Балканската картина на света в заети думи от османски турски
The Balkan Picture of the World in Ottoman Turkish Borrowed Words

Author(s): Maxim Stamenov
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Philology
Published by: Факултет по славянски филологии, Софийски университет »Св. Кл. Охридски«
Keywords: Balkan linguistics
Summary/Abstract: In the Balkan studies it is generally accepted that Turkish is not a member of the Balkan Language Union (Sprachbund). On the other hand, it was acknowledged already a long time ago that the members of this union share a considerable set of loans from Ottoman Turkish that was due to the widely distributed cultural influence imposed on Balkan countries during the time they were part of the Ottoman empire. In this article we study the cultural impact of Turkish leading to ‘shared picture of the world’ in Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Northmacedonian, Romanian and Serbocroatian. The analysis is oriented toward establishment of the depth of the penetration of loans as documented in the dictionaries of Turkisms for the Balkan languages, as well as the patterns of getting rid of them after the Balkan nations fell outside of the dominion of the Ottoman empire. The main trends, in the latter respect, are found to be speeded archaisation and pejorativisation of whole sets of loans. In concluding our inquiry, we arrive at the apparently paradoxical conclusion that while Turkish is not a member of the Balkan Language Union, it is defining in terms of linguistic evidence for the existence of a Balkan Cultural Union up to the present date.

• Details
• Contents