Turkisms in South Slavonic Literature

Turkisms in South Slavonic Literature is a comparative analysis of Turkish loanwords in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bosnian and Bulgarian Franciscan sources. The introduction gives historical information on the Order of the Bosnian Franciscans (Bosna Srebrena), Bulgarian Catholic communities, Turkish presence in Bosnia and in Bulgaria, as well as short biographies of each of the writers whose works are analysed. The second half of the introduction deals with language background: defining the local language, phonology, and orthography. Chapter two discusses the complications regarding the chronology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The third chapter looks at nominal morphology in Bosnian and Bulgarian. Among other things, this chapter analyses why turkisms borrowed from a language where gender is not a category developed the genders that they did. Chapter four addresses the verbal morphology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. It discusses aspect, Slavonic verbal prefixes, verbal roots, and Turkish voiced suffixes. The fifth chapter focuses on adjectives and adverbs: Turkish root adjectives and adverbs, derived adverbs and adjectives, and their agreement with the nouns that they modify are discussed. The sixth chapter addresses the use of Turkish conjunctions in in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The seventh chapter looks at the motivation, semantics, and context of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The conclusion addresses how the morphology, semantics, motivation, and context of turkisms relate to their chronology in Bosnian and Bulgarian, as well as how these points differ from language to language. It also provides suggestions for further study.