𐰅𐱅-

ēt- is a common Old Turkic verb whose oldest securely attested semantic centre is ‘to put into order, arrange, organize’. In the runiform inscriptions it is especially used of political and military organization, as in bodun et- ‘organize or constitute a people’ and çerig et- ‘marshal troops’; it also occurs in the paired expression et- yarat- ‘organize, establish’.

In the Old Uyghur textual tradition the verb has a broad but coherent semantic field: arrange and prepare, equip and set up, erect or build, adorn, and repair. Clauson’s sequence ‘organize → adorn → create → make → do’ is therefore useful as a model of semantic bleaching, but should not be treated as a strict chronology, since several of these meanings coexist already in Old Turkic. A more economical basic meaning is ‘put into a proper or intended state’, from which ‘prepare/equip’, ‘adorn’, ‘construct/produce’, ‘repair’ and finally generic ‘make/do’ can develop. By Kāšgarī’s time the generalized ‘make/do’ meaning and light-verb use were especially characteristic of Oghuz.

The length of the first vowel is not consistently represented by the Old Turkic writing systems, but comparative evidence strongly supports it. Khalaj preserves i:et- ~ e:t- with a long vowel, while the Oghuz languages show the expected intervocalic voicing of final t. Proto-Turkic *ēt- is therefore well supported.