No Aryan or Semitic language has preserved a similar freedom in the harmonic arrangement of its vowels, while traces of it have been found among the most distant members of the Turanian family, as in Hungarian, Mongolian, Turkish, the Yakut, spoken in the north of Siberia, and in dialects spoken on the eastern frontiers of India.

For completeness' sake I add a short account of the Turanian family, chiefly taken from my Survey of Languages, published 1855:—

Tungusic Class.

The Tungusic branch extends from China northward to Siberia and westward to 113°, where the river Tunguska partly marks its frontier. The Tungusic tribes in Siberia are under Russian sway. Other Tungusic tribes belong to the Chinese empire, and are known by the name of Mandshu, a name taken after they had conquered China in 1644, and founded the present imperial dynasty.

Mongolic Class.

The Mongolic language, although spoken (but not continuously) from China as far as the Volga, has given rise to but few dialects. Next to Tungusic, the Mongolic is the poorest language of the Turanian family, and the scantiness of grammatical terminations accounts for the fact that, as a language, it has remained very much unchanged. There is, however, a distinction between the language as spoken by the Eastern, Western, and Northern tribes, and incipient traces of grammatical life have lately been discovered by Castrén, the great Swedish traveller and Turanian philologist, in the spoken dialect of the Buriäts. In it the persons of the verb are distinguished by affixes, while, according to the rules of Mongolic grammar, no other dialect distinguishes in the verb between amo, amas, amat.

The Mongols who live in Europe have fixed their tents on each side of the Volga and along the coast of the Caspian Sea near Astrachan. Another colony is found south-east of Sembirsk. They belong to the Western branch, and are Ölöts or Kalmüks, who left their seats on the Koko-nur, and entered Europe in 1662. They proceeded from the clans Dürbet and Torgod, but most of the Torgods returned again in 1770, and their descendants are now scattered over the Kirgisian steppes.

Turkic Class.

The most ancient name by which the Turkic tribes of Central Asia were known to the Chinese was Hiung-nu. These Hiung-nu founded an empire (206 b. c.) comprising a large portion of Asia, west of China. Engaged in frequent wars with the Chinese, they were defeated at last in the middle of the first century after Christ. Thereupon they divided into a northern and southern empire; and, after the southern Hiung-nu had become subjects of China, they attacked the northern Hiung-nu, together with the Chinese, and, driving them out of their seats between the rivers Amur and Selenga, and the Altai mountains, westward, they are supposed to have given the first impulse to the inroads of the barbarians into Europe. In the beginning of the third century, the Mongolic and Tungusic tribes, who had filled the seats of the northern Hiung-nu, had grown so powerful as to attack the southern Hiung-nu and drive them from their territories. This occasioned a second migration of Asiatic tribes towards the west.

These facts, gleaned chiefly from Chinese historians, show from the very earliest times the westward tendency of the Turkish nations. In 568 Turkish tribes occupied the country between the Volga and the sea of Azov, and numerous reinforcements have since strengthened their position in those parts.

The northern part of Persia, west of the Caspian Sea, Armenia, the south of Georgia, Shirwan, and Dagestan, harbor a Turkic population, known by the general name of Turkman or Kisil-bash (Red-caps). They are nomadic robbers, and their arrival in these countries dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

East of the Caspian Sea the Turkman tribes are under command of the Usbek-Khans of Khiva, Fergana, and Bukhára. They call themselves, however, not subjects but guests of these Khans. Still more to the east the Turkmans are under Chinese sovereignty, and in the south-west they reach as far as Khorasan and other provinces of Persia.

Another Turkish tribe are the Nogái, west of the Caspian, and also north of the Black Sea. To the beginning of the seventeenth century they lived north-east of the Caspian, and the steppes on the left of the Irtish bore their name. Pressed by the Kalmüks, a Mongolic tribe, the Nogáis advanced westward as far as Astrachan. Peter I. transferred them thence to the north of the Caucasian mountains, where they still graze their flocks on the shores of the Kuban and the Kuma. One horde, that of Kundur, remained on the Volga, subject to the Kalmüks.

Another tribe of Turkish origin in the Caucasus are the Bazianes. They now live near the sources of the Kuban, but before the fifteenth century within the town Majari, on the Kuma.

A third Turkish tribe in the Caucasus are the Kumüks on the rivers Sunja, Aksai, and Koisu: now subjects of Russia, though under native princes.

The tribes near the Lake of Aral are called Kara-Kalpak. They are subject partly to Russia, partly to the Khans of Khiva.

The Turks of Siberia, commonly called Tatars, are partly original settlers, who crossed the Ural, and founded the Khanat of Sibir, partly later colonists. Their chief towns are Tobolsk, Yeniseisk, and Tomsk. Separate tribes are the Uran'hat on the Chulym, and the Barabas in the steppes between the Irtish and the Ob.

The dialects of these Siberian Turks are considerably intermingled with foreign words, taken from Mongolic, Samoyedic, or Russian sources. Still they resemble one another closely in all that belongs to the original stock of the language.

Southern Siberia is the mother country of the Kirgis, one of the most numerous tribes of Turco-Tataric origin. The Kirgis lived originally between the Ob and Yenisei, where Mongolic tribes settled among them. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Russians became acquainted with the Eastern Kirgis, then living along the Yenisei. In 1606 they had become tributary to Russia, and after several wars with two neighboring tribes, they were driven more and more south-westward, till they left Siberia altogether at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They now live at Burut, in Chinese Turkestan, together with the Kirgis of the “Great Horde,” near the town of Kashgar, north as far as the Irtish.

Another tribe is that of the Western Kirgis, or Kirgis-Kasak, who are partly independent, partly tributary to Russia and China.

