Turkisms in Pshavian and Khevsurian

(A Lexical Analysis)

Abstract

The dialectological landscape of the Georgian language is distinguished by its diversity, within which a particular place belongs to the mountain dialects, among them Pshavian and Khevsurian. Despite the relative geographical isolation of these regions, borrowings are nonetheless found among the lexical units present there. Historical processes, socio-economic ties, and relations with neighboring Caucasian peoples brought about the penetration of lexical units of Turkic origin into the dialects mentioned above.

The object of study of the present paper is Turkisms – lexical units of Turkic origin that have secured a specific place within the living speech and folklore of Pshav-Khevsureti. In the dialects under analysis, terms connected chiefly with animal husbandry and agricultural branches are found: vocabulary related to soil and to livestock-keeping. For example: q’ishi (Turk. kış) – hard ground, difficult to dig. In Khevsurian: ground left over-wintered; difficult to work. Turk. kış means „winter“; ground left over the winter is indeed difficult to work. Kechi (Turk. keçi) – „goat“; a billy-goat that leads the flock of sheep. It occurs in Mahmud al-Kashgari’s dictionary as „eçkü“; in modern Turkish, keçi: goat. Tokhli (Turk. toklu) – „a lamb between one and two years of age“. A tokhlia is a ewe that has already lambed. In Old Turkic, toklı, in Mahmud al-Kashgari’s dictionary, means „a sheep of six months“. In Sevortyan’s dictionary, it is defined as follows: „a sheep older than six months, up to one year“. The word tok in Old Turkic means „an animal without horns and without a mane“, while -lı is a noun-forming suffix. In modern Turkish, it denotes „a sheep up to two years of age“.

The analysis of Turkisms in the mountain dialects allows us to trace not only the mechanisms of linguistic borrowing but also the broader picture of historical-cultural contacts. The paper focuses attention on the following aspects: the semantic groups of Turkisms in the Pshav-Khevsurian dialects, and the phonetic and morphological transformation undergone by the borrowed words within the mountain dialects.