This CNN article, talking about the new city council for Mosul, says:
What’s a turkmen? I thought the noun was simply “turk.” Or does that only refer to citizens of Turkey? But the kurdish citizens of Turkey are still called Kurds, right? Is there a difference between Turkmen and Turks?
Different languages and ethnic groups. Turkmens speak a Turkic language which is not the same as Anatolian Turkish.
Jomo Mojo and Tamerlane should be able to expound further, as I am not aware of whether they have a direct linguistic relationship with the Central Asian Turkmens or more intermediate.
Well, I’ve always known “Turkmen” to refer to a person from “Turkmenistan.”
However, there is a secondary definition, according to dictionary.com:
Dictionaries are not a terribly good way to understand ethnic labels in general, but this one luckily gives the key info, the name of Turkmenistan derives from the Turkmens, not all of whom ended up in Turkmenistan.
I am not, however, clear that the Turkmens of Iraq are precisely the same group, although they do speak a Turkic langauge.
In this case it is a coincidense of names. Well, sort of. The Turkmen of Iraq are apparently linguistically synonomous with the Iranian ( South ) Azerbaijani.
However in a wider sense the name Turkmen or Turcoman is a pretty general term historically, referring usually to tribal Turks, whether they be in Anatolia, Azerbaijan, northern Mesopotamia, or Turkmenistan. They are all adjoining areas ( with fuzzy and somewhat artificial geographic borders ) and in sharp contrast to the more linguistically divided Kurds, I believe ( and Jomo Mojo can perhaps correct me if I’m wrong ) that all of these western Turkic dialects are mutually intelligible to some extent. There is definitely an acknowledged historical commonality that reaches back to the eruption of the Seljuqs into the Middle East - The Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia ( a Turkish dynasty ) between them controlled all of these territories and Eastern Anatolia/Azerbaijan was the site of constant skirmishing for control over a restive populous with divided ( sometimes no ) loyalties. Enver Pasha and his cronies dreamed of uniting all the Turkic regions of the northern Middle East/western Central Asia into a single Turkish nation.
The Turkmen of Iraq are rather pro-Turkey, regarding it as a political counterweight to the Kurds, whom they are suspicious of. Likewise Turkey, whether legitimately or calculatingly ( or both ), regards itself as the protector of the Turkmen ( who before Hussein’s population transfers a few years ago, dominated the population of Kirkuk, which many Kurds claim as an “emotional capital” of Kurdistan and which, thanks to Hussein, is now a heavily Arab city ). Very touchy situation.
It is my observation that Turkoman, or derivatives thereof, refer to peoples from Turkey to Mongolia, most from Mong’gol ancestry.
I can be abominably wrong, so I hope Tamerlane or others will jump in and save us from ignorance.
Consider yourself corrected, see Tamerlane above.
Geographically you’re actually not too far off, but origin-wise it’s a little more complicated.
The Turks of Turkey through Turkmenistan today seem to mostly derive from the Ghuzz or Oghuz, a group that was first noted ( though that may have not been the original homeland ) in the region of modern Kazakhstan. They were/are related linguistically ( according to Grousset’s older cites, anyway ) to the Kipchaks ( Cumans ), later famous on the Russian Steppe as first the Cuman ( polovsty ) Khanate and then the Kipchak Khanate ( the Mongol’s Golden Horde ), and the Khirghiz ( who are sort of geographically close to Mongolia ). There is also some question as to whether the Oghuz and Uighers were once part of the same people.
They entered the Middle East in two waves - The first with the Seljuqs ( a clan of the Oghuz ), the second with the Mongols ( who both pushed some nomadic groups ahead of them as well depending heavily on local Turkic manpower - reportedly the clan of Oghuz that would become known as the Osmanlis or Ottomans migrated from the region of Merv to Anatolia at this time ). That second wave may be why you’re mentally associating them with the Mongols - Indeed some actual Mongols did settle in the area in small numbers, but they’ve long since been linguistically absorbed ( the now Dari-speaking Hazaras of Afghanistan may be one semi-distinct remnant, referring to a political division that may have been isolated in the 13th century civil war ).
That should be Uigur, really.
Oh, right, I should say that the term “Turcoman” isn’t usually applied to groups like the Khirghiz, Kazaks, Uzbeks, et al - So in that sense, no - To the best of my knowledge the term doesn’t extend much farther east than Afghanistan and is best reserved for those predominately Oghuz-descended groups from Anatolia to Afghanistan.
What’s the relationship between Turks and Tartars? How did they come to be called that?
