Topics Turkic Basic Vocabulary Database

This project compiles a database with sound for basic vocabulary of Turkic languages recorded by Shinjiro KAZAMA (Professor of TUFS).

Turkic languages are a language group spoken in a vast area extending over the East and the West of Asia, from Turkey to Siberia. They are sometimes considered as a part of the Altaic language family with Mongolic languages including Mongolian Language, Tungusic languages including Evenki languages and Manchu language. Mr. Shinjiro Kazama has been conducting research on Altaic languages in order to investigate the process of branching and understanding the formation of Altaic languages. This database provides basic vocabularies of Turkic languages collected by his fieldwork using audio data that he recorded. The date recorded in this database are collected through aid from Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) “Comprehensive study for the lexicon of Altaic languages,“ and this database is an outcome of this project.

The research on basic vocabularies was conducted based on “Linguistic questionnaire for Asia and Africa 2” (ILCAA, 1979), and 200 items classified to the category A in the questionnaire are registered in this database. The database shows forms used in documents on some languages on the basis of accumulated research outcomes on Turkic languages.

You are able to change languages you want to display and refine your search in the menu bar, so you will be able to search the correspondences among Turkic languages.

This project started in 2014 and was in progress as of January 2019. Starting with Tuvan language, we have added languages to the database every year; now we include vocabularies of 10 languages and 26 variants and will continue to add other data to the database. We aim at more clearly describing various aspects of the Turkic languages by continuously adding data.

(Author: Norikazu KOGURA)

Reference:
Turkic Basic Vocabularies