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Turkish Borrowings in Macedonian
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Turkish was the most important source of vocabulary in the Macedonian language during the five centuries of Ottoman rule. Sporadic examples of the use of Turkisms in Macedonian texts can be traced back as early as the 16th century. The process of borrowing Turkish words into Macedonian reached its peak in the 19th century. For the Macedonian people, Turkish was a means of communication within the vast Ottoman Empire. This shows how prestigious Turkish was in the last century. Most of the Turkish lexemes were not only adopted into and adapted to the Macedonian language, but they became a natural and inseparable component of the colloquial and regional speech of the population. In the Ottoman period, unlike today, these words were not only readily accepted in everyday speech, but were also incorporated and sanctioned in the literary and learnèd language of religious and other written texts.

The number of Turkisms in Macedonian is estimated to be as high as 4,000 or 5,000. It should be noted straightaway, however, that not all borrowings generally labelled as 'Turkish' are ultimately Turkish in origin. The majority of the items imported via Turkish come from Arabic or Persian; a smaller number come from Greek. But while originally Arabic words like inat 'stubbornness', katran 'tar' or sandak 'chest, box', or originally Persian words like charshaf 'bed sheet', charshi'a 'market', or (h)an 'inn', can, with a fair amount of certainty, be said to have come into Macedonian via Turkish, the case with some Greek words is not so clear. Words which are inherently Greek (e.g., efendi 'sir', furna 'bakery') and have been adopted in Turkish could have found their way into Macedonian either through Greek or Turkish. Historically, the layer of Greek borrowings in the lexical stratification of Macedonian is known to be considerably older than the Turkish one, and it includes orally transmitted words covering a wider dialectal scope (daskal 'teacher', fener 'lamp', ortoma 'rope'), and a much larger number of literary words (geni 'genes', efemeria 'transience'). On the other hand, however, Greek influence in Macedonia was local, restricted to the southern Macedonian dialects and decreasing in the north, whereas Turkish influence was evenly and uniformly spread over the entire territory of Macedonia.

A large number of Turkish loan words can be referred to as Balkan Turkisms because of their existence in other Balkan languages as well, Slavonic and non-Slavonic. Besides Macedonian, other Balkan languages heavily affected by Turkish influence are Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, and, to a lesser extent, Romanian and Greek.

 
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