THE TERMINOLOGY DENOTING POLITICAL ORGANISATION AND COMMON DESCENT IN THE DÄFTÄR-I ČINGIZ-NĀMÄ

Research objective and materials: The paper examines selected lists of terminologies which define certain features (common descent and political organisation) of ethnic identity in the Däftär-i Čingiz-nāmä. These words often occur in coordinate compounds in the text. Compounding is not very well researched in Turkic linguistics, nor was it being considered in earlier philological works on Turkic historical texts. The author defines the problem of identification of such compounds in the text, and offers a morpho-syntactic criterion which can be used as a tool for identification. Novelty and results of the research: Based on the semantic relation between the compound’s components, the author distinguishes two types: 1. Those compounds, the components of which have identical meaning: These were probably used for elaborate speech. 2. Those compounds, the components of which do not have identical meaning: These arrived at a new, different concept from the components’ meaning. Three such compounds have been identified, which more or less arrive at a similar concept to ethnos. Finally, the author compares the meaning of these compounds to that of Old Turkic bodun – ‘people’, and el – ‘realm’.

"The historical identity of Turkic-speaking groups" is the working title of a broader project of which the initial steps are being made at the Szeged University, by the Turkological Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the University of Szeged.
As a narrower field of research within this project, the author chose to assemble a terminological list which was used to characterise ethnic identity in Turkic historical texts, based on the general criteria defined by András Róna-Tas [5, p. 5-15], on a selected corpus of texts. According to Róna-Tas, the required characteristics of the ethnos are the following: Ethnos is a historically evolved group of people which has a) common semiotic system, b) self-distinction from other groups, c) permanent self-designation. There are formative elements, which are important, but not necessary characteristics of ethnos. These are: d) consciousness of common descent, e) common land, f) common political organisation, and g) common religion. In the present paper, I will examine the terminology of three formative elements d), and e), with a short detour on f), in the Däftär-i Čingiz-nāmä [3], which is an important literary source written in the 1680's by an unknown author. The reason of the choice is that it contains rich information about the folklore concerning identity of the historical Turkic-speaking groups of the former Golden Horde (13 th -16 th centuries), probably based on oral tradition. As a working hypothesis, I assumed that the intuitive translations given in the Dictionary (Wörterbuch) part of [3, p. 97-203] are correct. As the lexicon of the Däftär-i Čingiz-nāmä is translated to German, I must have found an English equivalent for the German translations.
In the selected corpus, we find enough terminological material which denote a group of people, which is the basic requirement for the definition of the concept ethnos. These are the following: (T) 1 awïl, 'Aul village', (T+M) el kün 'friendly people', (M) ulus 'people', (A) ḫalq 'people, humanity', (A) ḫalāyïq 'creatures, people', (A) qawim 'people, stem'. I symbolized the concept a group of people with a triangle, which represent hierarchically more or less organized society. We see that almost all the words have a meaning 'people'.

