A review on "Turkish Loanwords Dictionary"

This study aims to reassess the headwords included in Günay Karaağaç's Türkçe Verintiler Sözlüğü (2008) in terms of their etymology and pathways of interlingual transmission. In the research, the concept of loanwords is addressed under two categories: direct loanwords, referring to items of Turkish origin that have been identified as having passed into other languages; and indirect loanwords, referring to items that are not originally Turkish but are claimed to have been transferred into other languages through the mediating role of Turkish. In establishing this classification, the analysis was not limited to the information presented in the dictionary; instead, each headword was re-examined etymologically and verified through comparison with various etymological sources. To this end, major reference works—such as the Sir Gerard Clauson's An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish (1972), Martti Räsänen's Versuch eines etymologischen Wörterbuchs der Türksprachen (1969), Andreas Tietze's Tarihi ve Etimolojik Türkiye Türkçesi Lugatı (2002–2019), and Gerhard Doerfer's Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen. were used as primary sources, enabling a systematic determination of the origin and direction of transmission of the lexical items. The study not only classifies the existing data found in the dictionary but also identifies additional languages that fall outside the clusters examined by Karaağaç yet are marked in the dictionary without being described in the definition fields. These languages were incorporated into the analysis as well. In this regard, the thesis expands and systematizes the dictionary's data, presenting a more comprehensive and verifiable framework that reveals how Turkish has interacted with various languages throughout history within an etymological perspective. By revisiting the concept of loanwords both theoretically and practically, the research makes the network of Turkish interlingual contacts more visible and offers a complementary perspective that enhances the scholarly functionality of the dictionary. Keywords: Vocabulary, lexicography, etymology, morphology.