A study in the Uzbek vowel system formation

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370490
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Nagoya University
• Principal Investigator: Ido Shinji 名古屋大学, 国際開発研究科, 准教授 (80419233)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: ウズベク語 / タジク語 / 回回館訳語 / ヘブライ文字 / ペルシア語 / 母音体系 / 連鎖推移 / ブハラ

Outline of Final Research Achievements

I extracted linguistic data from 回回館雑字 (huihuiguan zazi), a New Persian-Chinese glossary compiled in Ming China, and Sefer Tokhen Alilot, a literary (prose) work written more than a century ago in Hebrew script by a Bukharan Jew, and analyzed them to identify changes that the vowel systems of Uzbek and Tajik have undergone in the last centuries. I also analyzed the acoustics of (mainly) vowels in present-day Uzbek and Tajik spoken in Bukhara, Tashkent, Angren, and Dushanbe. Several findings emerged from these analyses; in the Tajik vowel chain shift, the raising of Early New Persian long a preceded the fronting of (long) o, and hence the chain shift was likely a push-chain shift; the vowel system of Bukharan bilinguals in the late 19th-century was a six-member vowel system consisting of i, e, a, o, u, and the open-mid back rounded vowel.

Free Research Field

言語学