Borrowed Language in Turkish

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Borrowed Language in Turkish Turkish is said to be Altaic, while Arab is commonly referred to as Semitic language.

That notwithstanding, there are many Turkish words taken from Arabic, and many words that have been derived by Arabic rules in Turkish. The interaction between the two languages can be traced back to historical times from the 11th century to the 19th century, whereby the Turkish as used by the elites of the reigning Ottoman court went through a long and intense period of contact with the Persian and Arabic of which as the languages of the Islamic religion, they were earmarked by the Ottomans as the model on which to base their own emerging official language.

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However, language attitudes changed when the political situation changed, especially their prolonged purification and borrowing outcomes. The paper considers how the two languages have interacted by exploring issues such as templatic morphology, vowel harmony, and other issues, and how the issues have influenced the results of borrowing.

Language borrowing has been a common outcome of prolonged language contact, whereby the elements of one language tend to be incorporated into another language. The elements are likely to range from the level of the individual sounds to the larger syntactic or morphological structures. There is so much influence of consonant harmony and Turkish vowel, and the Arabic templatic morphology when it comes to the borrowing and the incorporation of the Arabic words into Turkish.

Some of the reasons for lexical borrowing have been unveiled. These include cultural influence. There is also a tendency whereby the rare native words are lost and replaced by foreign words. There may also exist circumstances whereby two native words are likely to sound so much alike, such that replacing one with a foreign word is likely to solve the ambiguities that come by. Through borrowing, there is also a likelihood that the semantic distinctions will become possible. Borrowing also became imperative in a situation where synonyms of affective words happen to have lost their expressive force. There are also situations where a word may be introduced unconsciously through intensive bilingualism (Grigore, 2017). Again, a word may be taken from a low-status language and be used in a pejorative fashion.

The symbolic power of the Arabic language and the Turkish language led to the interaction of the two in a more visible fashion. The influence of the Arabic language is more conspicuous as compared to the influence of other languages such as French. The history of Arabic loanwords in Turkish provides an interesting case in the study of language contact. The

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status of Arabic and Persian as prestige languages for the Ottoman Turks was responsible for their immense influence on and incorporation into the official Ottoman language, but when the political and cultural situation changed, these formerly accepted borrowings suddenly became the scapegoat for the Turkish language reformers. The commitment displayed by Atatürk and the TDK in pushing their language of Arabic and Persian influence is a testament to the perceived symbolic power of language and is also a textbook example of language planning. This protracted language reform effort also provides clear parallels to the work of language academies in other nations, charged to this day with the task of maintaining the integrity of their languages in the face of invasive vocabulary from other languages. In large parts, the governing bodies charged with responsibilities comparable to those of the TDK have been most active in their opposition to the encroaching influence of other languages (Sofu et al., 2019).

There are different types of lexical borrowing, and these depended on whether or not parts of the borrowed items tend to be replaced according to patterns in the receiving language.

Here, the three cases include the loan shifts, the loan blends, and loan words. The language aspects borrowed from Arab to Turkish can be considered as loanwords. This refers to the imported words with the substitution of the original features by the native ones purely on the phonemic level. Apart from the substitution of the foreign phonemes in the process of lexical borrowing, there is insertion or deletion of phonemes into the borrowed word to create a word structure aligned with the syllable structure of the language. Lexical borrowing is likely to be followed by either of these processes, which are also referred to as phonological adaptation and accommodation (Grigore, 2017).

There has been a gradual phonological adaptation of the Arabic loanwords into Turkish, in line with the Turkish linguistic features of consonant harmony and vowel harmony.

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Considering vowel harmony, this is a process by which all the vowels in words, including those that are across morpheme boundaries, tend to assimilate the word's first vowel in line to the phonological feature of backness or front. Some of the rules aligned with this requirement are that the low vowels are supposed to be unrounded, the high vowel assimilates to the immediately preceding vowel in rounding, and that the vowels tend to assimilate to the immediately preceding vowel in backness or front. As such, the vowels of the suffixes tend to be specified only for heights, implying that they vary in terms of backness/front, and the rounding is actually based on the preceding vowel from the root word. For instance, taking the following word, there is variation in the possessive and plural suffixes' vowels, in line with the preceding root vowel. The variation can be illustrated as follows; ku∫, ku∫ - lar, ku∫- lar - ɯm, which are words for bird, birds, and my birds, respectively. Even though the suffix vowels are mostly specified for height, especially with underlying low vowels "a" or "e" in the plural suffix and an underlying high vowel "w" or "I" in the possessive suffix, their backness/front varies in line with the frontness or backness in the cases of di∫ and ku∫ respectively of the root level (Grigore, 2017). Apart from the aspect of vowel harmony, there is also a consonant harmony. In this case, articulation when it comes to the consonants tends to be influenced by the backness/front of the vowels in their syllables. The back vowels lead to velar consonants, while the front syllables lead to palatal consonants. The fronting or backing of the phonemes as a result of the place of articulation of a neighboring phoneme tends to be a common phenomenon that is normally aligned with the physics of the sound articulation.

