The review, led by Bibaisha Iliasovna Nurdauletova of Sh. Yessenov Caspian University of Technologies and Engineering in Aktau, together with colleagues from Yessenov University, L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, and the University of Dodoma, uses a structured narrative and conceptual-synthesis methodology to compare how place names moved across languages, scripts, manuscript genres, and political regimes. Rather than treating the linguistic layers of the region as a single synchronic mass, the authors build a diachronic framework that separates pre-Islamic external attestations, medieval Arabic-Persian documentation, early-modern cartography, imperial and Soviet standardisation, and post-Soviet renaming. The final evidence base comprised 138 unique references after relevance screening and de-duplication, with direct evidence from the five-state core given primary interpretive weight and material from neighbouring regions such as the Tarim Basin, Xinjiang, the Iranian plateau, Russia, and China used only where it documented transmission corridors, external attestations, or methodologically comparable mechanisms.

The authors’ central conceptual move is to operationalise toponymy as a sociopolitical knowledge infrastructure. In their framework, a place name functions infrastructurally when it identifies a spatial referent consistently enough for repeated use, links that referent to an administrative, route, jurisdictional, fiscal, or cartographic record, and is reproduced through an institution with authority to maintain, standardise, or replace the recorded form. This is not a metaphor, the authors stress, but a testable criterion: a case qualifies as a knowledge infrastructure only when three components can be identified together, namely a named spatial referent, an institutional record or documentary genre that reproduces the name, and a governance function such as route management, gazetteer standardisation, or cartographic assertion. When a name is renamed or orthographically standardised, what changes is not merely a label but the identifier through which a place is retrieved and related to institutional knowledge.

Each of the three major manuscript traditions encoded Middle Asian space differently. Arabic geographical writing recorded the region through routes, urban sequences, commercial connections, and regional description, in which practical sequence and connectivity could matter more than metric distance. Yet Arabic orthography, which typically omits short vowels, does not encode every contrast required for Turkic phonological reconstruction, generating transliteration instability that must be kept distinct from genuine linguistic change. Persian historiographical and administrative writing provided a second channel, stabilising names of oasis centres, dynastic territories, fiscal districts, and routes in the Bukhara-Samarkand and Khorezm zones, where Persian literary and bureaucratic practice interacted continuously with Turkic naming to produce transliterations, Persianised forms, and hybrid names. Chinese dynastic and gazetteer traditions, meanwhile, offered an external eastern witness, rendering foreign names through Chinese characters whose historical pronunciations and graphic conventions changed over time, a logographic approximation that introduces its own systematic distortion.

The review’s micro-cases make the analytical stakes concrete. The clearest cross-script case concerns the Khorezmian centre recorded variously as Koneurgenish, Gurganj, Jurjaniya, and Urgench. A Turkmenistan study cited in the review documents Chinese forms such as Yue-gan alongside Khorezmian Gurganj and Arabic-source variants, and analyses the earlier form morphologically as Gurgan plus a second element glossed as city. Crucially, the Persian-language Tarikh-i Jahangusha of Juvayni preserves Jurjaniya and Urgench as alternative designations for the same centre, providing an explicit Persian historiographical stage alongside the Chinese and Arabic evidence. The review separates four analytically distinct operations in this case: character-based phonetic approximation in the Chinese witness, Arabic-source exonymic and orthographic variation, Persian historiographical transmission, and a proposed morphological reduction within the Gurganj lineage. The semantic proposal of a city of Gurgan is kept separate from the phonological comparison and treated as a source-dependent etymology rather than a demonstrated sound law.

A second micro-case, drawn from source-critical scholarship on the Bukhara oasis, concerns the Chinese form Niumi and its proposed relationship to the Numijkat, Nokmitan, and Bukhara cluster. Published historical-phonological comparison reports Niumi as Middle Chinese with reconstructed values that have been compared with Sogdian Nōk-mētān, meaning New Residence, providing an empirical example of period-specific segmental comparison rather than inference from modern Mandarin or graphic resemblance. The review retains these as separate evidence layers whose equivalence must be demonstrated through historical phonology, chronology, and relative geography, and explicitly refuses to invent period-specific phonetic transcriptions where the cited evidence does not support them. A third case, Dargan on the Amu Darya route, shows the opposite problem: referential continuity from medieval Arabic sources to the modern Dargan-Ata is strong, but the root etymology, with competing explanations including an association with a term in the semantic field of boatman, remains a hypothesis rather than a settled reconstruction.

