Tuvan Dictionary (review)

Tuvan (Tyvan, Tuvinian) is a Turkic language spoken by nearly 200,000 people in a remote area of South Siberia. Due to the extreme physical isolation of the Tuvan Republic, a constituent of the Russian Federation nestled between the formidable Altai-Sayan Mountains and the wastelands of western Mongolia, most previous work on this language was conducted by Soviet scholars. Only since the collapse of communism have Westerners been free to pursue linguistic fieldwork in Tuva. During the last several years, the two authors of the present dictionary have made several significant contributions to the study of Tuvan and other South Siberian Turkic languages. These include a grammar of Tuvan by Anderson and Harrison (Tyvan (Languages of the world/materials 257), Munich: LINCOM Europa, 1999) and a grammar of Xakas by Anderson (Xakas (Languages of the world/materials 251), Munich: LINCOM Europa, 1998). A&H have also produced a learner’s dictionary for native Tuvans (Tyva-Angli Söstük, Kyzyk: Tuvknizdat, 2002) and are now compiling a major dictionary of Tuvan, as well as a full-length grammar of the closely related language Tofalar (Tofa). They are also currently involved in documentation research with the last remaining speakers of Middle Chulym, Siberia’s least-studied Turkic language form. The present dictionary is merely a small part of the authors’ much more comprehensive work on the native languages of South Siberia.

This is the first bilingual dictionary of Tuvan designed for English speakers. It contains a concise introductory overview of the grammar and lexicon (4–35), a Tuvan-English dictionary (36–106), and an English-Tuvan dictionary (107–76). Together with the authors’ earlier grammatical description (mentioned above), this book largely supersedes the only previous English-language monograph-length treatment of Tuvan by John Krueger (Tuvan manual, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).

The introductory grammatical sketch presents in concise form all of the main phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of Tuvan. Space is also devoted to elucidating the language’s similarities with other South Siberian Turkic languages (Altai, Xakas), as well as to pointing out features unique to Tuvan. The authors also make the valuable observation that the process of Turkicization of this general area of Inner Asia involved several distinct Turkic language forms, each of which mixed with the earlier Samoyedic and Yeniseic languages in complex ways (30–31). The significance of modern dialectal divisions and borrowed lexical strata—chiefly from Mongolian and, more recently, from Russian—are also discussed (26–30). In the dictionary portions, these loanwords are usefully marked (M) and (R), respectively.

Another excellent feature of the dictionary is that each Tuvan word is provided in the native Tuvan Cyrillic orthography as well as in a Latin-based phonemic transcription devised by the authors. Since the transcription is employed as the basis for alphabetization, users of the dictionary need not be versed in Cyrillic. Altogether, about 6,000 Tuvan words are included, making this book a solid first introduction to the Tuvan lexicon in all its varied origins.

This important and pioneering work helps make one of the more fascinating Siberian languages accessible to a general linguistic readership. It should be especially useful to anyone seeking Tuvan lexical or phonological data for use in comparative Turkic studies.