The Place that Loanwords from the Persian Language Take in the Contemporary Turkish Language

This article is dedicated to the problem of loanwords from Persian in the contemporary Turkish language. The list of Persian loanwords in Turkish that was created by Turkish Language Association was closely examined. In order to make valid conclusions 250 most frequent loanwords had been analyzed by their frequency, part of speech that they represent and semantic meaning of those words. To begin with, loanwords are important evidences of historic communication between nations. Turkish language, like any other language in the world, has a noticeable amount of borrowings in its vocabulary. Such European languages as English, French, Italian, Greek, German and such Middle Eastern languages as Arabic, Persian and Kurdish languages influenced Turkish in terms of borrowed lexemes. Furthermore, loanwords of world languages conceive a system and allocate into two categories according to the reason of their borrowing. Those are interlingual (the necessity of naming new objects; the will to avoid polysemy; etc.) and extralingual (historical interactions between peoples; superiority of one nation in a specific field; etc.) reasons. Besides pure linguistic systems, during the period of the Ottoman Empire the Turkish language borrowed massive amount of lexemes, and not only them, grammatical forms too, from Persian. Nomadic lifestyle that was natural for Turks from the beginning of their existence in the Göktürk Empire couldn’t bring their gathered tribes to the level of civilization. Thus, Turks when changing their lifestyle to a settled one with the goal of building strong and civilized country borrowed many words from the advanced Persian people. Persian became a leading language in government, literature and art for many centuries and appearance of hundreds of loanwords in Turkish vocabulary was unavoidable. Moreover, massive practical research also took place. The list of the Persian loanwords in the Turkish language that was constructed by the Turkish Language Association was taken as the main material of the research. The Turkish National Corpus which was chosen according to its relevance (the corpus was updated in 2013; the texts it uses were written between 1990 and 2013; 2 % of its texts are transcribed conversations) was the main instrument of the held research. Using corpus, 1082 words from the list were evaluated in terms of the frequency variable. Next step was choosing 250 most used words to run a deeper study over them. Each word was translated and separated to categories according to the part of the speech and its semantic meaning. After calculating the data, it turned out that in terms of the number of words “noun” was at the first place, yet according to the average frequency “conjunctions” had highest numbers. In terms of meaning such categories as “Government, economics”, “Religion” and “Time, measures” were influenced the most by the Persian loanwords. To sum up, taking Persian people as an example of creating a civilized settled country, Turks borrowed many words from them. Nevertheless, Atatürk’s reforms against Persian and Arabic words that were implemented at the beginning of the 20th century influenced language a lot, loanwords still remain there until now. Such parts of speech as “conjunctions” and “adverbs” lead in terms of frequency. However, when talking about fields of usage such categories as “Government, economics”, “Religion” and “Time, measures” were the ones Turks learned about or improved at the most with the help of Persian people and that are still used today actively.