Sakha language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Sakha Саха тыла Saxa tyla |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Russia | |
| Region: | Sakha | |
| Total speakers: | ~363,000 | |
| Language family: | Altaic[1] (controversial) Turkic Northern Turkic Sakha |
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| Writing system: | Cyrillic alphabet | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | Sakha Republic | |
| Regulated by: | no official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | sah | |
| ISO 639-3: | sah | |
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| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Sakha, or Yakut, is a Turkic language with around 363,000 speakers spoken in the Sakha Republic in the Russian Federation. Its speakers are known as the Sakha or the Yakuts.
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[edit] Classification
Sakha is a member of the Northern Turkic family of languages, which includes Shor, Tuvan, and Dolgan in addition to Sakha. The Northern Turkic family is a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which some linguists believe to be member of the disputed Altaic language family.
Like Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish, Sakha has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually Subject Object Verb.
[edit] Geographic distribution
Sakha is spoken mainly in the Sakha Republic. It is also used by ethnic Sakha in Khabarovsk Region and a small diaspora in other parts of the Russian Federation, Turkey, and other parts of the world. Dolgan language, a close relative of Sakha, considered by some a dialect, is spoken by Dolgans in Krasnoyarsk Region. Sakha is widely used as a lingua franca by other ethnic minorities in the Sakha Republic.
[edit] Sounds
One characteristic feature of Sakha is vowel harmony. For example, if the first vowel of a Sakha word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel: кэлин (kelin) "back": э (e) is open unrounded front, и (i) is close unrounded front.
- Sakha Open World - mp3's of Sakha Radio
[edit] Consonants
| Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | p | b | t | d | c | ɟ | k | ɡ | ||||
| Nasals | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||
| Fricatives | s | x | ɣ | h | ||||||||
| Tap | ɾ | |||||||||||
| Approximant | j, j̃ | |||||||||||
| Lateral approximants |
l | |||||||||||
[edit] Vowels
| Short | Long | Diphthong | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | Open | Close | Open | |||
| Front | Unrounded | i | e | iː | eː | ie |
| Rounded | y | ø | yː | øː | yø | |
| Back | Unrounded | ɯ | a | ɯː | aː | ɯa |
| Rounded | u | o | uː | oː | uo | |
[edit] Writing system
Sakha is written using the Cyrillic script: the modern Sakha alphabet, established in 1939 by the Soviet Union, consists of the usual Russian characters but with 5 additional letters: Ҕҕ, Ҥҥ, Өө, Һһ, Үү.
| Cyrillic | IPA | |
|---|---|---|
| А а | /a/ | |
| Б б | /b/ | |
| В в | /v/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Г г | /ɡ/ | |
| Ҕ ҕ | /ɣ, ʁ/ | |
| Д д | /d/ | |
| Дь дь | /ɟ/ | |
| Е е | /e, je/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Ё ё | /jo/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Ж ж | /ʒ/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| З з | /z/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| И и | /i/ | |
| Й й | /j, j̃/ | Nasalization of the glide is not indicated in the orthography |
| К к | /k, q/ | |
| Л л | /l/ | |
| М м | /m/ | |
| Н н | /n/ | |
| Ҥ ҥ | /ŋ/ | |
| Нь нь | /ɲ/ | |
| О о | /o/ | |
| Ө ө | /ø/ | |
| П п | /p/ | |
| Р р | /ɾ/ | |
| С с | /s/ | |
| Һ һ | /h/ | |
| Т т | /t/ | |
| У у | /u/ | |
| Ү ү | /y/ | |
| Ф ф | /f/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Х х | /x/ | |
| Ц ц | /ʦ/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Ч ч | /c/ | |
| Ш ш | /ʃ/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Щ щ | /ɕː/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Ъ ъ | /◌./ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Ы ы | /ɯ/ | |
| Ь ь | /◌ʲ/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Э э | /e/ | |
| Ю ю | /ju/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Я я | /ja/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
[edit] Grammar
[edit] Syntax
The typical word order can be summarized as subject adverb - object - verb; possessor - possessed; noun - adjective.
