Product Description

The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from the Balkans to the Arctic Ocean and from Southern Iran to the great wall of China. Turkic Languages is the first reference book for almost forty years to bring together detailed discussions of the historic development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family. Seen from a linguistic topology point of view, Turkic languages are particularly interesting because of their astonishing morphosyntactic regularity, their vast geographical distribution and their great stability over time.

Each chapter combines modern linguistic analysis with traditional historical linguistics and a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. Written by an international team of experts, Turkic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, Turcology and Near Eastern and Oriental Studies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3129717 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 504 pages

Customer Reviews

Useful, but wildly overpriced
This is a good source for readers to get a feel for the Turkic language family as a whole, as well as an introduction to the various languages that make it up. The depth of coverage varies from one language to another: Turkish and Uzbek are the most extensively described, while some of the others get more cursory treatment. All of the descriptions are written in accord with the approach propounded by the major editor of the book, Lars Johanson. His own analysis is not always accurate, however, as can be seen in some places in this book.

The price of the book, at 320 dollars, is outrageous, and has doubled since it was first published. I thus suspect most potential readers will seek copies in libraries and then photocopy the parts that are of most interest to them.