Spoken Uyghur.

• Author: Allworth, Edward

The author and his Uyghur informant collaborated to prepare an excellent, substantial descriptive grammar and 15 dialogue units for the modern Uyghur language as indigenous speakers use it mainly in eastern Turkistan (Xinjiang), China. The grammar offers a technical analysis of the present Uyghur language for linguists, but does not provide a system of lessons for teachers or learners of the living language. The grammar refers frequently to European-language phonetics and structures and to modern Turkish, but very seldom to contemporary Uzbek, usually considered the Turkic language closest to Uyghur in what many scholars call the Turki subfamily. The fact that standard written Uzbek, though not always spoken Uzbek, for the most part ignores vowel harmony may explain why Mr. Hahn largely ignores it in his grammatical comparisons. Modern Uyghur in most ways supplants earlier attempts to make Uyghur understandable to English speakers. Two of those also specifically based themselves upon the spoken tongue: Robert Barkley Shaw's pioneering A Sketch of the Turki Language as Spoken in Eastern Turkistan (Kashghar & Yarkand) (Lahore: Central Jail Press, 1875), 153 pages plus 41 pages of Uyghur texts written in the Arabic script and a large, folding chart outlining the verbal conjugations in Uyghur, with translations (not mentioned in Mr. Hahn's bibliography); and E. Denison Ross' and Rachel O. Wingate's Dialogues in the Eastern Turki Dialect on Subjects of Interest to Travellers (London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1934), 48 pages, including a short glossary of less common words. This little book presents the dialogues in both Arabic script and transliteration in parallel columns on the same page, faced by translations into English, giving the learner the advantage of seeing the original text, Romanized transliteration and relevant translation at a glance without turning pages. A third booklet in English, E. N. Nadzhip's Modern Uigur (Moscow: "Nauka" Publishing House, 1971), 157 pages (not listed in the bibliography of Spoken Uyghur), explains the grammar of the written language with quite a few examples in transliteration and gives one-half page as a specimen of the Arabic script employed then, before the official return to Arabic for most Uyghur publishing. In the 110-page reference grammar that opens Spoken Uyghur, a reader will also find a concise presentation of past writing systems and the current modified Arabic alphabet applied to the...