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E-Proceeding of the 4Th World Conference On E-PROCEEDING OF THE 6TH WORLD CONFERENCE ON INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE 2020 UTILITY OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN LOANWORDS FOR THE LEARNERS OF TURKISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE Kazuhito Uni Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Universiti Teknologi Malaysia [email protected] ABSTRACT French is one of the primary donor languages to Turkish. In this study, a vocabulary survey was conducted to propose the usefulness of frequently used French and Italian loanwords in Turkish for speakers of English, French, Italian, and Spanish learning basic Turkish. The Oxford 3000 was used as the primary reference for the 3,000 most frequently used English words, and the author analyzed the frequency of their Turkish equivalents. A total of 201 French and Italian loanwords retaining phonetic and semantic similarities with their English equivalents were identified from the study’s list of Turkish equivalents of the 3,000 most frequently used English words. For instance, similar Turkish words of Latin origin were akademik (academic), dramatik (dramatic), ekonomik (economic), and organik (organic). Similar Turkish words of Greek origin were biyoloji (biology), enerji (energy), kategori (category), sempati (sympathy), teknoloji (technology), and teori (theory). Therefore, the findings indicate that the Turkish words examined assist English, French, Italian, and Spanish speakers in learning basic Turkish vocabulary. Field of Research: English, French, Italian, Latin, similarity, Turkish ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Characteristics of Turkish Vocabulary The Turkish language belongs to the Turkic branch of the Uralic language family (Crystal, 2010). It is closely related to Azerbaijani, the national language of Azerbaijan (Johanson & Csató, 1998). The native vocabulary of Turkish and Azerbaijani is significantly different from that of Indo-European languages. Indigenous Turkish and Azerbaijani words with identical spellings include, for example, bir (one), iki (two), on (ten), and su (water). Turkish vocabulary also includes thousands of Arabic words, such as dünya (world), hava (air), and kitap (book), as more than 90% of native Turkish speakers are Muslim (Cowan, 1994). Several words of Arabic origin have also been assimilated into Hindi and Urdu, as the Mughal Empire in the northern Indian subcontinent was a Muslim-dominated regime (Richards, 1993). Many of these words, including hawā (air) and kitāb (book), have retained their original pronunciation. Among Hindi, Urdu, and Turkish vocabularies of European origin, the Hindi and Urdu words telifon (telephone) and piyāno (piano) are phonetically similar to the Turkish words telefon (telephone) and piyano (piano). The pronunciation of many Hindi and Urdu words is almost identical; however, scripts used for the two languages are different. The Devanagari script of Sanskrit origin is used for Hindi, while a type of the Arabic alphabet is employed for Urdu, mainly spoken by Muslims in Pakistan and several Indian states. Each of the two writing systems represents the cultural and religious identity of the respective communities. Loanwords shared between Turkish and several Indian languages point to the existence of close cultural and linguistic links in the past. The advantages of these linguistic similarities for language learning need to be recognized worldwide, as the international E-PROCEEDING OF THE 6TH WORLD CONFERENCE ON INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE (WCIK 2020) (e-ISBN: 978-967-0792-35-8). 27 August 2020. Copyright and published by https://worldconferences.net Page 1 E-PROCEEDING OF THE 6TH WORLD CONFERENCE ON INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE 2020 standing of India and Pakistan, where Hindi and Urdu are respectively spoken as official languages, has been increasing with rapidity (World Bank, 2018). The current Turkish alphabet includes several modified letters that accurately represent Turkish phonemes: ö and ü, for instance, vowels similar to those indicated by the German ö and ü. The Turkish letter ı represents [ɯ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), that is, a close back unrounded vowel; the letters ş and ç correspond to the English sh and ch, respectively. In addition, j and c in Turkish correspond to the French j and English j, respectively. When the Ottoman Empire ruled present-day Turkey, Turkish mainly borrowed Arabic vocabulary through Persian; the pronunciation and meaning of the majority of contemporary Turkish words of Arabic origin remain close to those of their Persian counterparts (Mace, 2003). Persian was highly regarded by educated Muslims in the Ottoman Empire as a cultural and literary language until the empire’s dissolution in 1922 (Gibb, 2014). Turkish words of Persian