WRS
Want to know the genetic relationship between one language and another? Go to www.ethnologue.com. BTW, “genetic relationship” here does not have anything to do with Biology. It merely refers to the language’s ancestry, not the ancestry of those who use it.
It is worth mentioning that EThnologue displays a tendancy to chop up langauges into tiny parts.
E.g. their divisions of Arabic strike me as extreme reifications of regional dialects.
The ethnologue seems to prefer local identification as a distinct language as their major criterion. In an era wherein government policies still tend to favor obliterating minority languages on the smallest pretext, I can understand how they might prefer an criterion to the other extreme. Another way of putting it is this:
A language is just a dialect that merely happens to have an army. A dialect is a language that merely happens to lack an army.
(Paraphrase of someone I forget.)
Well the criteria, in the case of Arabic is utterly senseless insofar as almost no Arab identifies by the extremely particular divisions they give. And I mean extremely particular. The same logic they apply to Arabic, which I use as an example since I know it well across a range of dialects, would require English to be listed in UK, American and Aussi-Kiwi dialects, at minimum.
I like using ethnologue, mind you, but I do warn that they have a clear tendency to slice and dice and I think too finely.
Tortuously :). Really.
The Tatars ( note the single “r” ) were a Mongolic tribe that were something of hereditary rivals of the Mongols proper. Chingis Khan annhilated them and divided the populace up among other tribes. However the Tatars had been dominate players in the region since the 8th century and just as Mongolia today derives its name from a single, originally not over-large tribe, the “Mongols” of the day were often generically referred to as “Tatars” in the 12th and 13th centuries ( much to the annoyance of contemporary Mongols, who are on record as protesting the name to western travelers ).
Now the “Tatar” appellation, probably common among traveling merchants, preceded the Mongol conquests. Europeans, hearing this name, made a etymological leap and assumed the terrible conquering horde they were hearing about were “Tartars” ( double “r” ) - the hordes of Tarterus, a Greek word for hell.
So the Mongols became the “Tartars”. Now the Mongol immigrant population was scanty, as mentioned, and in southern Russia in particular soon “Turkified”, absorbed by the numerically dominant Kipchak Turks. But the name Tartar for these Turkic peoples stuck. Eventually they adopted the name themselves to some extent, but dropped the insulting extra “r”, that marked them as hellfiends.
So you have modern Crimean Turks/Tatars ( for example ) that use the name of a long-vanished Mongol group.
Whence “Tartar sauce”? Is it the sauce from Hell? Or a secret Mongolian recipe?
WRS
Re: the Turkic peoples of the FSU…some of the less enlightened Slavs have an annoying tendency to call all of them “Tatary” [Tatars]. This is just a step above the tendency to call all FSU Muslims “chornye” [literally, “black,” but in current usage the rough analogue to “nigger.”].
Also, I will recount to for your amusement a moment from grad school. As an optional Friday afternoon lecture, an Uzbek parliament representative came to speak about current ethnic and linguistic issues in Uzbekistan. He spoke in Russian, although with a heavy Uzbek accent, and his interpreter was a professor at my university’s Dept. of Central Eurasian Studies. (They cover everything from Finland to Hungary to Central Asia; basically, all the areas that don’t get squeezed into the West European, Russian & East European, or East Asian Studies programs, although there is some overlap in coverage here and there.)
It’s true that Uzbek is a Turkic language, but this guy turned out to be quite the pan-Turkic nationalist, going on and on about the proud Turkic heritage of his nation, while conveniently ignoring all the other influenced that have shaped Central Asia in general and Uzbekistan in particular. Apparently the Persian peoples, the general influence of Islamic learning from outside Central Asia, and all the others who have passed through in the past 2,000 years were completely irrelevant. It got so ridiculous that finally the professor who was interpreting for him (an Afghan, and IIRC an ethnic Uzbek himself) stopped and announced to the audience that in the interest of professional ethical disclosure, he felt that he had to inform us that he strongly disagreed with just about everything the speaker was saying, but would do his best not to let it affect the quality of the interpretation.
P.S. On the early Russian/Soviet censuses, the Azeris were called Turks, and a number of Turkic groups were officially called Tatars. But the subject of changing ethnic appellations on the Soviet censuses is quite a messy one, and probably a topic best left for a different thread.
Collounsbury: Your observation of ethnolouge’s methodology really alludes to the ongoing discussion as to what is a dialect and what is a language? There’s still no good answer to that.
I am more than well aware of the discussion to which you refer, and the subjectiveness of the definition, however I believe my reference to the manner in which Ethnologue slices up Arabic but not English indicates more than a simple subjective difference.