THE FIRST TURKOLOGICAL CONGRESS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMY IN THE LANGUAGE SYSTEM

Regardless of their agglutinative or inflectional nature, all languages of the world possess the capacity to manifest the principle of linguistic economy in one form or another. At the First Turkological Congress convened in Baku on February 26, 1926, a wide range of issues—such as the alphabet, spelling and orthography, terminology, methods of language teaching, the interaction of related and neighboring languages, the literary language of Turkic languages, the theory of a proto-language, and the history of Turkic languages—were discussed and interpreted. Within the framework of these discussions, attention was also paid to the system of linguistic economy, and several of its characteristic features were briefly analyzed. This article aims to present an analytical perspective on that issue and to highlight how the principle of economy was implicitly addressed within the linguistic debates of the Congress.