Teleut in the System of Altai Dialects - Phonetics and Morphophonology (Based on Das Altaiturkische by Omeljan Pritsak)

This article examines the phonetic and morphophonological features of the language of the Bachat Teleuts, a minoritised Turkic language of Siberia. The language is genetically related to the southern dialects of the Altai language (Turkic), but has evolved in isolation from them. The article aims to identify which features of the phonetics and morphophonology of the Teleut language are similar to and different from other Altai dialects, and to determine the place of Teleut in the system of Altai dialects. The structure of the research is guided by O. Pritsak’s encyclopedic work Das Altaiturkische (Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta). Research material is taken from dictionaries and grammars of southern and northern Altai dialects, as well as from the corpus of Teleut texts in SIL FieldWorks Language Explorer format (about 30,000 tokens). Descriptive, comparative-historical, and areal methods are used in the work; Praat (speech analysis software) was used to verify some phonetic features of the Teleut language. The introduction describes the Siberian-Turkic dialect continuum and provides various characteristics of the concept of Siberian Turkic languages with a general conclusion about the heterogeneity of both the Siberian-Turkic area and the dialect system of the Altai language itself. The main part of the article compares the data given by O. Pritsak for Teleut and other Altai dialects (southern (Altai-Kizhi and Telengit) and northern (Chalkan, Kumandy, and Tuba)) and modern corpus and lexicographic data on the Teleut language. In the domain of vocalism, the Teleut language differs from the Altai language, perhaps, by a less consistent labial harmony - after all types of labials in the first syllable, the vowel of the second syllable may not be labialized, which brings it closer to the Northern Altai dialects with which Teleut has been in close contact since the 16th century, primarily with Kumandy and Shor. As far as consonantism is concerned, Teleut is distinguished by voiceless [p] and voiceless palatalized [t] at the absolute beginning of the word, which correspond to semi-voiced [b] and semi-voiced palatalized [d] in Altai. Teleut is characterized by palatalization [l] in the position after [j], as well as devoicing of the intervocalic [s]~[s], which also brings it closer to the Kumandy language. The loss of [r] in the infinitive marker also brings the Teleut language closer to the Kumandy language. The distribution of morphonological variants of the case affixes of the genitive, accusative, and ablative in Teleut generally corresponds to the system of the Altai literary language; however, an important feature is also noted - the predominance of d-variants of the genitive and the accusative after a short vowel stem, which finds a parallel in the Telengit dialect. This testifies to the ethnogenetic relatedness of Teleut and Telengit; on the contrary, the similarities in the phonetics of Teleut and Kumandy are presumably a later phenomenon due to linguistic convergence.

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