There is a case of an Arabic loanword called "idriac" which constituted a violation of the consonant harmony rules in its adopted form, as a result of the back-patterning vowel "a" occurring in the same syllable with the palatal stop "c." There is also a violation of the vowel

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harmony requirement because of the application of the possessive suffix with a front vowel. The violations were eliminated with the original palatal [c] changing to the velar [q]and the vowel of the possessive suffix [-im] changing to its high back equivalent [w] (Sofu et al., 2019). This type of change gives a good example of adaptation in which the sounds that were originally Arabic were gradually replaced with the Turkish phonemes, which were better aligned with the rules of consonant harmony and vowel harmony.

Templatic morphology, which allows for the predictable nature of word-forming, led to immense lexical borrowing from Arabic to Turkish. In this regard, anytime an Arabic word is borrowed, the chances are high that the expressions of the underlying root will also be borrowed.

This is actually unusual in most situations of natural language contact. However, it tends to be important when it comes to remembering the specifics of the speech community that tends to be responsible for the heavy borrowing of the Persian and Arabic linguistic features. Most of the scholars of Ottoman Turkey did not accidentally introduce Persian and Arabic elements into their speech as side effects of their trilingualism. However, they were purposefully importing as many aspects of the two languages as they could so that they could increase the prestige of the new official language that they had just acquired (Grigore, 2017). The familiarity of these speakers with the Arabic language and their relentless mining of language for the linguistic forms that were more prestigious explains how the expressions of a templatic root were borrowed into the Turkish language. Again, the ease with which templatic morphology allowed for every grammatic expression of the root that is formed predictably is the main reason as to why the borrowed lexical items of the Arabic origin would subsequently be more than those of the Persian origin, especially when in quantity.

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Ideally, the Arabic language is deemed to have only one lateral phoneme /l/, which is a lateral approximant lacking valorization. For instance, Grigore (2017) analyses the lateral phoneme /l/ in Arabic as having a variable place of articulation across dialects between dental and postalveolar. This can be related to the knowledge of the fact that the input variety of Arabic in the Ottoman context was Classical Arabic, but we lack more detailed information about the exact pronunciation of the phoneme /l/ in the input. More so, in the most crucial respect, it can be assumed that it must have lacked valorization because this is a non-variable property of Classical Arabic. On the same note, there exist some exceptions to the lack of valorization in the Arabic language. An example of the exceptions includes the word Allah or 'God' [alˁːaːh]. This word derivates in a situation where a so-called emphatic [lˁ] that involves valorization is used (Sofu et al., 2019). As a result of the limited use of the word, this lateral is not taken as a separate phoneme of Arabic, and it does not appear in the word-final coda. Another exception is manifested in a phonological process in Arabic called emphasis spread, in which a so-called emphatic feature can spread from one segment to nearby segments. The extent and domain of emphasis spread vary from dialect to dialect and can, in some cases, lead to an emphatic realization of the phoneme /l/ as [lˁ] (Sofu et al., 2019). Such laterals that are emphatically realized, with the valorization, are phonetically quite similar to the Turkish back allophone [ɫ].

Many Arabic and Persian words have been borrowed as Islam was embraced by the Turks. In the 19th century, the Turkish Language Society made a list of pure Turkish words. The purpose here was to start a movement of purification and simplification. After this, many loanwords were replaced by their Turkish counterparts in the literary language. The Turkish counterparts were found from the other Turkic languages. During the 19th century, the Turks started to borrow words from French, Italian ad English. Currently, various loanwords are still

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being used as much as the pure Turkish words that have been intentionally imported to the language.

There are also some fundamental differences between the Turkish and Arabic languages.

The differences may exist in terms of rules and sounds. For instance, in Arabic, there exist many "h" sounds, while such a sound is only one in Turkish. This explains why it is also hard for many Turkish people who find it hard to read the Quran. In fact, there have been cases whereby the fundamentalist Turkish Muslims claim that Turkish Muslims are supposed to learn. Arabic words because they risk making some fatal mistakes when praying in Arabic. The Arabic words which have the same consonants are related. For example, kitap means book, mektep means school, and all these words are used in Turkish, even though they are Arabic in origin. The consonants in the word kitap and k, t, p, while the consonants in the word mektep are m, k, t, p.

