- published: 28 Oct 2015
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Tatar (Cyrillic: Татар) was one of the five major tribal confederations (khanlig) in the Mongolian plateau in the 12th century. The name "Tatar" was first recorded in history in 732.
The Tatars inhabited the north-eastern Gobi in the 5th century and the Tatars became subjects of Khitan Liao Dynasty in the 10th century. After the fall of the Liao Dynasty, the Tatars experienced pressure from the Jin Dynasty and were urged to fight against the other Mongol tribes. The Tatars lived on the fertile pastures around the lakes Hulun and Buir and occupied a trade route to China in the 12th century.
After the establishment of the Mongol Empire, the Tatars were subjugated by the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan. Under the leadership of his grandson Batu Khan, they moved westwards, driving with them many of the Turkic peoples toward the plains of Russia.
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty-five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.
Turkic languages are spoken as a native language by some 165 to 200 million people; and the total number of Turkic speakers is over 300 million, including speakers of a second language. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish proper, or Anatolian [and Balkan] Turkish, the speakers of which account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers.
Characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. There is also a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, Balkan Gagauz Turkish and Oghuz influenced Crimean Tatar.
The characteristic features of the Turkic languages are vowel harmony, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes and other affixes, and lack of noun classes or grammatical gender. Subject–object–verb word order is universal within the family. All of these distinguishing characteristics are shared with the Mongolic, Tungusic, and Korean language families, as well as (with the exception of vowel harmony) with Japonic, which are considered by some linguists to be genetically linked with the Turkic languages in an Altaic language family.