origin include hafta (week), renk (color), and şehir (city). The Urdu and Hindi equivalents of these words are haftā (week), rang (color), and shahr (city). This phonetic similarity between Turkish and northern Indian languages regarding Persian loanwords can be considered a common heritage that would benefit learners of Turkish, Hindi, and Urdu. 2. Difficulty in Learning Turkish as a Foreign Language One of the main linguistic obstacles in learning Turkish vocabulary for speakers of major European languages is the syntactic difference that arises from the fact that the basic word order in Turkish is subject–object–verb (S–O–V) (Göksel & Kerslake, 2011). Another difficulty stems from etymological differences, as the primary donor languages to Turkish are Arabic and Persian (Lewis, 2002). It is therefore important for speakers of European languages to focus instead on Turkish vocabulary that has been borrowed from French, English, and other European languages and retains phonetic and orthographic similarities with the vocabulary of their first language. 3. Characteristics of Turkish Culture Turkish culture has developed over approximately a millennium as an amalgamation of Hellenistic, Muslim, and modern European cultures. The former Orthodox Christian cathedral Hagia Sophia in Istanbul symbolizes ancient Greek culture (Schibille, 2014; Eastmond, 2016). Similarly, various renowned mosques from the Ottoman period, such as the Sultan Ahmed Mosque completed in 1616, maintain Muslim culture (Yeomans, 2012). The Ottoman Empire faced numerous political crises throughout its history, when the United Kingdom and Russia increased their military presence in the region (Quataert, 2005). These crises directly affected the Turkish language. The majority of Ottoman Turkish vocabulary consisted of Arabic and Persian loanwords (Buğday & Frakes, 2009). After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a new linguistic identity for the new Turkish nation needed to be created. This process ultimately led to the abolition of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, a variant of the Arabic alphabet that included several additional letters similar to those of Persian. In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first President of the Republic of Turkey, introduced a modified Latin alphabet with the aforementioned additional letters (Stone, 2010). This orthographic reform significantly facilitated vocabulary borrowing from French and other European languages, accelerating the Westernization of Turkey (Hanioğlu, 2011). Most modern Turkish words of European origin, such as asansör (elevator), telefon (telephone), televizyon (television), müze (museum), otel (hotel), and üniversite (university), were borrowed from French, which had in turn inherited many Latin and Greek vocabulary elements (Solodow, E-PROCEEDING OF THE 6TH WORLD CONFERENCE ON INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE (WCIK 2020) (e-ISBN: 978-967-0792-35-8). 27 August 2020. Copyright and published by https://worldconferences.net Page 2 E-PROCEEDING OF THE 6TH WORLD CONFERENCE ON INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE 2020 2010). Historically, France had been allied with the Ottoman Empire, which had for centuries competed with the Austrian Empire (Judson, 2016; Howard, 2017). Moreover, French was a prestigious diplomatic language, particularly in the years before the end of the First World War, in which France suffered huge losses despite being on the winning side (Price, 2014; Popkin, 2016). Modern Turkish and its Latin alphabet are a clear expression of the Westernized Turkish identity. Given present-day Turkey’s roots in the Byzantine Empire, which was based on Greek and Roman culture, the reintroduction of words of Greek or Latin origin through Italian, French, and other languages can be said to represent a rebalancing of Muslim and European elements in Turkish culture. 4. Objective This study proposes an efficient method for learning basic Turkish words borrowed from European languages based on their French and Italian equivalents. Most European loanwords in Turkish originate from Latin and ancient Greek but were borrowed via French. This method is primarily aimed at English, French, Italian, and Spanish speakers interested in learning basic Turkish. The primary references for Italian and Spanish are the Compact Oxford Italian Dictionary (Bulhosen et al., 2013) and the Compact Oxford Spanish Dictionary (Rollin et al., 2013), respectively. In this article, Greek and Russian words are transliterated in the Latin alphabet because some readers may be unfamiliar with those languages. This study does not aim to advocate European languages’ contribution to Turkish but suggests the possible benefits of the Turkish loanwords of Latin and Greek origins in learning Turkish as a foreign language. There are two primary reasons: 1. Latin and Greek loanwords
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