Figure 1. A group of people
There is also a list of words which express a concept which is related to descent: (T) toḫum, 'seed, progeny', (T) tüb 'foundation, base, root, origin', (T) uruġ/ruẇ 2 '(seed), lineage, progeny, clan', (T) tamur 'root, clan', (T) töš töl 'the masculine seed', (M) duyin 'offspring, dregs, seed', (A) aṣïl 'root, lineage, valuable, genuine, noble', (A) näsl 'origin, progeny, seed, lineage'. All the words are given with at least one of the following meanings by [3]: 'seed, progeny, root, origin, clan'. I gave the symbol for the concept descent of a root branching off  1 The capital letter in parenthesis before each given data refers to the origin of the word, see the abbreviations. 2 This word occurs in two forms in the text and the glossary: uruġ [3, p. 122] and ruẇ [3, p. 176]. The meaning 'seed' is given only at the entry of the latter, which is the reason I put it in parenthesis. The Old Turkic etymon of the word is uruġ 'seed, pip, kernel' with the metaphorical meaning 'progeny, descendants, clan' [2, p. 214]. I found only two words which are related to political organisation, (T) el/il 3 'people, (land), (state)' and (T) ḫānlïq 'authority or power of the khan'. The first two meanings of el/il occur at a terminological list of different concepts, namely descent (see above) and land (see below). The symbol I gave for political organisation is supposed to represent a ruler above a group of people  We saw that the individual members of terminological list have overlapping meanings. In the case of el, we saw that it is given a meaning which is found in other lists. We must ask the following: can be the members of the lists used synonymously? If not, what concept do they really denote?
What I am going to present here is a linguistic approach which I recommend using during the translation of historical sources to define a word's or expression's meaning. Many members of the lists occur in combination with another member of the same or a different list, constituting a so-called coordinate compound 4 . I must mention that neither sufficient linguistic research has been made so far on the process compounding in the Turkological literature nor sufficient consideration of compounds were taken during the translations and editions of Turkic historical sources. Generally, in Turkic, coordinate compounds possess the following morpho-syntactic structure: A coordinate compound consists of two (or more) juxtaposed nouns: N(oun) 1 and N 2 . For example, Turkish anne 'mother' and baba 'father'. The meaning of the compound anne baba is neither 'mother' or 'father', but the union of them, i.e. 'parents'. Either the second or both elements of the compound may take inflectional suffixes, such as anne-ø baba-sı. 'his/her parents' and anne-m baba-m 'my parents' (it is not allowed that the first element takes suffix, but the second doesn't). Such compound structures have several types on which I will talk below. The elements of a compound help to define each other's meaning. Provided that the members of the above lists occur in coordinate compounds, we must ask an additional question: What concept do these compounds grasp, or in other words, how do they grasp the concept of 'a group of people', 'common descent', 'political organisation' or 'common land'?
The first problem we must overcome with this approach is that the morphosyntactic structure of a coordinate compound may be identical with the structure of two independent inflected or uninflected nouns which appear in an enumeration, and which do not constitute a compound. The general formula of a coordinate compound in Turkic is the following: [N 1 (infl.) + N 2 ](infl.) This means that two different nouns (N 1 and N 2 ) constitute a compound which is a new lexeme (they are bracketed together), and both, only the second, or none of the elements may be inflected (see the example above). The formula for two independent nouns which are enumerated after each other can be described as [N 1 (infl.)] + [N 2 (infl.)]. This means that there are two different nouns again, which do not constitute a compound (they are bracketed separately). Both or none of the elements may be inflected. For example, Turkish araba 'car' and çocuk 'child' means 'car and child' and araba-m çocuğu-m will mean 'my car and my child' but they do not constitute a new lexeme. This means that structurally a coordinate compound may look identical with two enumerated inflected or uninflected nouns (note the differences between the bracketing In the right column of the third possibility, the expression cannot be a coordinate compound (if at all, it will be a subordinate compound, which is a different type and does not concern us here). Thus, if there are two juxtaposed nouns and only the second one if inflected, we have a morpho-syntactic criterion which assures that compound-suspicious structure is really a coordinate compound. Also, if both nouns are inflected or uninflected, but they are subordinated to a single syntactic element, such as a postposition or a verb, we can expect again that the two nouns constitute a compound. Now let us turn to the data found in the Däftär-i Čingiz-nāmä. The expressions given below are those constructions which contain at least one element of the following lists, yet we must decide whether they are compounds or not.
Surely The meanings of these constructions will be dealt with below. In the right column, we find compounds which has a sure morpho-syntactic criterion, the element assuring it is highlighted with bold. In the left column, we find expression which may be compounds, but we cannot tell if for sure, because of their syntactic structure. Consider for example ruẇ ḫalq it occurs with only ḫalq inflected, and without any inflectional suffixes. Probably we can consider the uninflected instance also as a compound. Some words which were listed in the above lists do not appear in such a combination (awïl, duyïn, and ḫanlïq). Further on, I will deal only with the combinations given here. Now let us see what is the semantic typology of two coordinated nouns. If they constitute a compound, depending on the relation of the components, the meaning of the compound can be the cross-section or the union of the meanings of the components (see Fig.5). If the components individually possess already a similar meaning, we encounter the first case. If the components have different meanings, the meaning of the compound will be the union of them, and the compound will grasp a new concept. Or, if the components do not constitute a compound, we will have two disjunctive meaning with the relation 'and' between them. Let us see these cases on our list one by one. There is a set of compounds or possibly compounds which do or do not have the morpho-syntactic criterion (highlighted with bold).
[aṣl]ï [tüb] Both the components of the above constructions have the meaning which is connected to the concept 'descent' (Fig. 6). The components are words of different origin. If they are compounds, they still express the same concept, and both the compounds and its components can practically be considered synonymous. They were probably used in the contemporary language by an elaborate style. The same can be said about the words and compounds meaning connected with the concept 'land' (Fig.7). There are compounds among them with morphosyntactic criterion, but not necessarily.
[mäqām] [ In the glossary, both are given with the meaning 'people' [3, p. 109, 121], but we know that both words had a meaning referring to a political organisation in earlier sources [2, p. 121, 152]. The context allows both the readings 'people' and 'state'. As 'people' are mentioned also in the sentence, I would prefer the meaning 'state' in which case the compound would be used as an expression for political organisation. There is a set of word-pairs which do not possess a morpho-syntactic criterion. As the individual components seem to have completely disjunctive meaning, I consider them as different words with the relation 'and' between them.  The compounds which belong to the first group are a group of people which possess a common descent. Note that el is among the components, here with the meaning a group of people. This is the expression among our data which grasps a concept which is closest to an ethnos. Based on its components, el kün šähär may mean sedentary people in opposition of nomadic, however, the context does not tell us much about such an opposition.
With this in hand, let us see whether these described concepts correspond to those denoted by bodun and el in the Old Turkic runic inscriptions. The concepts grasped by the term bodun (based on [6] cf. also [2, p. 306] are the following:

Bodun: (primarily)
Bodun: (secondarily) Community with common progeny Subjects of the ruler Political community Common people Tradition community Auxiliary people Among the primary meanings of bodun, we find 'community with common progeny', which was denoted by ruẇ ḫalq and ruẇ il. Another meaning of bodun is 'political community', which may have been denoted by el ulus as we saw above. The secondary meanings of bodun mostly grasp some parts of the whole of the primary meanings. Figure 11. The primary and secondary meanings of Old Turkic bodun El on the other hand, originally meant the political power over one or more tribes or tribal confederations. We did not see such a concept among our data, but el ulus grasped something similar, may be not so complex political organisation. The symbol used here is a combination of political organization over several distinct group of peoples. For bodun, these are ruẇ ḫalq, ruẇ il, 'people with common descent' and el ulus 'political organisation'. For el, we find one correspondent which, however, does not really cover the original meaning of el: el ulus. The original concept of el seems to be changed. The meaning of the word became vague, but the word itself is present in the language. The word bodun is also present in the language in the form boyun, moyun [3, p. 135, 172]. At the 17 th century, it lost its meaning 'people (with a common descent)', started from its original meaning its stem bod 'stature, size' [2, p. 296] it changed to 'neck'.