Abstract
This study investigates the phonological and morphological adaptation of Turkish loanwords of Arabic origin to reveal aspects of native speakers’ knowledge that are not necessarily obvious. It accounts for numerous modification processes that these loanwords undergo when borrowed into Turkish. To achieve this, a corpus of 250 Turkish loanwords was collected and analyzed whereby these loanwords were compared to their Arabic counterparts to reveal phonological processes that Turkish followed to adapt them. Also, it tackles the treatment of morphological markings and compound forms in Turkish loanwords. The results show that adaptation processes are mostly phonological, albeit informed by phonetics and other linguistic factors. It is shown that the adaptation processes are geared towards unmarkedness in that faithfulness to the source input—Arabic—is violated, taking the burden to satisfy Turkish phonological constraints. Turkish loanwords of Arabic origin undergo a number of phonological processes, e.g., substitution, deletion, degemination, vowel harmony, and epenthesis for the purpose of repairing the ill-formedness. The Arabic feminine singular and plural morphemes are treated as part of the root, with fossilized functions of such markers. Also, compound forms are fused and word class is changed to fit the syntactic structure of Turkish. Such loanwords help pave the way to invoke latent native Turkish linguistic constraints.
Highlights
Narrowing borrowing down to the lexical level, one can speak of a loanword when it has been transferred into a language (Wohlgemuth, 2009, p. 55)
It deals with some of the phonological processes that are applied to Turkish loanwords of Arabic origin in order not to violate the structural constraints of Turkish
Turkish loanwords originating from Arabic apply such a rule mostly where we find modified forms to conform to this rule
Summary
Narrowing borrowing down to the lexical level, one can speak of a loanword when it has been transferred into a language (Wohlgemuth, 2009, p. 55). This study examines one of the emblems of language contact and linguistic interference, namely the use of loanwords It deals with some of the phonological processes that are applied to Turkish loanwords of Arabic origin in order not to violate the structural constraints of Turkish. Vol 10, No 5; 2020 harmony, and epenthesis, the treatment of the feminine singular and plural markers, which contain lexemes together with their grammatical morphemes, resulting in lexical items with fossilized functions of their grammatical morphemes, i.e., fossilized morphology, i.e., loanwords integrated need not always be uninflected as they are taken as unanalyzable chunks It investigates compound forms fused with word-class change to fit the syntactic structure of Turkish.
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