В. Г. Гузев. Избранное

491 The Turkic Runic script: Is the hypothesis of its indigenous origin no more viable? Thus, in case we succeed in establishing the continuity between the signs of the Saka-Yueh-chih script, reflected by both of the mentioned monuments, and the prenormative variants of the Turkic runic writings, the pictorial store which afterwards was used by the Turks for the creation of their own writing systems may prove to be rather ancient. One should agree with the scholars who assume that the invention of the OTRS dates back to the 7th or the beginning of the 8th(?) century (G. C1au- son, L Bazin) with perhaps one important reservation: if the terms “inven- tion” here denotes a. reform of already existing variants of the runic script. The essence of the latter lies in the systematization and unification of the alphabet as well as possibly providing some of the signs that have already been in use with new phonetic values. This would explain the surprising uni- formity of the Orkhon-Yenisei script that very rarely is broken by local vari- ants of some signs. The substance of the reform consisted in the creation of its odd inner form (although this process was in fair accord with the laws of the natural develop- ment of scripts). It resulted in the amalgamation which retained all of the pre- ceding stages: 1) at least a part of the signs is able to function as logograms or ideograms ( äb “tent”, äd “property, livestock”, aj “moon”, äl “hand”, oq “arrow” etc.), it represents pictorial stages; 2) apparently, all signs (in the first instance, of course, the vocalic ones) are able to act as syllabograms with permissible (within the rules of the script) deviation from the predominant and, supposedly, premortal (for the script) syllabic structure — VC(C) — by turning the syllable around ( äb / bä , oq / qo , yq / qy , äd / dä etc.); 3) almost all of the signs assumed the ability to represent phonemes ( though most of the consonantic signs are able to render only velarized or palatalized consonantal allophones) and therefore to function as phonemograms (the “global signs ” , or “ligatures”, as it was said above, may be considered as remainder of the syllabic stage of the OTRS evolution). Taking advantage of A. M. Pevnov’s terminology, 1 one could say that the OTRS was a signophonographic system, if this term may be applied not, only for word-syllabic, but also for more mixed — word-syllabic-alphabetic systems: in the OTRS the graphemes were able to function as signograms, i. e. signs for signs, and as two types of phonograms — syllahograms and phonemograms. It must be emphasized that everything set forth above is a deliberate at- tempt to trace the conditions and ways of the formation of the OTRS in the 1 Певнов A. M. Проблемы дешифровки чжурчженьской письменности // Вопросы языкознания. № 1. 1992. P. 25–47.