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Five Essays in Lexical Interaction between Spoken Arabic and Turoyo
Turoyo is a Neo-Aramaic language whose home is in the Tur Abdin region, in the south-east of contemporary Turkey. Contacts of local Aramaic varie- ties with Arabic started no later than around 650 AD. As a result, Turoyo has numerous Arabic borrowings. In the paper, we discuss the etymology of !ve Turoyo verbs: ʕbd ‘to worship’, ʕly ‘to rise up’, lbk ‘to deal with’, qfy ‘to !nd’, ʕšf ‘to weed out.’ As the reader is going to see, these !ve cases are spe- cial in more than one way and pregnant with possibilities for further re- search into the language contact in Anatolia. The data used in the paper have been taken from the Verb Glossary of Turoyo in progress, on which the present writers have been working since 2011. See FURMAN and LOESOV 2015 for the description of the project, in- cluding the corpus and the entry organization. The textual data cited in the paper are all taken verbatim from the Glossary, including our way to present individual tense-aspect forms in “boxes”. All German glosses and transla- tions below have been borrowed from the published !eld corpus, all of which is due to German scholars. For the references to text sources and other abbreviations used in the study, see a list at the end of the paper. For the moment, the Glossary includes around two thousand verbal roots. According to a preliminary etymological analysis, some six hundred roots are of Aramaic origin, some seven hundred roots are of Arabic origin, about one hundred roots are of Kurdish origin, and twenty seven roots are of Turkish origin. There are about two hundred and !fty roots of yet un- known provenance.