LVC is happening this Friday, February 3rd from 15:30-17:00 in Cobb Hall 107. Our own Darragh Winkelman will be presenting on some of his ongoing qualifying paper research. Please join us!
Ottoman Turkish Rendering of Perso-Arabic Borrowings.
Perso-Arabic borrowings are ubiquitous in many forms of Anatolian Turkish, historical and modern. While some borrowings entered gradually through familiar instances of contact, the emergence of Ottoman Turkish as a court language in the 16th and following centuries triggered an unprecedented rapid incorporation of Perso-Arabic lexemes and morphology. I argue that most of these borrowings were phonologically rendered in Ottoman Turkish through a systematic correspondence between underlying Perso-Arabic and surface Turkish phonology. Evidence for this analysis is adduced from two sources. The first is conventions of Ottoman Turkish romanization and Turkish texts from the years immediately following the adoption of the Latin script in Turkey. The second is the metrical calculus of Ottoman poetry, which is sensitive to aspects of Perso-Arabic phonology that do not appear in the expected surface representation.