Monday, 2 June 2014
There's an idea among linguists of a macro-Altaic family linking Turkish with Mongolian, as well as Korean and some argue even Japanese. The Turks certainly originated somewhere around the Altai and Tien Shan mountains, and were linguistically and culturally related to fellow nomadic peoples like the Mongols, who were, however, somewhat farther east around the Gobi Desert.
The Turks are not indigenous to Anatolia, they migrated to current Turkestan north of the Iranian Plateau, and were converted to Islam by the Persians. Afterwards they came to dominate the Middle-East under the Seljuk Empire, but that was, curiously enough, destroyed by the Mongols.
Fleeing the wrath of the Mongols and seeking pastures for their flocks and horses, they entered Anatolia, which was then Greek-speaking, with perhaps some of the older Indo-European languages of the peninsula like Lydian still being spoken.
If so, they were soon assimilated by the Turks, who dominated the interior. For a long time the Greeks continued to predominate on the coasts of Asia Minor, especially in Pontus and Ionia. But these were finally expelled in 1923 following Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, and the exchange between Greece and the Turkish Republic.
It's interesting to note that Indo-European languages extended at one time unbroken from Iberia to the Ganges. The Scythians and Sarmatians who inhabited the steppes of southern Russia and the Ukraine were nomadic Iranian peoples. But the links were broke by the Turks in Anatolia and Central Asia. As Turks separate Greeks and Bulgarians from the Kurds, the nearest Indo-European speakers. At the same time Turkic peoples in Central Asia separate the Slavic Russians to the north from the Persians to the south.
The word Turk itself appears to mean simply ancestry or lineage. It would seem as if it were some larger identification, like a tribal unit, to which early Turks associated themselves with.
- Kaiser