6th International Symposium Oriental Studies

The 6 th International Symposium on Oriental Ancient Documents Studies 12 Apollinaria Avrutina Statistical Evaluation of Ancient and Modern Turkic Languages’ Phonological Data in Russian Linguistic Literature The method of quantitative analysis of linguistic data is relatively new in linguistic literature. The first papers on statistical research of the phonologi‑ cal subsystem appeared in European linguistics in the 30es of the 20th c. in the works of the Prague Linguistic Circle. “Phonological statistics” method has been already described in “Grundzüge der Phonologie” by N.S. Trubetz‑ koy. N.S. Troubetzkoy believed that statistical methods could be used for different language systems, including phonological studies, when the subject of study is combinability of phonemes. He noted that “one should not count letters, sounds and phonemes but combinations of phonemes”. Quantitative analysis of different subsystems of language makes possible to build a new typology. There is always a question related to the issue of the methodol‑ ogy, and to what result is expected. Therefore, for a long time the literature focused on the indices of J. Greenberg, whose goal was to identify certain typological characteristics of languages, and who finalized and formalized typological postulates of Edward Sapir. Presently a relatively large quantity of literature on statistics of differ‑ ent languages subsystems has been collected. This material relatively rarely includes the Turkic languages. The presented talk is planned to analyze the work of L.G. Zubkova (who made statistical analysis of vocalic and conso‑ nant structure of the word, as well as counted the distribution of phonemes), V.I. Zolhoev (quantitative analysis of distinctive features of vowels and con‑ sonants in various Turkic languages), Y.V. Tambovtsev (who measured the conditional distance between phonemes to identify a new typology of lan‑ guages), V.B. Kasevich, E.V. Yagunova and A.S. Avrutina (who use indexes of J. Greenberg, readability index of R. Flesch, automated assessment of the quality perception of the text) and others. Key words: Turkic languages, phonology, phonological statistics, quan‑ titative analysis.