Sogdian language

History

During the period of the Tang dynasty (ca. 7th century CE) of China, Sogdian was the lingua franca in Central Asia of the Silk Road, along which it amassed a rich vocabulary of loanwords such as tym ("hotel") from the Middle Chinese /tem/ ().

The economic and political importance of Sogdian guaranteed its survival in the first few centuries after the Muslim conquest of Sogdia in the early eighth century. A dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana (capital: Bunjikat, near present-day Istaravshan, Tajikistan), a region to the south of Sogdia, developed into the Yaghnobi language and has survived into the 21st century. It is spoken by the Yaghnobi people. File:British Museum stamp-seal (Registration number 1870,1210.3).jpg|Seal with two facing busts and Sogdian inscription "Indamic, Queen of Zacanta", Kushano-Sasanian period, 300-350 CE. British Museum 119999. File:Sogdian text Manichaean letter.jpg|Sogdian text from a Manichaean creditor letter from around 9th to 13th century File:Manicheans.jpg|Manichaean priests (Uyghur Turks) writing Sogdian manuscripts, in Khocho, Tarim Basin,

Discovery of Sogdian texts

The first discovered Sogdian text was the Karabalgasun inscription, but it was not understood until 1909 that it contained text in Sogdian.

Aurel Stein discovered five letters written in Sogdian, known as the "Ancient Letters", in an abandoned watchtower near Dunhuang in 1907, dating to the end of the Western Jin dynasty. The finding of manuscript fragments of the Sogdian language in China's Xinjiang region sparked the study of the language. Robert Gauthiot (the first Buddhist Sogdian scholar) and Paul Pelliot (who explored in Dunhuang and retrieved Sogdian material there) began investigating the Sogdian material that Pelliot had discovered in 1908. Gauthiot published many articles based on his work with Pelliot's material but died during the First World War. One of Gauthiot's most impressive articles was a glossary to the Sogdian text, which he was in the process of completing when he died. This work was continued by Émile Benveniste after Gauthiot's death.

Various Sogdian pieces have been found in the Turfan text corpus by the German Turfan expeditions. These expeditions were controlled by the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.

Dunhuang and Turfan were the two most plentiful sites of Manichean, Buddhist, and Christian Sogdian texts. Sogdiana itself actually contained a much smaller collection of texts, discovered in the early 1930s near Mount Mug in Tajikistan. The texts, related to business, belonged to a minor Sogdian king, Divashtich. They dated back to the time of the Muslim conquest, about 700.

Between 1996 and 2018, a number of inscribed fragments have been found at Kultobe in Kazakhstan. They date back to the Kangju culture, are significantly earlier than the 4th century AD and showcase an archaic state of Sogdian.

In the years between 2003 and 2020, three new bilingual Chinese-Sogdian epitaphs have been discovered and published.

Writing system

Like all other writing systems employed for Middle Iranian languages, the Sogdian alphabet ultimately derives from the Aramaic alphabet. Like its close relatives, the Pahlavi scripts, written Sogdian contains many logograms or ideograms, which were Aramaic words that were written to represent native spoken ones. The Sogdian script is the direct ancestor of the Old Uyghur alphabet, which is itself the forerunner of the Traditional Mongolian alphabet.

As in other writing systems descended from the Proto-Sinaitic script, there are no special signs for vowels. As in the parent Aramaic system, the consonantal signs ’ y w can be used as matres lectionis for the long vowels [a: i: u:] respectively. However, unlike it, the consonant signs would also sometimes serve to express the short vowels, which could also sometimes be left unexpressed and always are in the parent systems.

Sogdian also used the Manichaean alphabet, which consists of 29 letters.

In transcribing Sogdian script into Roman letters, Aramaic ideograms are often noted by means of capitals.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Sogdian is as follows (parentheses mark allophones or marginal phonemes):

:{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;" ! !Labial !Dental !Alveolar !Palatal / Postalveolar !Velar/Glottal |- ! Plosive/Affricate |- ! Fricative |- ! Nasal | | |- ! Liquid/Glide | |}

Vowels

Sogdian has the following simple vowels:

Sogdian also has three rhotacized vowels: ər, ir, ur.