Of what are called the three Kirgis Hordes, from the Caspian Sea east as far as Lake Tenghiz, the Small Horde is fixed in the west, between the rivers Yemba and Ural; the Great Horde in the east; while the most powerful occupies the centre between the Sarasu and Yemba, and is called the Middle Horde. Since 1819, the Great Horde has been subject to Russia. Other Kirgis tribes, though nominally subject to Russia, are really her most dangerous enemies.

The Turks of Asia Minor and Syria came from Khorasan and Eastern Persia, and are Turkmans, or remnants of the Seljuks, the rulers of Persia during the Middle Ages. The Osmanli, whom we are accustomed to call Turks par excellence, and who form the ruling portion of the Turkish empire, must be traced to the same source. They are now scattered over the whole Turkish empire in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and their number amounts to between 11,000,000 and 12,000,000. They form the landed gentry, the aristocracy, and bureaucracy of Turkey; and their language, the Osmanli, is spoken by persons of rank and education, and by all government authorities in Syria, in Egypt, at Tunis, and at Tripoli. In the southern provinces of Asiatic Russia, along the borders of the Caspian, and through the whole of Turkestan, it is the language of the people. It is heard even at the court of Teheran, and is understood by official personages in Persia.

Europe now had respite, but not long; Timur died, and with him his empire fell to pieces, while the Osmanic army rallied again under Mahomet I. (1413), and re-attained its former power under Murad II. (1421). Successful in Asia, Murad sent his armies back to the Danube, and after long-continued campaigns, and powerful resistance from the Hungarians and Slaves under Hunyad, he at last gained two decisive victories; Varna in 1444, and Kossova in 1448. Constantinople could no longer be held, and the Pope endeavored in vain to rouse the chivalry of Western Europe to a crusade against the Turks. Mahomet II. succeeded in 1451, and on the 26th of May, 1453, Constantinople, after a valiant resistance, fell, and became the capital of the Turkish empire.

In the grammar of the Turkic languages, on the contrary, we have before us a language of perfectly transparent structure, and a grammar the inner workings of which we can study, as if watching the building of cells in a crystal bee-hive. An eminent orientalist remarked “we might imagine Turkish to be the result of the deliberations of some eminent society of learned men;” but no such society could have devised what the mind of man produced, left to itself in the steppes of Tatary, and guided only by its innate laws, or by an instinctive power as wonderful as any within the realm of nature.

Let us examine a few forms. “To love,” in the most general sense of the word, or love, as a root, is in Turkish sev. This does not yet mean “to love,” which is sevmek, or “love” as a substantive, which is sevgu or sevi; but it only expresses the general idea of loving in the abstract. This root, as we remarked before, can never be touched. Whatever syllables may be added for the modification of its meaning, the root itself must stand out in full prominence like a pearl set in diamonds. It must never be changed or broken, assimilated or modified, as in the English I fall, I fell, I take, I took, I think, I thought, and similar forms. With this one restriction, however, we are free to treat it at pleasure.

Let us suppose we possessed nothing like our conjugation, but had to express such ideas as I love, thou lovest, and the rest, for the first time. Nothing would seem more natural now than to form an adjective or a participle, meaning “loving,” and then add the different pronouns, as I loving, thou loving, &c. Exactly this the Turks have done. We need not inquire at present how they produced what we call a participle. It was a task, however, by no means so facile as we now conceive it. In Turkish, one participle is formed by er. Sev+er would, therefore, mean lov+er or lov+ing. Thou, in Turkish, is sen, and as all modificatory syllables are placed at the end of the root, we get sev-er-sen, thou lovest. You in Turkish is siz; hence sev-er-siz, you love. In these cases the pronouns and the terminations of the verb coincide exactly. In other persons the coincidences are less complete, because the pronominal terminations have sometimes been modified, or, as in the third person singular, sever, dropped altogether as unnecessary. A reference to other cognate languages, however, where either the terminations or the pronouns themselves have maintained a more primitive form, enables us to say that in the original Turkish verb, all persons of the present were formed by means of pronouns appended to this participle sever. Instead of “I love, thou lovest, he loves,” the Turkish grammarian says, “lover-I, lover-thou, lover.”

But these personal terminations are not the same in the imperfect as in the present.

We need not inquire as yet into the origin of the di, added to form the imperfect; but it should be stated that in the first person plural of the imperfect a various reading occurs in other Tataric dialects, and that miz is used there instead of k. Now, looking at these terminations m, ñ, i, miz, ñiz, and ler, we find that they are exactly the same as the possessive pronouns used after nouns. As the Italian says fratelmo, my brother, and as in Hebrew we say, El-i, God (of) I, i.e. my God, the Tataric languages form the phrases “my house, thy house, his house,” by possessive pronouns appended to substantives. A Turk says,—

We may hence infer that in the imperfect these pronominal terminations were originally taken in a possessive sense, and that, therefore, what remains after the personal terminations are removed, sever-di, was never an adjective or a participle, but must have been originally a substantive capable of receiving terminal possessive pronouns; that is, the idea originally expressed by the imperfect could not have been “loving-I,” but “love of me.”

The most ingenious part of Turkish is undoubtedly the verb. Like Greek and Sanskrit, it exhibits a variety of moods and tenses, sufficient to express the nicest shades of doubt, of surmise, of hope, and supposition. In all these forms the root remains intact, and sounds like a key-note through all the various modulations produced by the changes of person, number, mood, and time. But there is one feature so peculiar to the Turkish verb, that no analogy can be found in any of the Aryan languages—the power of producing new verbal bases by the mere addition of certain letters, which give to every verb a negative, or causative, or reflexive, or reciprocal meaning.

To each of these three forms a causative sense may be imparted by the addition of the syllable dir. Thus,

Each of these six forms may again be turned into a passive by the addition of il. Thus,