1877.] 
243 
of Eastern Turkistdn. 
Viewed in this light the study of the Eastern Turki is seen to have 
an interest which is not to be measured by the amount of the commercial 
or other intercourse likely to be facilitated by it. For the Turkish 
tongues, a journey eastward is pretty nearly equivalent to a study of the 
earlier forms of an Indo-European language. In either case we get nearer 
to the source ; and the less literary character of the former makes it easier 
to approach its origin in space than in time. Remusat, in his “ Langues 
Tartares” # , truly says: “ Le dialecte de Constantinople est celui de tous 
qui s’est le plus enrichi, je pourrais dire appauvri, par l’introduction de 
mots Arabes et Per sans; et l’on n’en rencontre que fort peu dans la langue 
des Turks voisins de la Chine, ou l’on peut, pour cette raison, esperer de 
retrouver l’antique langue Turke dans un etat plus voisin de sa purete 
primitive.” 
Yalikhanoff (the son of a Kirghiz chief in the Russian service, 
whose name, Vali Khan, with the affixed Russian patronymic ending off', 
is significant of Russia’s progress among those tribes) writes :f “ The 
language.spoken in Kashghar is altogether unknown to European 
savants”, and Prof. Vambery, in quoting him, adds that this language 
“ has incontestably the most primitive words and formations amongst all 
Turkish forms of speech.”]: 
In the Turkish of Kashghar and Yarkand (which some European 
linguists have called TJighur ,§ a name unknown to the inhabitants of 
those towns, who know their tongue simply as Turki), we can obtain 
a glimpse backwards at a state of the language when the noun (which 
in Western Turkish is almost inflected) was but a rude block, labelled 
if necessary by attaching other nouns, &e., to show its relation to the 
remaining words of a sentence, as in Chinese. Of these attached words 
we can still see the meaning and special force, and can even use some of 
them as independent parts of speech (see below in Chapter III and Chapter 
VII, Numerals). It requires scientific dissection to extract and realize 
the meaning of the genitive element in the Latin word “ rosse,” for in¬ 
stance ; but the Turki genitive ulus-nung (“ tribe’s,” lit. “ tribe property”) 
bears its origin on its face, and it cannot be very long ago that the word 
“ nung ” or “ neng ” would have been used freely to mean “ goods” or 
“possessions”, as it is in the Kudatku-Bilik|| (translated by Prof. Vam- 
* Page 250, edition 1820. 
f See Messrs. Michel’s “Russians in Central Asia”. 
f Vambery’s “ Chagataische Sprach-studien”, p. 3. 
§ This would seem in many cases to he a misnomer as applied to the modern lan¬ 
guage of Kashghar. 
|| E. g. iila neng “ bestow (thy) property.” 
