After O. Böhtlingk described long vowels of Yakut dialect in 1851, Z. Gombocz, in his work Die bulgarisch-türkischer lehnwörter in der ungarischen sprache 1912, against the mechanische Verschmelzung or Zusammenziehungstheorie of W. Radloff and V. Grønbech, set force a new theory of long vowels in proto-Turkic. Later J. Németh, Е. Д. Поливанов, M. Räsänen and L. Ligeti tried to show that Yakut dialect keeps long vowels since a fairly old time, and from about the time of 1930, with the backing of Türkmen dialect, long vowel theory in proto- Turkic has been established. The writer tries to compare, in tabular forms, vowels of the modern dialects of Yakut, Tuva, Koibal Karagas, Xakas, Kašgar, Salar, Kirgiz, Kazax, Cuvaš, Kazan Tatar, Baškir, Taškent, Xiwa, Türkmen and Osman, with the results as for long and short a, i, o, u, ö, ü:
(1) Yakut dialect corresponds to Türkmen dialect on the points of long vowels and diphthongs.
(2) most words with y and v of Cuvaš dialect contain the preceeding Yakut and Türkmen words.
(3) o, u, ö, ü of Baskir and Kazan Tatar dialects correspond respectively to u, o, ü, o of the other dialects.
In the oldest inscriptions (732 A.D.), while
at ‘horse’,
eb ‘house’,
ac-‘open’ etc. are written without vowel letters, we can find at ‘name’, ac ‘hungry’, yo
ok-yu
ok ‘not’, köök-küök ‘blue, sky’ etc. with vowel letters. This is, as V. Thomsen noted in his Samlede Afhandlinger III, p.33, an evidence of the language of the oldest inscriptions with long vowels or diphthongs.In the dictionary Kitabu divan luyat at-turk (11 c.), clear distinction between the words with long and short vowels is made as in Arabic, which all the examples in quetion show as seen in the article (e.g. horse at 189, at- 112;‘name’ at- 3, at- 4-c). Nouns with hyphen indicate derivative forms, and verbs without hyphen imperative. It is notable in this dictionary that the stem vowels lose their length in the derivative forms and that the fact can be observed in the modern Yakut dialect as well. So it might be said that the history of Turkic vowels is that of vowel shortening.
Correspondence relations of short i, e and long i in the modern dialects are seen in tabular forms, e.g. e of Xakas, Kazax, Baškir and Kazan Tatar dialects correspond to i of the other dialects and i of Xakas, Baškir and Kazan Tatar to e. This may be derived from [æ] or [ε].
The writer's investigatation into the eight words in the oldest inscriptions that V. Thomsen pointed out to be of narrow é in his works, Inscriptions de l'Orkhon déchiffrées and “Une lettre meconnues des inscriptions del'Ienissei” has resulted that the words et-, yetmis and eki would be [æt], [jæ-tmi] and [i-ki] from the view points of the forms in the modern dialects and in Divan luyat. It has been estimated that the rest five words, as the table shows, would be of long vowels as [e: l], [e: ∫], [be: l], [be: ∫] and [ke: ∫], with references of the letter i much used for these words in the oldest inscriptions and Divan luyat, and of Yakut i, iä corresponding to Türkmen i, ä. From this fact, he has presumed short [æ] or [ε] to long [e:] or [ie:] in old Turkic, as in English beat [bi: t] to bit [bit] and as in German Lehre [le: ro] to lernen [lεrnen].
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