Talât Tekin

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Talât Tekin (July 16, 1927 – November 28, 2015) was a Turkish linguist and Turkologist who made important contributions to the study of Old Turkic inscriptions and Altaistics. He was born in Tavşancıl, Dilovası, Turkey, and studied at Istanbul University, graduating in 1951. After teaching in high schools and completing military service, he moved to the United States in 1961 to work at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he began his doctoral studies with Janós Eckmann and also taught Turkish at Indiana University. He earned his PhD in 1965 with A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic and then taught at the University of California, Berkeley, until 1972. In 1970 he defended a Turkish-language PhD at Istanbul University and became an associate professor there.

Tekin returned to Turkey in 1972 to join Hacettepe University in Ankara, where he later became a professor after publishing Volga Bulgar inscriptions and the Volga Bulgar language. In 1991 he founded the journal Türk Dilleri Araştırmaları (Researches in Turkic Languages). He retired in 1994 but continued teaching part-time at Bilkent University, and from 1997 to 2002 he led the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Yeditepe University. In 2004 he received a service award from the Turkish Academy of Sciences.

Tekin published more than 200 articles and at least 35 books, with many works collected in Makaleler. His early research covered Old Turkic philology (including the Orkhon inscriptions, the Bulgars, the Huns, and Karakhanid poetry), lexicography (such as a Turkmen–Turkish dictionary and glossaries for various Turkic languages), and the reconstruction of Proto-Turkic. He contributed to understanding sound correspondences between Chuvash and Turkic, notably the r/z and l/š relationships; his 1975 proposal on the l/š correspondence is widely accepted.

He was a strong proponent of the Altaic theory, arguing that Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Korean are related, and he explored connections to Japanese. Tekin passed away in Bodrum on November 28, 2015, at the age of 88.