The early Turks came from the Altai region in Central Asia, on the western border of present-day Mongolia, and may even have had some distant links across the straits to Alaska (the Eskimo word for 'bear' is the Turkish ayı). The first written reference to them is a Chinese tyu-kyu of the second century BC, a name that appears here and there, subsequently, in Chinese sources of the sixth century. It denoted nomadic warrior tribes, practised at riding superior civilizations: the word 'Turk' was the name of the dominant tribe, and means 'strong man'. These nomads, related to the Mongols and perhaps also to the Huns, spread out over the vast tableland of Central Asia, and caused much trouble for the Chinese, sometimes establishing steppe empires that lasted for a generation or two before being absorbed by the more settled natives. Much of Chinese history is about these battles on the long, open frontier; the necessity for the Great Wall being a case in point. The steppe empire that really stood out was that of the Uyghurs, of around 800 AD, who took literacy and much else from the Chinese. There were dynasties with obvious Turkish antecedents, including that of the fabled Kublai Khan (Kubilay is a common enough first name in Turkey), whip in 1272 established Hanbalık, 'city of the ruler', the modern-day Beijing.
Some of these Turkish connotations may be more then romantic speculation. Does 'Kirghiz' mean Turkish 'the forty-two' (tribes), or something else, such as 'nomad'? In the twelfth and thirteen centuries, Marco Polo referred to Chinese Turkestan as 'Great Turkey', and the place names are obvious: the river Yenisei in Russia takes its name from yeni çay or 'new river': and the earlier name of Stalingrad, Tsaritsyn, has nothing to do with 'Tsar' but comes from sarı su, 'yellow water'. The linguistic descendants of old Turkish have, of course, grown in some case far apart, although Anatolian Turks say they find Kirghiz quite easy, despite the thousands of miles in between. The grammar is regular, but different from English, in that preposition, tenses and the like are added to the main word, with the vowel changing according to the main word's dominant vowel. This maybe best illustrated by the word 'pastrami', one of none-too-many words that we owe to these old Turks. It is an Italian version of the original pastırma, nowadays sold as very thin slices of dried beef, preserved in a cake of spices, of which cumin (çemen) is chief. Pas is the stem of a verb meaning 'press'. Tır (the dotless ı pronounced something like a French 'eu' and marking a vowel change that is used an 'a') indicated causation, and ma (also a vowel change: it could have been me) turns it all into verbal noun or gerund. This foodstuff, kept under the saddle, maintained nomadic horse archers for hundreds of miles across the Central Asia steppe.
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