Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/55037

Böhtlingk (1851), the first comprehensive grammar of Sakha (Yakut), contains two texts written by Uvarovskij, a native speaker of Sakha. These two texts, Uvarovskij’s letter and memoir, are considered to be the oldest texts written in Sakha. This paper gives morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and translations to Uvarovskij’s letter to Böhtlingk, and examines how his language differs from modern standard Sakha particularly focusing on the vowel length. In some cases, Uvarovskij uses short vowels where modern standard Sakha has long ones, and in other cases there are apparently sporadic long vowels corresponding to modern short ones. It is noteworthy that Uvarovskij uses long vowels in all the four examples of the distant demonstrative pronoun ool, which is ol with a short vowel in the modern standard language. Thus Uvarovskij’s text perhaps reflects an older stage of Sakha language, and gives some keys to the comparative studies of Turkic languages.