Origins of Turkish vocabulary from 1931 - 1965

Friday, September 19, 2008

Origin of Turkish vocabulary in 2005.

I just noticed that the German Wikipedia has more information on this than in English. It has the following table showing the origin of Turkish words over the years:

Year Turkish
words
Arabic
words
Persian
words
Other
words
Ottoman
words
1931 35,0 % 51,0 % 2,0 % 6,0 % 6,0 %
1933 44,0 % 45,0 % 2,0 % 4,0 % 5,0 %
1936 48,0 % 39,0 % 3,0 % 5,0 % 5,0 %
1941 48,0 % 40,0 % 3,0 % 4,0 % 5,0 %
1946 57,0 % 28,0 % 3,0 % 7,0 % 5,0 %
1951 51,0 % 35,0 % 3,0 % 6,0 % 5,0 %
1956 51,0 % 35,5 % 2,0 % 7,5 % 4,0 %
1961 56,0 % 30,5 % 3,0 % 6,0 % 4,5 %
1965 60,5 % 26,0 % 1,0 % 8,5 % 4,0 %

I then turned them into this graph:


That's only until 1965, but luckily we also have the current number for 2005 to compare. Now a total of 14% of Turkish words are of foreign origin, so from 1965 over 40 years the ratio of Turkish words in Turkish has gone from 60.5% to 86%. Arabic is around 6%, Persian at a bit over 1%, Ottoman not sure, and the rest makes 7%.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hmmm... interesting. Considering that, should "purity" be encouraged? What do you think?

Me said...

I think it's a good thing in Turkish because when learning the language loanwords are more irregular to use. The word saat (hour) for example would seem to have the plural in -lar because the vowel before it is an a, but because it's from Arabic (or Persian, or Arabic through Persian, don't remember) it's a long a which corresponds to a Turkish e so the plural is -ler. I've heard people say that the Persian loanwords sound nicer but as a person not from the region I think the pure Turkish words are cooler and suit the language more.

Antonielly said...

Hmmm... interesting. Considering that, should "purity" be encouraged? What do you think?

Mithridates said...

I think it's a good thing in Turkish because when learning the language loanwords are more irregular to use. The word saat (hour) for example would seem to have the plural in -lar because the vowel before it is an a, but because it's from Arabic (or Persian, or Arabic through Persian, don't remember) it's a long a which corresponds to a Turkish e so the plural is -ler. I've heard people say that the Persian loanwords sound nicer but as a person not from the region I think the pure Turkish words are cooler and suit the language more.

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