В. Г. Гузев. Избранное

346 В. Г. Гузев. Избранное: К 80-летию The hypothesis of the syllabic character of OTRS first suggested by V. Thomsen and subsequently supported by O. Pritsak eliminates the two contradictions made explicit through our phonological analysis of consonan- tal dualism above. If, at some stage in the script’s evolution, the consonantic signs represented syllables whose structure, naturally, included vowels, then the manifestation of the latter’s lingual features in the set and functioning of these signs should be considered normal. It is worth emphasizing that the morphonological characteristics of the Turkic languages seem to favor the formation of a syllabic script. Normally, vowels and consonants succeed one another; vocalic clusters within a syllable are rare, and consonantic clusters are restricted to a number of definite types. In these languages, short monosyllabic words and morphemes predominate (and the latter also favors the emergence of word-syllabic writing systems) 1 . In fact, most roots have a VC structure; roots of the V, VCC, CV, CVC and CVCC type can also serve as the basis of syllabogram values. The second puzzle that the Turkic Runiform script presents is the five different signs for the consonant phoneme /k/. O. Pritsak (1980: 91) and A. Róna-Tas (1987: 12) are in agreement that this large set of signs can be explained by the high frequency of the phoneme /k/ in the Turkic speech. This explanation, however, has no theoretical basis. Or, are we to assume a correlation between the frequency of a phoneme and the number of signs representing it in writing? For my part, I find the following explanation by I. M. Djakonov (1979: 133) of an analogous phenomenon in Etruscan script more convinc- ing: “Especially significant is the existence of the triad c, k, q; these let- ters had the names ‘ke’, ‘ka’, ‘ku’, and were differentiated according to the vowel following the consonant in the text: e, a or u . It is quite clear what this signifies, namely, the existence, at an earlier stage, of a syllabic script where c was read /ke/, k—  /ka/ and q —  /ku/, so that the spelling out of the vowel was superfluous: the signs in question themselves represented the sequence ‘consonant plus vowel’.” Applying this approach to OTRS leads to the suggestion that the five signs under scrutiny initially rendered the syllables: 1) a k, 2) ä k , 3) o k / u k , 4)  ö k/ ü k, and 5) ï q. The third puzzle is the use of “ligatures”, i. e., signs for consonantal clus- ters (sequences of consonants), a matter which has been the subject of vivid discussion in the literature. What consensus there is points in the direction 1 I. M. Djakonov 1979: 10–11.