Timofey Makarov's 1848 Kumyk Grammar Published in Digital Form for the First Time

In 1848 a book entitled A Tatar Grammar of the Caucasian Dialect came off the press of the Chancellery of the Viceroy of the Caucasus in Tiflis. Its compiler, Timofey Makarov, was a military interpreter and teacher who had served several years in the Caucasus, and by the "Caucasian dialect" he meant Kumyk. In the preface he explains why in so many words:

…but above all I had in mind that they live on the Left Flank of the Caucasian Line, where our military operations are, and where all the tribes speak Kumyk besides their own language.

The pronunciation adopted in the grammar, he notes, is "the Kumyk one". It is the first printed grammar of Kumyk in Russian.

Nearly a hundred and eighty years later the grammar appears in digital form for the first time — not as scanned pages but as a typeset, proofread text in which any word or form can be searched. The online edition was prepared by the til.im team (read Makarov's grammar).

Why "Tatar"

The title is misleading today. In nineteenth-century Russian scholarship and administration "the Tatar language" meant the Turkic languages as a whole, and what are now counted as separate languages were called its "dialects". In his preface Makarov lists nearly twenty of them — Turkish, Chagatai, Azerbaijani, Crimean, those of Khiva and Bukhara, Shamkhal, Kumyk, Kizlyar-Mozdok, the Nogai dialects on both sides of the Terek, Karachay, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Kazan, Orenburg, Siberian — and admits that before arriving in the Caucasus he had no idea there were so many.

Of them all he chose Kumyk, and explained why:

Of the tribes speaking the Tatar language, I liked the Kumyks best of all, both for the definiteness and precision of their language and for their closeness to European civilization.

The book was conceived as a manual for future interpreters of the Separate Caucasian Corps; but, meeting "a general wish among the Russians living in the Caucasus to know the language", the author widened the plan so that gymnasia, schools and private persons could use it too.

The language the Caucasus negotiated in

Makarov's statement that on the Left Flank of the Caucasian Line everyone also speaks Kumyk is an eyewitness account, and it is not alone. For centuries Kumyk was the lingua franca of the North Caucasus — the language in which peoples speaking different tongues made themselves understood to one another. As early as 1807–1808 Julius Klaproth wrote of the Turkic speech of the Caucasus:

…it is understood by the Circassians and the Ossetians as well as by the Chechens and the Lezgins.

In 1867 P. G. Przhetslavsky asserted:

Knowing Kumyk, one can converse not only throughout Daghestan and in all the Muslim provinces of the Caucasus, but in the Crimea, Kazan, Persia and Turkey.

The Turkologist A. N. Kononov described Kumyk as being for the North Caucasus what Azerbaijani was for Transcaucasia:

…a lingua franca of a kind.

Kumyk was also the official language of communication between the Russian Empire and the peoples of the Caucasus. The administration's correspondence with the highlanders was conducted in it — Russian chanceries called this written tradition "Kumyk writing" — and it was written not only by Turkic speakers but also by Andis, Kaitags, Chechens, Kabardians and Ingush. Makarov himself served as "written interpreter on the Kumyk Plain", and his grammar answered a practical need: the administration required people able to read and write the language in which the Caucasus dealt with it. In Soviet times Kumyk remained an official language of Daghestan.

Linguists place Kumyk in the Kipchak group of Turkic languages, but it combines archaic features of both the Kipchak and the Oghuz languages, and in many respects occupies a middle position between them.

A primer of ajam

The first part of the book, "Orthography", is a complete course in writing Kumyk in Arabic script — what the Kumyks themselves call ajam. Makarov begins with the eighteen "primary shapes", the skeleton forms of the Arabic alphabet which, taking one, two or three dots above or below, yield twenty-nine letters. He then shows how each letter is written in isolation and at the beginning, middle and end of a word, what numerical value it has "especially in the Qur'an, the Sharia and the ruznama", that is, the calendar, and which letters do not join the following one.

What the book teaches beyond any general account of the Arabic alphabet is how the Kumyks actually used it. They wrote both g and ng with the single letter ك‎, borrowing neither the Persian گ‎ nor the Turkish ڭ‎; they read ف‎ as p, not only in Turkic words but in Arabic ones too: ⁧فكر⁩ — pikir. Russian words of the day are written with ف‎ and pronounced with p: ⁧فولكونك⁩ — polkovnik, "colonel", ⁧فروستوف⁩ — pristop, that is, pristav, a district officer. Two ي‎ in a row at the start of a word are read, by Makarov's rule, "like gi, but the g is barely heard". The Kumyks had names of their own for the vowel signs — üstü ("top", fatha), tübü ("bottom", kasra) and aldı ("front", damma) — and Makarov at once gives the names used by the Tatars of the Russian interior and by the Azerbaijanis, who follow the Persian zebar, zir, pish. He also warns of the traps of cursive: in a quick hand ق‎ and ف‎ are almost indistinguishable, and final ع‎ and غ‎ are easily confused with ج‎, چ‎, ح‎, خ‎.

