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The etymology of ‘king’ in Soviet Turkic languages*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

P. M. Austin
P. M. Austin*
Affiliation:
Brock University
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Extract

In the modern turkic languages there are three words for a non-Muslim, European monarch: kral, kiral, korol. Obviously these words have the same common origin. This paper is an attempt at an explanation of the etymology of the last.

Kral is the term for “king” common to all the South Slavic languages. Although it is not attested in the canon of Old Church Slavonic, it must have been borrowed early enough from the Prankish root karl—that is, Charlemagne—to allow it to undergo the changes common to all roots of the type TorT. The language known as Turkish or Osmanli borrowed this root from the conquered Balkan Slavs to denote a non-Muslim monarch.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Fall 1967 , pp. 34 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1967

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Professor David Huntley of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, for his useful suggestions in the preparation of this article and also Professor Fahir lz of the University of Istanbul, Visiting Professor of Turkish at the University of Toronto, 1966-67, who read the article before its publication.

References

1 For a definition of this canon, see Lunt, H. G., Old Church Slavonic Grammar (The Hague, 1963), pp. 6-8 Google Scholar.

2 Czech král, Polish król, Serbo-Croatian kralj, Bulgarian kral, Russian korol. For a brief explanation of this feature, see Brückner, A., Slownik etymologiczny jçzyka polskiego (Warsaw, 1957), p. 269 Google Scholar and Machek, V., Etymologický slovník jazy ka českého a slovenského (Prague, 1957), pp. 231-32 Google Scholar.

3 L. Swift, A Reference Grammar of Modern Turkish (The Hague, 1963), p. 19.

4 For a discussion of original borrowings and later phonemic changes, see Hockett, C., A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1963), pp. 408ff Google Scholar.

5 Cf. : tren~tiren;spor~ispor; Swift, p. 19.

6 Radlov, V. V., Versuch eines Wörterbuchs der Türkdialekte, vol. 2, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1899), p. 738 Google Scholar. The latter is probably more correctly Karai as the Hebrew script is used.

7 For example: kurunuvusta (kurun ‘ages’ plus vusta ‘middle’ from Arabic gurūn wastā) ‘Middle Ages’ was replaced by the Turkish ortaçağ (orta ‘middle’ plus çağ ‘age’).

8 See Weinreich, U., “The Russification of Soviet Minority Languages,” Problems of Communism 6, 2 (1953), pp. 46-57 Google Scholar. Weinreich traces the various phases in the development of the minority languages from the Revolution to Stalin’s death.

9 Weinreich, p. 52.

10 Kenesbaev, S., “Progressivnoe vliianie russkogo iazyka na kazakhskii” (“The progressive influence of the Russian language on Kazakh”),in Progressivnoe vliianie russkogo iazyka na kazakhskii (“The Progressive Influence of the Russian Language on Kazakh” (Alma-Ata, Kazakh S.S.R., 1965), p. 13 Google Scholar.

11 Kenesbaev, p. 17.

12 See note 2.

13 In Kazakhstan more than half of published works are translations from Russian; see Kenesbaev, p. 13.

14 Weinreich, p. 51.