The work offers a detailed analysis of Anglo-Turkic cultural and linguistic relations as reflected in English vocabulary between the 16th and early 20th centuries. Words attested in historical English texts for which a Turkic language acted as an etymological link have not yet received a monograph treatment and the information to be found in etymological dictionaries of English is usually hardly adequate. The aim of the current book is to rectify this situation.
The main part of the study is an etymological dictionary of 106 lexical items related to material culture that were adopted from Turkic or via Turkic, whether directly or not. For each entry a chronological list of orthographic variants is provided, followed by a summary of information on the word’s etymology to be found in selected etymological dictionaries of English. A critical survey of these is the point of departure for the author’s own commentary. Through careful analysis of contexts in which the new lexical items came to be used in English as well as a thorough scrutiny of their formal features the author reconstructs the transmission routes along which the vocabulary in question was transmitted into English.
Mateusz Urban (born 1982) is an assistant lecturer at the Institute of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His main interests lie in historical linguistics, language contact as well as phonetics and phonology. He holds a PhD degree in Linguistics (2013) from the Jagiellonian University