Aspects of early Chinese global lexical copies surviving in Modern Uyghur

Abstract

The Modern Uyghur language has a large number of lexemes copied from Chinese in different periods of Uyghur. Amongst them, there is a special group of lexemes globally copied from Chinese first into the Old Uyghur literary language which is documented in the texts written in various scripts from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Some of these global lexical copies were transmitted to the next stages of Uyghur and are established in Modern Uyghur as part of its lexicon. This paper discusses aspects of this special group of lexemes from the four points, semantic reinterpretation, fusion in form and meaning, multiple copying of the same lexeme, and additions to the lexicon. The aim is to illustrate some important aspects of the historical Sino-Uyghur linguistic and cultural contact reflected in these copies and to provide Uyghur examples to understand aspects of diachronic development of copied lexemes in the recipient language.