The diphthongs in Sogdian are āi, āu and those whose second element is a rhotacized vowel or a nasal element ṃ.

Morphology

Sogdian has two different sets of endings for so-called 'light' and 'heavy' stems. A stem is heavy if it contains at least one heavy syllable (containing a long vowel or diphthong); stems containing only light vowels are light. In heavy stems, stress falls on the stem, and in light stems, it falls on the suffix or ending.

Nouns

Light stems

Heavy stems

Contracted stems

Verbs

Present indicative

Imperfect indicative

References

Sources

References

1. Jacques Gernet. (31 May 1996). "A History of Chinese Civilization". Cambridge University Press.
2. (1 January 1996). "History of Humanity: From the seventh century B.C. to the seventh century A.D.". UNESCO.
3. (25 January 2017). "Revised proposal to encode the Sogdian script in Unicode".
4. "Sogdian Language and Its Scripts {{!".
5. Barthold, W. "Balāsāg̲h̲ūn or Balāsaḳūn." Encyclopaedia of Islam. Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill, 2008. Brill Online. Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden. 11 March 2008 http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-1131
6. (1983). "The Cambridge History of Iran. The Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanian periods". Cambridge University Press.
7. Rachel Lung. (7 September 2011). "Interpreters in Early Imperial China". John Benjamins Publishing Company.
8. [[Eliot Weinberger. Weinberger, E.]], "[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22032 China's Golden Age]", [[The New York Review of Books]], 55:17. Retrieved on 2008-10-19.
9. Hanson, Valerie. (2012). "The Silk Road: A New History". Oxford University Press.
10. [[Richard Foltz]], ''A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East'', London: [[Bloomsbury]], 2019, pp. 4-5.
11. Paul Bergne. (15 June 2007). "The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic". I.B.Tauris.
12. "Stamp-seal; bezel British Museum".
13. Sims-Williams, N.. (December 15, 1985). "ANCIENT LETTERS".
14. Keramidas, Kimon. "SOGDIAN ANCIENT LETTER II". Telling the Sogdian Story: A Freer/Sackler Digital Exhibition Project.
15. "The Sogdian Ancient Letters 1, 2, 3, and 5".
16. Norman, Jeremy. "Aurel Stein Discovers the Sogdian "Ancient Letters" 313 CE to 314 CE".
17. Sogdian Ancient Letter No. 3. Reproduced from Susan Whitfield (ed.), The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (2004) p. 248.
18. "Ancient Letters". Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution..
19. Keramidas, Kimon. "SOGDIAN ANCIENT LETTER III: LETTER TO NANAIDHAT". Telling the Sogdian Story: A Freer/Sackler Digital Exhibition Project.
20. (5 March 2021). "Sogdian letters". History of International Relations.
21. Vaissière, Étienne de la. (2005). "Sogdian Traders: A History". Brill.
22. (2005). "Sogdian Traders". Brill.
23. Livšic, Vladimir A.. (2009). "Symbola Caelestis: Le symbolisme liturgique et paraliturgique dans le monde chrétien". Gorgias Press.
24. Utz, David. (1978). ''Survey of Buddhist Sogdian studies.'' Tokyo: The Reiyukai Library.
25. These pieces consist almost entirely of religious works by Manichaean and Christian writers, including [[Bible translations into Sogdian
26. (2020). "The Epitaph of a Buddhist Lady: A Newly Discovered Chinese-Sogdian Bilingual". Journal of the American Oriental Society.
27. To distinguish long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph can be written before the sign that denotes the long vowel.Clauson, Gerard. 2002. Studies in Turkic and Mongolic linguistics. P.103-104.
28. Gershevitch, Ilya. (1954). ''A Grammar of Manichean Sogdian.'' p.1. Oxford: Blackwell.