Oh my, I forgot what this rush felt like, since I had first started learning German. Here recently, I started on chipping at a rather scarce Turkic Language called Altai.
Backstory
There is basically no English material on this language, so I am having slowly comb through a Russian Grammar (Drenkova's from the 40's) and translate everything. I don't speak Russian, but I learned their variant of Cyrillic years ago now, so I am trusting Google Translate to give me the gist of that and if anything sounds weird, I take an educated guess, and manually translate it (which thankfully I haven't much had to do.) For the actual Altai vocabulary, I am manually translating the Russian translations as they appear in either my Oxford Russian dictionary or Wiktionary. If either the Russian is too broad or I am in doubt, I first look up any turkish equivalent words to the Russian and secondly Kazakh. If absolutely necessary, I see if there is an entry for it or any cognates in the Russian Wiktionary.
The Wikipedia article in English has amasing grammatical and phonological information, but its orthography section was terrible, so I piandered at the Russian Wikipedia page and its orthography section was amasing, and... other than that, terrible. So I took and translated that, doublechecked the footnotes, and put all that info in my own words in the Orthography Section in the English Wiki.
When I first started this quest, back in January, I was searching and could find nothing for about two weeks, hours each night. I gave up and was so mad. I am Christian, so you may want to take this with a grain of salt, I prayed for anything that could help me, even a Bible--I know that backward and forward, I was sure I could find a Turkish grammar and learn to piece things together based off word order, etc. And then an idea came to mind to use translate to translate "Altai Bible" into Russian and Google it. The very first link was to the Russian Bible Translation Society's site where they freely release New Testaments and full bibles in all of their indigenous languages they can, of Russia. They had just released v. 2 of their Southern Altai New Testament back in 2016, and they have available freely a wonderfully done PDF with Russian interlinear, and, get this full audio reading in Altai of the New Testament, start to finish!
The Actual Sentence
Now I had remembered what one or two of the pronouns were from a gloss over the Wikipedia page, and from the Grammar I am using, I saw two words, дьол (јол, today) and чын, which mean way/mountain pass and truth, respectively.
As soon as I saw that word, чын, meant truth, I immediately recalled the Altai New Testament and looked up John 14:6.
And there, I saw it: Иисус каруу јандыры: -- Мен -- јол, *чын*дык ла јӱрӱм...!
"I -- way, (the?) truth, and(?) life..."
I even listened to the audio reading (which is extremely fast-spoken;) to my shock, the phonology sounds just like we Americans (but some foreign sounds save for what we have in the South, aside from /q/) and even the stress is on the first syllable of a word. But, the accent sounds, strangely, Turkish (who'da thunk it?)
I am decently sure this is the first transcription of Altai into the IPA for English Speakers--whether there be any academic, I know not:
/ˈmen#ˈd͡ʒoɫ#ˈt͡ʃɯn.dɯx#ˈɫɑ#ˈd͡ʒʏ.ɾʏm/
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from Siya namkela nonke | Languagelearning https://ift.tt/2wJ3y3G
via Learn Online English Speaking
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