведен | "from the camel" or "than a/the camel" |
| Allative I | тевеже | "to the camel" |
| Allative II | теведиве | "to the camel" |