Syngarmonism as the basis of Turkic syngarmonic orthoepy, orthography, word formation and inflection

Abstract

The article examines the problem of syngarmonism and word formation based on an analysis of Khalel Dosmukhameduly’s work ‘The Law of Syngarmonism in the Kaisak[1]Kirghiz Language’, which was published in Tashkent in 1924. Kh. Dosmukhameduly’s work is a rigorous, high-quality scholarly study of significant value to general and comparative linguistics, Turkology, linguodidactics, and language teaching. In linguistic history, syngarmonism has been described by various terms, including class harmony, distant assimilation, and vowel assimilation. In Turkology, and especially in Turkic linguistics, Dosmukhameduly was the first to apply the term "syngarmonism," describe it in detail, and introduce it into scholarly use based on Kazakh language material. While prominent linguists of the late 19th and early 20th century linguists (I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay and N.S. Trubetskoy, V. Radlov, Е. Polivanov, А. Baitursinuly etc.) referred to the prosodic phenomenon of syngarmonism as vowel harmony, Kh. Dosmukhameduly, in 1924, interpreted it as the harmony of all sounds within a word(both vowels and consonants), and characterized and substantiated his scholarly position in a multi-aspect manner.Kh. Dosmukhameduly demonstrated using extensive linguistic evidence that word formation and inflection in the Turkic languages depend on syngarmonism: all affixation – derivational and inflectional – follows this principle. He concluded that syngarmonizm, the harmony of all sounds in a word (vowels and consonants), underlies both word formation and grammatical inflection. A syngaromoaffix consists of a class (set) of its syngarmovariants, which are attached to the root of a word taking into account its syngarmotype and the features of the final sound of the root (for example, the class (set) of syngarmovariants of the Kazakh plural affix: -lar-, -ler-, -dar-, -der-, -tar-, -ter-). Thus, affix attachment to a word’s root is strictly syngarmonic, defining syngarmonism as a universal phenomenon (law) encompassing the entireword, regardless of syllable count. In other word, all affixal means of forming a new words or another grammatical forms are necessarily syngarmonic. Such methods as comparative analysis, linguo-theoretical description, and syngarmophonological analysis were used, in the course of the research, contributing to the identification of the work's theoretical and practical significance.