What Does the Torsyq Keep?

In the Museum of Almaty, we stumbled upon an artifact I had never heard of before: a torsyq, a traditional vessel of Central Asian nomads. Typically sewn from a single piece of hide, it was used to transport water or fermented milk products—kumis made from mare’s milk and shubat from camel’s milk.

If you google the word torsyq, you will mostly see flat vessels with two upward-curving ends. But the one we encountered in the museum was different—it featured three facets, likely designed to make it easier to stand upright.

I attempted to research the origins of the word torsyq itself, but the explanations I found felt somewhat less than convincing.

The suffix -syq serves to derive both nouns and adjectives from verbs, embedding the object’s functional essence directly into its name (W. Yugur emysyq “pacifier” from Proto-Turkic *em- “to suckle”, cf. Turkish emzik).

A Hunting Net or a Halt?

As for the root tor-, however, matters are considerably murkier.

Proto-Turkic *tor- denoted a hunting net and the very process of net-fishing. Yet it is rather difficult to imagine how a vessel could be connected to a net, even if woven tableware did exist among various peoples. Liquids, after all, were hardly carried in them.

It is generally considered conventional to derive torsyq from the root *tur-, associated with stopping or remaining in a certain state. In Turkish, the former yielded the verb durmak (“to stop”). From the latter sense arose the suffix -dır/-tır and its variants, serving as the Turkic copula “to be.”

Yet a curious anomaly arises here: across all Turkic languages, including Kazakh, with the sole exception of Bashkir, this Proto-Turkic root has preserved the vowel u. It strains credulity to suppose that a vowel shift occurred in the single word torsyq without leaving any other traces behind.

Unexpected Relations

At one point, the thought even crossed my mind: might the Russian verb pritorochit’ (“to strap to a saddle”) be connected to the name of this vessel, which was surely secured to a saddle? But toroka (a strap for tying game to a saddle) traces back to Proto-Indo-European *terkʷ- (“to twist, turn”). So that, in all likelihood, has nothing to do with the manufacture of the water-skin.

Along the way, however, it transpired that the very same Proto-Indo-European root gave rise to the English words torture and torment, as well as queer.

Sometimes etymology is fascinating not for the answer it discovers, but for the chain of unexpected connections into which a single word drags you.

All in all, why a torsyq is called a torsyq remains unresolved. But behind this word there now stands for me not merely a steppe vessel under museum glass, but an entire odyssey of linguistic wanderings.