Altaj Sarsenovič Amanžolov (Алтай Сарсенович Аманжолов; Altay Sersenulı Amanjolov, born 1934 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR) is a Kazakhi Turkologist. Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... 1934 (MCMXXXIV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Map showing Almatys location in Kazakhstan Almaty Orthodox church Mosque Almaty (Алматы; formerly known as Alma-Ata, also Vernyj, Vyernyi (Верный) in Imperial Russia) is the largest city in Kazakhstan, with a population of 1,185,900 (2004) (8% of the population of Kazakhstan) citizens. ... State motto: Барлық елдердің пролетарлары, бірігіңдер! (Workers of the world, unite!) Official language None. ...

Biography

He graduated in 1957 at the Eastern Languages Institute of Moscow State University, in Turkic philology. 1957-1960 and 1964-1966 at the Academy of Sciences, Kazakh SSR, 1966-1979 at lecturing in Kazakh language at the Kazakh State Women Pedagogical Institute. In 1975 he submitted his doctoral thesis on "Materials and research in the history of Old Turkic writing". 1979-1995 dean of the General Linguistics Faculty at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University Moscow State University M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russian: Московский государственный университет имени М.В.Ломоносова, often abbreviated МГУ, MSU, MGU) is the largest and the oldest university in Russia, founded in 1755. ... State motto: Барлық елдердің пролетарлары, бірігіңдер! (Workers of the world, unite!) Official language None. ... Kazakh, also Kazak, Qazaq, Khazakh, Kosach, and Kaisak (Қазақ тілі in Cyrillic, Qazaq tili in the Latin alphabet, and قازاق تءىلءي in the Arabic alphabet) is a Western Turkic language closely related to Kyrgyz, Nogai and Karakalpak. ... Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (Kazakh: Əл Фараби атындағы Қазақ Ұлттық Университеті), often shortened to Al-Farabi University, is a university in Almaty, Kazakhstan. ...

Amanzholov lectured for one year at the Black Sea Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey, in 1993/1994. Since 1995, he is a full member of the Kazakhstan Academy of Humanities. Trabzon, formerly known as Trebizond (Modern Greek: Τραπεζούντα, Trapezoúnta; Ancient Greek: , Trapezoûs), is a city on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey and the capital of Trabzon Province. ...

Sumero-Turkic

In chapter 9 of his 2003 book on the Old Turkic script, Amanzholov presents "more than twenty indisputable lexical coincidences between the Sumerian and Turkic languages that ascend to a Proto-Turkic language or a status of the language even before the migration of the 'Sumerians' to the Mesopotamia", a statement that is untenable in mainstream historical linguistics, and reminiscent of the Pan-Turkist national mysticist "Sun Language Theory of Turkish nationalism, equating e.g. Sumerian UTU "Sun" with a reconstructed Proto-Turkic *ütü "to singe, sear". Consistent with the "Sun Language Theory", Amanzholov concludes that "Proto-Turks" migrated to Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC, giving rise to Sumer, the world's first literate civilization. After listing his proposed Sumerian-Turkic cognates, Amanzholov bemoans that he had been couselled against publishing these sensational findings in his PhD thesis of 1970, and that they had been stolen by Oljas Suleimenov who published them as his own in his Asia (Alma-Ata, 1975), and who later had to officially renounce the hypothesis, since Sumero-Turkic unity was "forbidden in Soviet Turkology". Sumerian ( native tongue) was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BCE. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language in the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ... The Proto-Turkic language is the proto-language of the family of Turkic languages that predates the separation of the Turkic peoples in the course of the Turkic expansion from ca. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time. ... Pan-Turkism is a political movement aimed at uniting the various Turkic peoples into modern political states. ... National mysticism is the use of occult, pseudoscientific, or pseudohistorical beliefs to back up nationalistic claims. ... The Sun Language Theory is a linguistic theory proposing that all human languages are descendents of one Central Asian primal language. ... Turkish Nationalism is a political ideology that promotes and glorifies the Turkish people, as either a national, ethnic or linguistic group. ... In Sumerian mythology, Utu is the offspring of Nanna and Ningal and is the god of the sun and of justice. ... Sumer (or Å umer) was the earliest known civilization of the ancient Near East, located in the southern part of Mesopotamia (southeastern Iran) from the time of the earliest records in the mid 4th millennium BC until the rise of Babylonia in the late 3rd millennium BC. The term Sumerian applies...

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Amanzholov found himself free to pursue the Sumero-Turkic cause, communicating with Turkish author O. N. Tuna, who had published the same hypothesis in Turkey ^[1], where the authorities were more friendly towards pseudohistorical discoveries to the effect that "at least in 3500 BC the Turks are found in the eastern part of Turkey" (Tuna 1997, p.49). Pseudohistory is a pejorative term applied to texts which purport to be historical in nature but which depart from standard historiographical conventions in a way which undermines their conclusions. ...

Old Turkic alphabets

Somewhat less out-of-touch with mainstream chronology, Amanzholov also insists on reading two inscriptions of Scythia, found in the Irtysh and Issyk kurgans and dated to ca. the 4th century BC, as "Proto-Turkic runes" (p. 306). While mainstream scholarship assumes these inscriptions to record the Scythian language, accepting the Orkhon inscriptions of the 7th century as the oldest known traces of Turkic languages, the Orkhon script is likely derived from "Scythian" variants of the Aramaic alphabet, like the Sogdian script. Approximate extent of Scythia and Sarmatia in the 1st century BC (the orange background shows the spread of Eastern Iranian languages, among them Scytho-Sarmatian). ... drawing of the Issyk inscription The Issyk kurgan, in south-eastern Kazakhstan, less than 20 km east from the Talgar alluvial fan, near Issyk, was discovered in 1969. ... Scythian and Sarmatian are the names of the East Iranian dialects spoken by the Scythian/Sarmatian tribes of cattlebreeders in Southern Russia between 8th century BC and 5th century AD. The two branches are divided mainly chronologically, rather than geographically: Scythian - archaic version; mainly during classic antiquity Sarmatian Sometimes, the... Orhon aymag (Орхон аймаг) is one of the 21 aymags (provinces) of Mongolia. ... Bilingual inscription (Greek and Aramaic) by the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great, 3rd century BC. The Aramaic alphabet is an abjad alphabet designed for writing the Aramaic language. ... The Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of Aramaic alphabet. ...

Publications

Amanzholov authored five monographs in Russian and Kazakh.

• Glagol'noe upravlenie v iazyke drevneturkskikh pamiatnikov ("Verbal inflection in the language of the Old Turkic monuments"), Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Nauka", 1969.
• "Turkic runic graphics", Almaty, KazGU, three parts, 1980-1985
• Babalar sözi, Peking: Ülttar baspasy, 1988, 70 pp. (Kazakh)
• Ortak asyl miras - Ortak asyl miras, Trabzon, 1994, (Turkish and Kazakh);
• Türki filologiyasy jene jazu Tarihi, Almaty, Sanat, 1996, 128 pp. (Kazakh);
• Qazaqsha-Oryssha Lingvistikalyq Terminologiia Sozdigi : Kazakhsko-Russkii Slovar Lingvisticheskoi Terminologii ("Kazakh-Russian dictionary of linguistic terminology"). Almaty, Qazaq universiteti (1997), ISBN 9965408017, 2nd ed. 1999.
• История и теория древнетюркского письма ("History and Theory of the Old Turkic script"), Mektep, Kazakhstan (2003), ISBN 9965162042.

Nauka (Russian: , lit. ...

References