[edit] Nouns
Nouns have plural and singular forms. The plural is formed with the suffix /-LAr/, which may surface as [-лар (-lar)], [-лэр (-ler)], [-лөр (-lør)], [-лор (-lor)], [-тар (-tar)], [-тэр (-ter)], [-төр (-tør)], [-тор (-tor)], [-дар (-dar)], [-дэр (-der)], [-дөр (-dør)], [-дор (-dor)], [-нар (-nar)], [-нэр (-ner)], [-нөр (-nør)], or [-нор (-nor)], depending on the preceding consonants and vowels. The plural is used only when referring to a number of things collectively, not when specifying an amount. Nouns have no gender, but the pronoun system distinguishes between human and non-human in the third person, using кини (kini) to refer to human beings and ол (ol) to refer to all other things.
[edit] Pronouns
Personal pronouns in Sakha distinguish between first, second, and third persons and singular and plural number.
| Singular | Plural | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | мин (min) | биһиги (bihigi) | ||
| 2nd | эн (en) | эһиги (ehigi) | ||
| 3rd | кини (kini) | кинилэр (kiniler) |
[edit] Questions
Question words in Sakha remain in-situ; they do not move to the front of the sentence. Sample question words include: туох (tuox) "what", ким (kim) "who", хайдах (xaydax) "how", хас (xas) "how much", ханна (xanna) "where", and ханнык (xannɯk) "which".
[edit] Literature
The first printing in Yakut was a part of a Nicolaas Witsen's book published in 1692 in Amsterdam.
[edit] References
Kirişçioğlu, M. Fatih (1999). Saha (Yakut) Türkçesi Grameri. Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu. ISBN 975-16-0587-3.
Krueger, John R. (1962). Yakut Manual. Bloomington: Indiana U Press.
[edit] See also
- Yakuts
- Sakha
- Dolgan language
- Semyon Novgorodov - the inventor of the first IPA-based Yakut alphabet
[edit] External links
[edit] Language-related
- Comparison of Yakut and Mongolian vocabulary
- Russian translations of Yakut texts - heroic poetry, fairy tales, legends, proverbs, etc.
- Sakhalyy suruk - Sakha Unicode fonts and Keyboard Layouts for PC
- Sakhatyla.ru - On-line Yakut-Russian, Russian-Yakut dictionary
[edit] Content in Sakha
- Sakha Open World - Орто Дойду - A platform to promote the Yakut Language on the web; News, Lyrics, Music, Fonts, Forum, VideoNews (in Yakut, Unicode)
- Baayaga village website - news and stories about and by the people of Baayaga (in Yakut)
- Kyym.ru - site of Yakut newspaper
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| Bolgar | Bolgar† | Chuvash | Hunnic*† | Khazar† | ||
| Uyghur | Old Turkic† | Aini²| Chagatay† | Ili Turki | Lop | Uyghur | Uzbek | ||
| Kypchak | Baraba | Bashkir | Crimean Tatar¹ | Cuman† | Karachay-Balkar | Karaim | Karakalpak | Kazakh | Kipchak† | Krymchak | Kumyk | Nogai | Tatar | Urum¹|Altay | Kyrgyz | ||
| Oghuz | Afshar | Azerbaijani | Crimean Tatar¹ | Gagauz | Khorasani Turkish | Ottoman Turkish† | Pecheneg† | Qashqai | Salar | Turkish | Turkmen | Urum¹ | ||
| Khalaj | Khalaj | ||
| Northeastern | Chulym | Dolgan | Fuyü Gïrgïs | Khakas | Northern Altay | Shor | Tofa | Tuvan | Western Yugur | Sakha / Yakut | ||
| Notes: ¹Listed in more than one group, ²Mixed language, *Disputed, †Extinct | |||
