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Some Aspects on the Non-Slav Element in Serbo-Croat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2017

W. A. Morison
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Extract

The elements which I wish to discuss in the present paper are some of those which entered Serbo-Croat from, or at any rate through. Turkish, in the course of the centuries during which people of Serbo-Croat speech were under Turkish rule, or subject to the influence of neighbouring speakers of Turkish. I use the word “elements” because, as will appear, I am not concerned exclusively with integral words, but with suffixes and endings as well.

It is of course Turkish that provides the most important non-Slav foreign contribution to the Serbo-Croat vocabulary, and a very large and interesting contribution it is. For speakers of other Slavonic non-Balkan languages such as Polish it forms the principal stumbling-block to the acquisition of Serbo-Croat; and it might well be suggested that in the interest of inter-Slav intelligibility the total expulsion of these words from the language is to be desired.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavonic Yearbook American Series , Volume 1 , 1941 , pp. 239 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1941

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References

1 It has been suggested that it is incorrect to say that, e.g., the Serbo-Croat words čardāk (balcony, Turkish çardak) and márama (kerchief, Turkish mahrama) are of Turkish origin, since the one comes ultimately from Persian, the other from Arabic. This, however, seems to me tantamount to asserting that if some newly-discovered race acquired the word blancmange from English-speaking travellers, they would in reality be adding to their native vocabulary not the English word blancmange, but the Old French blanc-mangier. As the words discussed below entered Serbo-Croat through Turkish, in which language most of them are in fact still in use, they will in the present paper be spoken of as Turkish in origin.

2 Bruce Lockhart relates in Guns and Butter a story which illustrates Dr Prince's linguistic attainments. Speaking of him, the Albanian minister in Belgrade is reported to have remarked to his British colleague: “What a strange, what a silly people, are these Americans! They have a Turk for their minister to Yugoslavia.”

3 I shall not in all cases give forms existing in other Slavonic and Balkan languages.

4 In this the source of the Hungarian suffix -l- (e.g. ének (song), ének-el-ni (to sing), or is this one of the few cases (according to my own observations) where Turkic and Finno-Ugric present points of similarity? (Cf. T ol-mak (to be), Hungarian vol-t (he was), Finnish ol-la (to be).