Above all, almost every example in the book — and there are thousands — is given three times: in Arabic script, in Cyrillic transliteration and in Russian translation. Makarov's grammar is therefore not only a reference work but a self-teaching tool: with it one can learn to read Kumyk ajam, checking spelling against pronunciation word by word. The first part ends with a reading piece — the story of Sultan Suleiman, who, after taking Belgrade, was stopped by a woman whose goods had been plundered. She explained that she had slept soundly "because I was sure you were not sleeping for my sake", and the Sultan, pleased with the answer, ordered her loss to be repaid and gave her a hundred gold pieces besides. The story is printed twice, in Kumyk and in Azerbaijani, each time in Arabic script with a transliteration, and its very first sentence shows how close the two languages are and in what small details they differ:

In the Kumyk version padishah is spelt with ف‎, in the Azerbaijani with پ‎; Kumyk Istambulga ("to Istanbul") corresponds to Azerbaijani Istambula. Azerbaijani qaydub, "having returned", is remarkable too: Makarov renders its initial sound with a k, whereas in modern Azerbaijani it is pronounced only as g — qayıdıb, [gayıdıb]. This mid-nineteenth-century record shows how a Russian interpreter heard the word, and may be of interest to Azerbaijani Turkologists.

More than ten languages on a page

Makarov does not confine himself to Kumyk. Almost every rule is accompanied by a remark on how the same thing looks among the neighbours, and the result is a comparative description of the Turkic languages of the mid-nineteenth century. Constantly in view are Turkish (Ottoman) and Azerbaijani, which he calls the "Aderbijan dialect"; Nogai, with the Nogais beyond the Terek and on the Kuban treated separately; Tatar, distinguishing the pronunciation of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia; Crimean Tatar, Bashkir, Turkmen, Kyrgyz and Chagatai, the literary language of Central Asia. For writing and bookish vocabulary Arabic and Persian are added.

The comparisons are concrete. Where a Kumyk says yol, "road", the Nogais living in the Caucasus say jul; where a Kumyk says çapmağa, "to gallop", the Nogais say şapmağa; Kumyk jan, "soul", corresponds to dzan among the Siberian Tatars, the Bashkirs and the Kyrgyz. The Azerbaijanis, according to Makarov, say and write dag, demir, dash, deve, while in the Caucasus and in Astrakhan the same words sound taw, temir, tash, tüye. Take, for example, the page on the instrumental case:

Such observations run through the whole book. The Kumyks, Makarov remarks, have no diminutives and call a "little table" a "small table", whereas the Turks, Nogais and Tatars say kitabchik, "booklet", and the Azerbaijanis and Kyrgyz kitabchigaz. He declines the pronouns side by side in Kumyk and Turkish, accompanies the conjugations with Turkish and Azerbaijani forms (Kumyk bolmağa, "to be", there becomes olmağa), and sometimes takes his examples straight from daily life: şeker çay qalmuq çaydan yaxşı — "tea with sugar is better than Kalmyk tea (qalmuq çay, ayaq çay)" (many would argue with that). For anyone learning to read Turkic texts in Arabic script — Kumyk, Nogai, Azerbaijani or Ottoman — the book serves at once as a primer and a comparative handbook.

The written language and living speech

Makarov consistently separates how the Kumyks speak from how they write, and this makes his grammar a key to nineteenth-century manuscripts. In writing the Kumyks followed the Turkish model: here, Makarov notes, they used the demonstratives işbu and uşbu, "this". He lists them beside the colloquial bu and şu with a proviso — "the latter are used only in writing" — and yet declines them through every case, from işbunıñ to işbuda. This is a word of the written language of the time: it corresponds to Turkish işbu and Tatar uşbu. Equally bookish were the conjunction zira, "because", and the relative ki, "who, which" — in speech a participle takes its place: gelgen gişi, "the man who came". In writing a patronymic is formed with oğlu or zade, as among the Turks; in speech, with ulan. The reportative form in -miş lives only in writing; so does addressing a single person as "you" in the plural — again "like the Turks". Someone who has learned ajam from Makarov will understand why a nineteenth-century letter from a Kumyk prince contains words that are not heard in the village.

