The treatment of Turkish/Turkic etymologies in the OED: Presented at Etymology 1 session

Turkic is a language family that comprises a large number of languages including Modern Turkish as well as Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrghyz, Tatar, Bashkir, New Uyghur and many others.Language contact between English and Turkic has been of varying character and extent, but throughout the centuries English etymologists have noted a number of words that may be traced to Turkic at some of point of their history. The words involved constitute a considerable mixture in terms of their transmission routes: some of them come directly from Turkic (most frequently Ottoman Turkish) while others have been transmitted through a mediating language. Still others ultimately derive from another language, e.g. Arabic or Persian, with a Turkic language (again, most typically Ottoman Turkish) acting as one of the transmitters.What these words have common is the fact that they lack systematic analysis and their treatment in English etymological lexicography is insufficient and sometimes erroneous from the point of view of their history.The current paper provides a preliminary survey of the mistakes and inconsistencies found in the treatment of Turkic words in English etymological lexicography, with special reference to the OED.This conference paper is not available in ORA