Some Early Inner Asian Terms Related to the Imperial Family and the Comitatus

Chinese histories preserve a vast number of terms, names, and titles dating from the Turk era (roughly 550-750) and before. Scholars have succeeded in identifying a number of them with Turkic-language terms, but many terms have hitherto remained insoluble. As a rule, scholars have pursued this work by matching forms attested in Old or Middle Turkic texts with the reconstructed Tang-era pronunciation of the Chinese characters. In face of a large number of terms found in Chinese transcription that remain either completely resistant to analysis or involve seeming exceptions to the transcription values usually attached to the characters in Chinese philology, a conviction appears to have settled in on the field that Chinese transcriptions are so inexact as to render much further progress in this line impossible. Adapted from the source document