Mektep, which is a school, is a place where the books are read (Grigore, 2017). The relationship can be unveiled by looking at the consonants. In this case, one consonant is added. The Turkish language is normally famous for the endings, of which many foreigners get wrong. Such aspects make the Turkish language to look more unique.

When the two languages are considered from the perspective of the place of origin, the Turkish language originates from the central region of Asia, popularly known as Altaic. On the other hand, Arabic is a Semitic language, which means that its grammar and core vocabulary is different. However, it has been estimated that about 10 percent of Turkish words can be traced back to the Arabic language (Albachten, 2015). Turkish also contains many words that come from Latin and French. Although there could be more words derived from Arabic in Turkish, it may not be enough to help the Arabic speakers learn the Turkish language quickly.

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Nevertheless, the small portion of Persian and Arabic loanwords that were shared across the various socio-cultural levels of the Turkish-speaking population are the very candidates for fully borrowed lexical items. This is sufficient because these were introduced in large part to provide words for new concepts, especially the words associated with the newly adopted Islamic religion. The fact that these more widely used loanwords were among the first to be borrowed also makes it more likely that they have been incorporated into Turkish to a greater extent, as opposed to merely coexisting in a separate system alongside Turkish. There is also another crucial heuristic when it comes to determining the level of incorporation of loanwords into Turkish. The issue is whether these loans were used along with Turkish suffixes. In Turkish, which is an agglutinative language, suffixes are the primary markers of morphological information, concatenated onto the root stem with each morpheme still remaining easily distinguishable in the final product (Albachten, 2015). This is a good indication that the Arabic and Persian loans in modern Turkish have been fully incorporated into the Turkish lexicon.

However, whether these same loans were used with native Turkish suffixes during the Ottoman period is another question that has not been unveiled.

Assuming that Turkish is to do away with the foreign words, there will be the need to come up with substitute words that can be presented as legitimately Turkish. TDK has used various techniques to create and find Turkish substitutes for the outbound Persian and Arabic loanwords. These include some of the following strategies; obtaining the words found in the older, especially the pre-Ottoman and Old Ottoman texts, e.g., g ö r e n e k replacing an'an e.

Another strategy was suggesting the use of the words found in Anatolian dialects, e.g., "g öz g ü" replacing "ay na" (Albachten, 2015). Other strategies entailed introducing the words from the other Altaic and Turkish languages enlarging the semantic sphere of the Turkish words that are

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already existing. Again, the formation of the compounds with prefixes entails a morphological class that does not exist in the Turkic languages. Finally, there was the derivation of the new words by means of unproductive or productive suffixes of Turkic or the other origins. The strategies show that the creation of words ranged from the passive searches for the pre-existing words to the more creative developments of the new words or the word-formation processes.

In conclusion, the Arabic loanword adaptations into Turkish can be attributed back to historic times and have been mediated by Islamic factors such as the reading of the Quran. Codes from Arabic origin have followed different paths in the process of being incorporated into the Turkish language. There are some phonological rules, which happens to be more restrictive than others for Arabic and Turkish languages, which entails the lack of guttural stops and voiced plosives. Some of the differences between the two languages have to do with long vowels ad vowel harmony. Turkish has proved to be more tolerant when it comes to the word consonant clusters compared to Arabic. Although the influence of the Arab language on the Turkish language is approximated to be about 10%, considering the extent to which the loan words are used, there is a sense in which the influence is conspicuous; the two languages are attributable to each other. This makes it possible for an Arab to be in a better position to learn the Turkish language and vice versa.

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References Sofu, Hatice, & Çubukçu, Hatice. (2019). A note on Turkish–Arabic contact at phonological level. The International Journal of Bilingualism: Cross-disciplinary. Cross-linguistic Studies of Language Behavior, 23(4), 865-869.

Grigore, G. (2017). Fu??a Arabic Vocabulary Borrowed by Mardini Arabic via Turkish. In Approaches to the History and Dialectology of Arabic in Honor of Pierre Larcher (Vol. 88, Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, pp. 435-450).

Albachten, B. (2015). The Turkish language reform and intralingual translation. Tradition, Tension, and Translation in Turkey, edited by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Saliha Paker, and John Milton, 165-180.