Prolegomena zu einer Untersuchung der osmanischen und türkischen Elemente im Amharischen

Abstract

Although African territories constituted, for instance in the 19 th c., nearly a half of the empire, little attention has been paid to the Turkic and other Turkic influences (e.g. the Mamluk-Kipchak ones) in that particular region, and if any, then rather their influence on the Arabic dialects and rarely on Swahili. Yet, it appears to be a very rewarding area of study, as is for instance indicated by the fact that, among others, one can come across mixed Arabic-African languages in Africa, but with a Turkic name, e.g. Turki ~ Turku in Chad or Bimbasi-Arabic (< Osm. binbasi ‘major') in southern Sudan and in northern Uganda. The present paper reports on the author's work on the influence of the Turkic languages on the Amharic language. The results of these studies have at present a partly working character, as this is the first work in the world devoted to this subject. Among others, the author discusses the following issues: [1] the history of Ottoman-Amharic contacts; [2] the problems with defining the concept of the Ottoman Turkic word; [3] the possible ways in which Turkic vocabulary penetrated the Amharic language; [4] the principles of collecting the lexical material – altogether ca. 300 items – both from the printed sources and the field work in Ethiopia; [5] the division into semantic categories according to the model by A. Kannisto (1925) and a commentary to the obtained results.