The review also distinguishes transformation mechanisms that require different reconstructive controls. Phonetic distortion arises structurally when names move among scripts with non-equivalent phonemes, and administrative standardisation may regularise previously unstable variants. Semantic translation transfers descriptive content while changing linguistic form, as in the North Kazakhstan hydronyms Aksu, combining ak meaning white with su meaning water, and Karasu, whose interpretation depends on local associations with water source, flow, and landscape. Political renaming, by contrast, is an intentional transformation produced through official nomenclature and regime transition, and the review treats the documented sequence from Pishpek to Frunze to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan as administrative replacement rather than regular sound change. The authors insist that these mechanisms remain analytically separate: collapsing them would convert apparent variant spellings into false sound laws and obscure the dated institutional acts that often make political renaming the most precisely datable transformation in the record.

Manuscript cartography adds a spatial dimension to the philological analysis. The review examines Anthony Jenkinson’s sixteenth-century map of the region, whose representation of the Caspian Sea, the Oxus, Tashkent, and Samarkand can be compared with modern coordinates to identify changes in relative position and route geometry. The comparison is qualitative, testing relative spatial correspondence and displacement visually rather than deriving a metric from a schematic historical representation. More broadly, the review draws on cartographic theory showing how maps participate in the production of territorial authority: a label’s presence, absence, scale, or centrality on a historical map is evidence about the institution that produced it and cannot be read as a neutral measure of local importance.

Three methodological bottlenecks constrain toponymic reconstruction, the review argues. Chronostratigraphic attribution must separate the date of a naming event from the date of first surviving attestation, later copying, and administrative standardisation, since a Turkic surface form may incorporate older substrate material and written attestation may postdate the naming event. Cross-script harmonisation must relate script-specific forms to plausible spoken originals without projecting modern pronunciation backward onto medieval spellings; the review prescribes an ordered protocol that preserves source graphemes, retains scholarly transliteration as the primary Romanised form, evaluates Arabic and Persian consonantal frames separately from absent short vowels, compares Chinese transcriptions only against period-appropriate historical reconstructions, and accepts proposed correspondences only when compatible with the phonotactics and documented adaptation practices of the relevant languages. Cartographic-textual integration, finally, must test whether a linguistic identification is spatially credible against route sequence, hydrology, travel distance, and neighbouring settlements, since a proposed match remains weak if the corresponding site is incompatible with these controls.

Digital and computational methods, the review concludes, can address these bottlenecks when provenance and uncertainty remain visible throughout the workflow. The proposed infrastructure has four components: GIS-linked manuscript mapping that aligns historical maps, itinerary descriptions, manuscript place lists, and archaeological coordinates within a common spatial framework; cross-script and phonological matching that generates ranked candidate correspondences with explicit phonological steps and provenance, using automated string similarity only for candidate generation; route-network modelling that treats toponyms as nodes in historically constrained mobility systems, testing proposed manuscript routes against seasonally feasible travel corridors, topography, and water availability; and interoperable historical gazetteers that preserve each attested form, script, date, source, proposed correspondence, coordinate estimate, and confidence value as separate but linked records. The authors argue that a five-state Middle Asian gazetteer built on these principles would move the field from dispersed inventories toward reproducible historical-geographical reconstruction while preserving the linguistic and manuscript complexity that gives Middle Asian toponymy its evidentiary value, and that publishing unresolved variants rather than forcing premature harmonisation is essential to that project.

Subject of Research: Toponymic knowledge infrastructures in five-state Middle Asia: linguistic transformation, manuscript cartography, and historical-geographical reconstruction

Article Title: Toponymic knowledge infrastructures in five-state Middle Asia: linguistic transformation, manuscript cartography, and historical-geographical reconstruction

Article References: Nurdauletova, B. I., Saparbaikyzy, S., Artykbaev, Z. O., Kairken, T. Z., Spatayeva, S., & Shilunga, E. (2026). Toponymic knowledge infrastructures in five-state Middle Asia: linguistic transformation, manuscript cartography, and historical-geographical reconstruction. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1876337. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1876337

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1876337

Keywords: toponymy, Central Asia, historical geography, manuscripts, cartography, digital humanities, Toponymic, knowledge, infrastructures, five-state, Middle, Asia