ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base
"Turkism"
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Turkisms are words, expressions or grammatical constructs borrowed from or constructed in the manner of the Turkish language. They are most widely represented in various Balkan languages (e.g. Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian), but also penetrate into more distant languages such as Russian, often as exoticisms in translated literature from Turkish or other Balkan languages. An analysis of the Turkisms that entered the languages of the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula during the 5th century Ottoman rule shows that many borrowed lexemes are predominantly indirect, that is, these lexical units themselves came from Arabic or Persian.
General characteristic
It is noteworthy that the typologically different Balkan languages were penetrated by the same Turkisms. However, since the end of the XIX century, when these countries emerged from Ottoman influence, their fates have been different. The word sa(h)at ("hour, time") is used in spoken Albanian and Macedonian languages, but is outdated in Bulgarian. Sometimes even the literary variants of the same language demonstrate different approaches to the same Turcisms: in the Albanian language of Kosovar Pristina, Turkisms are often acceptable in all styles of speech and are even actively included in the Albanian dictionaries printed in this city. At the same time, in Albanian-speaking Tirana, they have a colloquial connotation and are often not included in modern dictionaries.
Bulgarian
There are many Turkish words and expressions in Bulgarian. Moreover, suffixes of Turkish origin are also used in the language (for example, -jia, -lk). Under the influence of the Turkish verb, the category of retelling inclination (dubitative, renarrative) took shape in Bulgarian. There is also a group of special adjectives of Turkish origin, which do not change in childbirth. Traces of Turkish influence are also found in syntax.
Romanian
Due to the remoteness from the main Turkish-speaking massif, Turkisms in the modern Romanian language are mainly residual lexical. For example: geam ("window").
Greek
Turkisms once penetrated widely into the modern Greek language. Proponents of purism systematically reduced the Turkish influence in literary vocabulary after 1828: of the 45,000 lexical units of the vocabulary of modern literary Greek, Turkisms account for only 1.5%, but their number is higher in dialect dictionaries: in the dialect of the island of Castellorizo their share reaches 3%, in the Cypriot language - 12.8%, in the vocabulary of the inhabitants of the island of Samothrace - 20%.
Examples of Turkism
kisei
Ataman
Notes
Turkish