ABSTRACT
East Old Turkic, often referred to with the simplifying term ‘Old Turkic’, is used in three text corpora. Inscriptions in the runiform script of the seventh–tenth centuries found in the territory of the second Türk empire, the Uyghur steppe empire, and the Yenisey basin. The inscriptions of the steppe empires feature numerous horse color terms. Old Uyghur texts embrace legal, literary, medical, folkloric, and astrological material. Lexical copying, which is mainly nominal, occurs from Chinese, Soghdian, Sanskrit, Tokharian, and Arabic-Persian. The scripts are relatively ambiguous. The runiform script is an exquisite example of fine sense for phonetic details. Judging from the written forms, sound copies from Chinese, Soghdian, Sanskrit, Tokharian, and Arabic-Persian seem to be adapted to Turkic phonology and phonotactics. Nonfinite verb forms are action nominals, participant nominals, and converbs. The nominals can be used attributively or with nominal heads.