Kumyk a century and a half ago

The grammar also records forms that the language no longer has. Makarov's genitive ends in -nıñ, -niñ: kimniñ nasihatı paydalı iken, "whose advice is useful?", aqıllı kişiniñ, "of a wise man", günniñ, "of the sun". This ending, he remarks, is the same as "among the Tatars living in Russia". In his pronoun tables the genitive and the accusative are still distinct: meniñ and meni, seniñ and seni, bizniñ and bizni. In modern Kumyk the genitive has become -nı, -ni and merged with the accusative — meni, seni, bizin, kimni — and a distinction that was a living norm for Makarov is now visible only in old texts.

Sometimes writing and speech diverge within a single example. Explaining the possessive forms, Makarov writes that a noun with a possessive ending is also preceded by the full pronoun: "my horse" — ⁧⁧منم اطم⁩⁩. The Arabic script gives the bookish menim here, with a final -m, while the author's transliteration gives meni atım, which is what he heard. The modern til.im edition follows the living pronunciation — meni atım — and marks the bookish spelling with an editorial note. This is how Kumyk speaks today too: in the present-day language the final consonant in such forms has been lost, whereas Turkish (benim), Azerbaijani (mənim) and Crimean Tatar (menim) have kept it. A single line of the grammar shows both states of the language at once: writing holds on to the older form while speech already lives by the newer one.

The loss of final -ñ in the genitive and of final -m in the pronoun are not isolated details but traces of how the phonetics of the language changed over a century and a half. Kumyk nevertheless remains a very archaic language and stands, in effect, midway between Chagatai, Mamluk Kipchak and the Cuman language of the Codex Cumanicus, coinciding with them in sound shape and vocabulary; the vocabulary of the Mamluk Kipchak dictionaries matches Kumyk down to the features of its Terek dialect. The changes it has undergone are not as radical as in the Oghuz languages, but they are there, and Makarov's grammar makes it possible to observe them in material from the mid-nineteenth century.

For the historian of the language the book is valuable for its vocabulary as well. It records words that one hardly ever hears in the modern language — mostly bookish ones, from Arabic and Persian: the conjunction aw ya, "or"; Persian turns with be — yüz be yüz, "face to face", söz be söz, "word for word" — and with bi, "without": bikar, "idle", bi haya, "shameless"; the postpositions bayn, "between", and uzre, "over"; the adverb xalis, "truly". The modern til.im edition brings such words into present-day spelling, while the original keeps the author's notation.

The forms are no less interesting. Makarov conjugates a verb to the last cell of its paradigm, showing how far Turkic word-formation can go. From söylemege, "to speak", he builds söyleşmege, "to converse", then söyleşdirmege, "to make converse", and finally the negative infinitive söyleşdirmesge, "to make them not converse"; in the 1848 original it is written suileshtyrmeske. Each of these verbs is taken through every tense and mood, including the optative — söyleşdirmegen bolğay edim, "if only I had not made them converse". Such forms are grammatically flawless yet almost never met in living speech, and a book in which a contemporary recorded them together with their Arabic spelling shows what possibilities the language held in reserve.

How the edition was prepared

Preparing the online edition took several months. It is based on the scan of the copy held by the Bavarian State Library. Every page of the book was converted into text and then checked against the original twice, line by line: every Arabic word letter by letter, with doubtful places magnified, dots and vowel signs verified and Kumyk dictionaries consulted; every word of the transliteration against the same page of the scan. The author's own list of errata, printed on the last page, was taken into account as well: thirty-one corrections that Makarov himself specified have now been entered into the text.

The grammar is published in two editions. The original keeps the Russian spelling of 1848, with its yats and hard signs, and the author's transliteration. The modern edition brings the Russian text into present-day spelling and renders the Kumyk words in modern Cyrillic — not mechanically but from the dictionary, form by form; for this the team compiled a glossary of more than fifteen hundred pairs of "ajam spelling — modern form". The Arabic script is left as Makarov printed it in both editions. One can switch between the editions while reading.

Makarov's grammar is one of the few books in which the Kumyk language of the mid-nineteenth century is recorded in three ways at once and set alongside its relatives. For Turkologists and Orientalists, for those who work with manuscripts in ajam and for everyone who wants to learn to read them, it is now open in full (read Makarov's grammar).