A Word from old Uyghur to the present: Alig

Abstract

In this study, we examine the etymology of the the word alig, which has appeared in various Turkic lan-guages starting with Old Uyghur. Researchers have so far put forth different theories regarding the origins of this word, which survives today in different parts of the Turkic-speaking world with various phonetic and semantic changes. Some have associated it with al-\"to take\" (\"almak\") (< al-i-g), which is semantically problematic, or with hypothetical roots which they reconstruct variously as *al (< al+ig), *al-or *ali-. Con-sidering earlier proposals, we narrow down the set of possible etymologies for alig in accordance with their relative merits.