Turkic Loanwords in Ukrainian: Possible Historical Circumstances of Borrowing

In Ukrainian, a number of words are of Turkic origin, having arrived from different sources via Turkic languages (such as майдан ‘square’, via an unknown Turkic language from Persian mejdan ‘square, arena’ or Arabic maydan ‘distance, extent, place to play games’; Melnychuk 1989 p.361) or directly tracing back to a Turkic source (such as сагайдак ‘a wooden arrow case’; Grytsenko et. al. 2020 p.452). While contact between Slavic and Turkic speakers is an accepted phenomenon in historical linguistics (Smal-Stocky 1963), the historical conditions this contact occurred in are often glossed over. Exactly how might a term have entered Ukrainian through Turkic? What might the thematic grouping of loanwords suggest about conditions of borrowing?

In this paper, I seek to do more digging into the possible ways that Turkic words entered Ukrainian, looking at socio-political factors such as trade links, military engagements, diplomacy between states and migration/settlement patterns, alongside historical technologies, agriculture and the material environment. I will move chronologically through different periods of language contact, concentrating mainly on borrowings in Old Ukrainian (also called Ruthenian; Bunčić 2015) from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Based on the evidence available to me (see Grytsenko et. al. 2020, Vasylyuk 2017), I divide Turkic loanwords into trade-based and military-based vocabularies. I suggest the first category entered Ukrainian mainly through trade in luxury goods (along with diplomatic connections) while the second arrived via warfare and population mixing in areas of Cossack control or Turkic habitation.

However, a number of loanwords - including household items, plant names and foods - appear to fall outside of this dichotomy. Specialised historical knowledge of ecology, agriculture and the material world in Ukraine would be needed to determine the context of these borrowings. Although this knowledge likely exists, it evidently has not been applied to loan etymologies or translated into English. English resources on Turkic-Slavic language contact overall are quite lacking, making this an area of linguistics in need of more attention and collaboration.

References:

Bunčić, D. (2015). On the dialectal basis of the Ruthenian literary language.

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Grytsenko, S., Medynska, N., & Dudko, I. (2020). Turkism as a Marker of the Ukrainian

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Melnychuk, O. C. (1989). Етимологічний словник української мови [Etymological Dictionary

of the Ukrainian Language] (in Ukrainian), part 3 (Kora - M), Kyiv: O. O. Potebny Institute of Linguistics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Smal-Stocky, R. (1963). History of the Ukrainian Language In Ukraine: A Concise

Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 490–500.

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