Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/yulār

• *yular (per Räsänen, Sevortyan; Starostin, Dybo, Mudrak)

Vowel length reconstruction follows Clauson's, and depends on the Mamluk Kipchak, Chagatai and Karakhanid attestations, though a short-voweled variant is also plausible.

Unknown and uncertain. No discernible internal etymology has yet been made, and etymological dictionaries usually do not elaborate on concrete etymologies besides those listed below. Replaced in most Turkic languages by Mongolic *nokto (cf. Khalkha Mongolian ногт (nogt, “halter”)).

Potentially cognate with Proto-Turkic *yul- (“to take, to buy; to free from slavery”) or *yōl (“road, way”), however, it should be noted that these etymological connections are extremely tentative, and the suffix *-ār would still go unexplained, as no such suffix is present in Proto-Turkic.

Middle Mongol ᠵᠢᠯᠤᠭᠤ (ǰiluɣu) (and thus Mongolian жолоо (žoloo)) are often given as cognates to Turkic forms by older dictionaries, independent from the Altaic hypothesis given below, but the ultimate source of this root, whether Mongolic or Turkic, remains elusive.

Räsänen (1969) compares this specific root to the dialectal Balkan Turkish yıltar (“leash to lead cattle, a short strand of rope at the end-point of a halter”) and yultar (“small braid croquet worn by women and children”), however, Sevortyan (1980) points out that those dialectal forms most likely trace back to Greek, though no etymon is given by him.

Compared to Proto-Mongolic *ʒiluɣa (“halter”) (cf. Middle Mongol ᠵᠢᠯᠤᠭᠤ (ǰiluɣu), Mongolian жолоо (žoloo), East Yugur ʒoluː, etc.) and Proto-Tungusic *ʒulʒi (“chain, rope bind”) (cf. Nanai дюлдиэн (ʒulʒien), Ulch дулди (dulʒi), etc.) by Altaicists. Phonetic and semantic similarities purported by the authors of EDAL aside, this kind of long-range comparisons are not well received by the historical linguistic consensus and thus are not accepted. Proto-Tungusic reconstruction, for instance, relies only on Nanaic and Udegheic branches, and cannot be held accountable for the Tungusic languages as a whole.

Compared to Ancient Greek εὔληρα (eúlēra) by Škaljić (1966), though this etymology does not enjoy much support either.

*yulār

1. (Common Turkic, equestrianism) halter, bridle
2. (Oghuz) nose-peg of a camel

• Proto-Common Turkic: *yulār ~ *yular

• Clauson, Gerard (1972) “yula:r”, in An Etymological Dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 932
• Eren, Hasan (1999) “yular”, in Türk Dilinin Etimolojik Sözlüğü [Etymological Dictionary of the Turkish Language]‎^[1] (in Turkish), Ankara: Bizim Büro Basım Evi, page 458
• Nadeljajev, V. M.; Nasilov, D. M.; Tenišev, E. R.; Ščerbak, A. M., editors (1969), “JULAR”, in Drevnetjurkskij slovarʹ [Dictionary of Old Turkic] (in Russian), Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, Nauka, page 278
• Räsänen, Martti (1969) “(mtü., AH., IM., osm.) jular”, in Versuch eines etymologischen Wörterbuchs der Türksprachen (in German), Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen seura, page 210
• Sevortjan, E. V., Levitskaja, L. S. (1989) “йулар”, in Etimologičeskij slovarʹ tjurkskix jazykov [Etymological Dictionary of Turkic Languages] (in Russian), volume 4, Moscow: Nauka, pages 244-245
• Starostin, Sergei, Dybo, Anna, Mudrak, Oleg (2003) “*ǯi̯ul[u]”, in Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages (Handbuch der Orientalistik; VIII.8), Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, page 1548
• Škaljić, Abdullah (1966, 2016) Турцизми у српскохрватском језику, Издавачка кућа Прометеј, →ISBN, page 374
• Tietze, Andreas (2002, 2009) “yular”, in Tarihi ve Etimolojik Türkiye Türkçesi Lügati [Historical and Etymological Dictionary of Turkish] (in Turkish), volume 9, Istanbul, Vienna, pages 436-437