About "Bagatur" word, question.

Quite the contrary, we never hear the end of some extremist genetic nationalists and their endless claims about how Turks arn't really Turks, how they mixed with others and so on.

Originally posted by barbar Toahrians (as a part of Yuechi) were originally also Nomadic, who were living in the east of Tarim and west of Huns. They had same culture as those of the Huns.

The Tokharians were not part of the Y�e-Chi, it was vice versa (Tokharian is a major language family within Indo-European; intrestingly, unlike Indo-Iranian and Slavic, it belongs to the centum-group and is closer related to the Romanic and Germanic languages). Like all earlier Indo-European peoples, they were semi-nomadic, and they had a strong linguistic influence on the Altaic peoples. As I have already explained in another thread, the ancient Turkic military title "Yabghu" was borrowed from Tokharian, while the Turks (especially Uyghurs) also borrowed countless words from neighbouring Indo-European languages, especially from the old Scythian and Sogdian languages. The Sogdian  script is still the base of the modern Mongolian script. Manichaeism and Buddhism - borth introduced to the Uyghurs by Sogdians, were the main religions of the early "Iranized Turks" (Uyghurs)  until the victory of Islam. Considering the small numbers of nomadic peoples, it is more likely that the early Turks were absorbed into the much larger settled Non-Turkic populations, while the Turkic languages replaced the native tongues (this happened in Uzbekistan and in modern Turkey, where the settled populations are mostly descendants of the earlier Non-Turks who have adopted the Turkic language of the invaders in the course of time). This is how all nomadic languages evolved, especially the Indo-European languages (50% of the world speaks an Indo-European languages). It is totally impossible that 3-4 billion people today are direct descendants of a small group of proto-Indo-Europeans who lived in the steppes of Ukrine 5000 years ago. The Indo-European languages spread through language replacement. That's also the reason why many Indo-European speakers today are not genetically related (see Indians and northern Europeans: related languages, but totally different ancestry). The same is also true for the Turks (see the Caucasian Anatolian Turks and the Mongoloid eastern Turks): related languages, but totally different ancestry. Language replacement by a small ruling elite was nothing uncommon in history.

This is also the reason why this entire idea of "Turan", "Turanian race", "Turkish unity" or whatever is totally baseless, just like the "Aryan nation" dreams of the Nazis.


Edited by DerDoc - 18-Apr-2007 at 05:47