В. Г. Гузев. Избранное

485 The Turkic Runic script: Is the hypothesis of its indigenous origin no more viable? talized allophones of a. Turkic consonant), then surprisingly the use of two signs for the phoneme j. which ( as it is clear from the remark of N. S. Tru- betskoy quoted above) does not and cannot posses the allophones in question. The solution to the riddle seems to be promoted., on the one hand, by the fact that V. Thomsen, taking into account the increased number of signs (38) presumed to have to do not with an ordinary alphabetical script (the normal number of the letters is approximately 30), but with a syllabary, on the other hand, by all that we know about the vocalic signs in the OTRS. It would be appropriate to recall that V. Thomsen succeeded first in dis- covering the three following vocalic letters: o (/u/, /o/), I ( /y/, /i/), ü (/ö/,/ü/); later the letter a (/a/, /ä/) was established. Besides, only vocalic signs were able to be both incised or omitted and the last one occurred only in the abso- lute fina1 position 1 . As regards the Yenisei-Tuba type of the OTRS (which, as is nowadays generally admitted, is not older than the Orkhon one) it pos- sessed in addition one vocalic sign more: Ğ for /ä/ and /é/. It is absolutely natural to suggest that the OTRS represented by the inscrip- tions was an alphabetic-syllabic script, which might have already evolved in some way. It might have left behind the pictorial stages (the pictographic and idiographic), the word-syllabic one and — most probably — the syllabic stage. By the time of the creation of Orkhon and Yenisei-Tuba inscriptions it might be losing its syllabic quality,-elaborating the signs for vowels; the syllabograms might be regenerating into consonantic signs 2 . Such a suggestion would signify that all the eleven pairs of consonantic signs originally had represented 22 syllables of one of the typical Turkic types. The fact that the “vocalic” sign a/ä is always omitted in the absolute initial position and does always occur in the absolute final position brought O. Pritsak to the correct conclusion: it must have been of the VC (vowel plus consonant) type 3 . 1 Thomsen V.Samlede Afhandlinger. Tredje Bind. Kobenhavn. MCMXXII. P. 12–14. 2 Polivanov E. D. Op. cit., p. 85; cf.: Pritsak O. Op. cit., p. 85–86; Дьяконов И. М. Предисловие, И. Фридрих, История письма, М., 1979. Р. 14. 3 Pritsak O. Op. cit., p. 85 (According to O. Pritsak, one of the fragments found in Toyoq (Turfan, 1905) and published by A. von Le C o q (Köktürkisches aııs Turfan “Sitzungs�- berichte d. Königlichen Preussischen Akadernie d. Wissenschaften. Phil.-hist. Klasse”, Vol. 4–1, 1909, P. 1047–1061) serves as an evidence in favour of this conclusion: the val- ues of 19 of the Turkic runic sings are reflected by means of the letters of the Manichaean alphabet. The same conclusion on the basis of the mentioned Manichaean material seems to have been independently arrived at by Talat Tekin; the opinion of the latter has given rise to objections from the side of O. F. Sertkaya (Kağıda Yazılı Göktürk Metinleri. III. Sovyet-Türk Kollokyumu. Göktürk Anıtları (Dil, edebiyat, sanat, arkeoloji, tarih, kültür) 8–15 Haziran 1990. Alma-Ata, Kazakistan SSR, Istanbul 1990. P. 13–15)).