Materials Towards an Etymological Dictionary of Kazakh (I): Arabic Loanwords in Kazakh
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
казахский всеми исследователями признан самым богатым, самым чистым среди тюркских языков …
The Kazakh language is recognized by all researchers as the richest and purest of the Turkic languages.
Platon Melioranskiy (1868-1906)
The first goal of this paper is to announce my good intention to launch a long-term project dedicated to the creation of a new work entitled An Etymological Dictionary of the Kazakh Language. The second goal is to give an overview of Arabic loanwords in the Kazakh language. Most short treatments focus on Arabic words connected with Islamic religion and civilization, such as din ‘religion’, kitap ‘book’, or mektep ‘school’. Certain basic words such as bata ‘blessing’ are also derived from Arabic (< fātiḥa ‘the opening verse of the Qur’ān’), but have changed shape and may not be immediately recognizable as a loanword from Arabic. Anyone with a deeper knowledge of Arabic will immediately recognize, based on how Arabic forms nouns from triliteral roots (such as KTB having to do with ‘to write’), that many classes of nouns in Kazakh (such as kitap ‘book’, mektep ‘school’, etc.) follow the principles of word formation in Arabic. This includes, in addition to nouns which may consist of just the consonants of the root (such as kitap), large numbers of nouns beginning in mA- and tA-, which are common prefixes used to derive simple nouns or verbal nouns from the 10 forms of verbs in Arabic. Finally, this paper will also note examples of words from Arabic which are re-analyzed falsely in Kazakh, such as mura ‘heritage’ (3s. possessive mura-sı) from mirās (< mīrāṯ which is based on the root WRṮ having to do with ‘to inherit’).
The goal of this papers (and the series of papers which will hopefully follow it) is not to reject the notion that the Kazakh language is an extremely rich language, it is indeed. But it does intend to contest the notion that Kazakh is the “purest” Turkic language, since there is no such thing as a “pure language” to begin with.