Please join us for the fourth winter meeting of LVC this Friday at 3:30pm on zoom (link will be sent out on the day). Darragh Winkelman will present work from his first QP on Perso-Arabic structures in Ottoman Turkish. Abstract and title are provided below.
Perso-Arabic borrowings in Ottoman Turkish
Ottoman Turkish, a sociolect of Anatolian Turkish that borrowed extensively from Persian and Arabic, presents a unique case study for researchers of contact linguistics. I propose that Middle (15-16th century) Ottoman Turkish can be situated at an intermediate point within a continuum whose two extremes are mixed languages at one end and unconventionalized code-mixing on the other. Based on morphosyntactic and phonological evidence from Talikizade’s Şehname-i Hümâyûn, I propose that despite broad similarities with both code-mixing and mixed languages, Middle Ottoman Turkish differs crucially from each. While Middle Ottoman incorporates Perso-Arabic material in a manner consistent with insertion models of code-mixing, the constraints on the kinds of structures that can be productively incorporated exceed the canonical case. However, Middle Ottoman differs too from mixed languages. Unlike mixed languages, Middle Ottoman maintains a Turkic/Non-Turkic dichotomy with morphosyntactic consequences. Furthermore, rather than Perso-Arabic structures replacing native Turkic equivalents, these co-exist with one another, often within the same clause.