Italianisms in Turkish transcription texts. A piece of historical-lexicographical research.
Several studies on Italian elements in Turkish have been published so far, the first ones dating back to the end of the 19th century. Most of them, however, simply present lists of words, possibly accompanied by some etymological discussion, without considering the historical dimension. This paper, instead, aims to research on Italianisms in Turkish from the historical-lexicographical viewpoint, taking into account the category of the so-called transcription texts, namely texts written in scripts different from the traditional Arabic-Ottoman one. Such texts not only usually allow a better examination of phonetic features of words but also often supply invaluable lexical data. Our research is based upon the material provided by 32 Turkish texts written in Latin script, ranging from the 16th to the 18th century. The structure of the entries is as follows: the Italian etymon, the Turkish data in chronological order (each with its date of occurrence) and, if opportune, a short commentary.
