Prilog semantičkom izučavanju arabizama u srpskohrvatskom jeziku
Contribution to the Semantic Study of Arabic Loanwords in Serbocroatian

Summary/Abstract: The scope and the objective of the present paper are explained in the first of three chapters of an extensive Introduction (I) under the title »General Remarks«. It was pointed out there, that the paper will primarily deal with the problem of semantic peculiarities and changes of Arabic loan words in the Serbo-Croat language, above all in the present stage of their development, bearing in mind the situations in which they are used. In the second chapter, »On the conditions. of the semantic development of Arabic loanwords«, a short survey is given of the channels through which the Arabic loanwords have passed to Serbocratian. In this respect they are divided into two groups: those, probaibly the majority .of them, that came through Turkish, or directly from the Arabic, i. e. from the Islamic cultural area. The second group, a considerably smaller one, comprises the Arabic words taken over from different European languages, i. e. from the Western cultural area. The former group has been in a wide colloquial use, not only among the Muslims, but also among others, while the latter, owing to their semantics and usage, are found in the literary language only. Along with these two groups, the author, on account of their origins, emphasizes especially a group of hybrid words, i. e. Arabic words, which, after they had been accepted into the mediator-language e. g. Turkish or Serbocroatian, have been modified, morphologically as also semantically, with foreign elements (affixes and in dependent words) and thus have their peculiarities which could be examined separately. In this chapter are further pointed out the exogenous and endogenous factors which influence the life of a language in general, and so, of course, of Arabic words in Serbo-Croat language. Popular etymology and the structure of the language that takes them in, in general, influence the formation of words, especially of the borrowed ones. The figurative usage of the words is of special importance for their semantic development. That development is influenced more or less by the change in the meaning of words, with respect to their volume, their emotional value and the intensity of feelings asociated with those meanings. The changes of grammatical value of the words, such as their category, function, gender and number, can be of importance for the lexical meanings of the words, since they, as such, are the only object of the semantic studies. Because of all those numerous changes in the meaning of the words, and under the influence of inumerable external and internal linguistic and extralinguistic factors, the semantic phenomena of the identity of meaning (synonymity) and multiplicity of meaning (polysemy) occur, as well as the opposite meaning of two or more words (antonymity). All the mentioned semantic changes and phenomena have been discussed individually and in more detail in the main part of the present work.

• Details
• Contents