Tatar heritage
The Tatars' linguistic and cultural heritage — traces that reach beyond the Estonian Tatars.
Codex Cumanicus and the Cuman language
Cuman and Mišär word comparison
This page lists all the Cuman (Kipchak) words of the Codex Cumanicus and their equivalents in our community's Mišär. Cuman and Mišär stand side by side, so you can see how much of…
Read →The Codex Cumanicus and the Kipchak-Cuman language
The Kipchaks (Cumans) were a Turkic steppe people who, from the 11th to the 13th century, dominated the grasslands between the northern Black Sea coast and the Caspian — a region k…
Read →The Cuman Lord's Prayer
The Cuman Lord's Prayer (the Kipchak-language Pater Noster) is the most famous surviving text in the Cuman — that is, Kipchak — language. It is known in two forms: as a written pra…
Read →The riddles of the Codex Cumanicus — all 50
Pages 119–120 of the German part of the Codex Cumanicus preserve about fifty riddles in Cuman (Kipchak) — the oldest recorded collection of Turkic folklore (the Turkologist Andreas…
Read →Why Mišär is the closest living language to Cuman
In the judgement of the classics of Turkology, the living language closest to the Cuman (Kipchak) of the Codex Cumanicus is Mišär — the language of the Estonian Tatars' ancestors.…
Read →
Turkic languages and writing
Proto-Turkic and the Turkic language family
Proto-Turkic is the reconstructed common ancestor of all the Turkic languages — a language preserved in no writing, but rebuilt by the comparative method from later languages. It i…
Read →The Mišär Tatar dialect
The Mišär dialect (also the western dialect) is one of the main dialects of the Tatar language, spoken mostly outside Tatarstan. The learning site learntatar.com stresses that Mišä…
Read →The Old Turkic script
The Old Turkic script (also the Orkhon-Yenisei script, or the Turkic runes) is the oldest writing system of the Turkic language — the alphabet in which the Turkic inscriptions of t…
Read →The Orkhon inscriptions
The Orkhon inscriptions are the oldest surviving extensive text in a Turkic language — the oldest written root of Turkic. They are stone memorial steles in the Orkhon valley of cen…
Read →The Tatar language
Tatar is a Turkic language belonging to the Volga group of the Kipchak branch (the Kipchak-Bulgar subgroup). It has an estimated four to six million native speakers — Wikipedia giv…
Read →
Turkic traces in Russian
Souvenirs from the Golden Horde: Turkic and Tatar words in Russian
Over its history Russian has absorbed a substantial layer of Turkic-origin vocabulary — much of it in the Middle Ages through the Golden Horde and the Kazan Tatars. There is no exa…
Read →Turkic and Tatar heritage in Russian culture
The Golden Horde — the Tatar-Mongol state of the Kipchak steppe — ruled the Russian lands from about 1240 to 1480. Two and a half centuries of overlordship left a deep Turkic-Tatar…
Read →