Extract

The Turkic languages, which include Tatar and Turkish, have not been major lexical donors to English: Turkish ranks thirtieth in the best available list of donor languages, just below Hawaiian and Scottish Gaelic and just above Welsh and Norwegian (Durkin 2014: 27). However, a number of loanwords in the transmission of which they have played a part occur at high frequency, for instance turban, coffee, and yogurt. Material from the Turkic languages is therefore handled in all English dictionaries with an etymological component. Since etymologists of English have not usually had a Turcological background, and since histories of transmission which involve the Turkic languages are often very complex, different dictionaries have shown different degrees of expertise in their handling of this material, and have come to different conclusions about it in individual cases. Hence Mateusz Urban’s study, a lightly revised version of his Kraków PhD thesis, which brings Turcological expertise to bear on an examination of the etymologies in a series of English dictionaries from Wedgwood (1859-67) to OED3 (2000- ).

You do not currently have access to this article.