Volume III Special Issue VIII August 2023

Name of Author : Aaya Ibrahim Mohammed Alqasaab, Prof. Jagdesh Joshi

Title of the paper : Words That Share Similar Meaning and Near Close Pronunciation in Turkish and Arabic

Abstract: Turkish is a member of the Turkic language group and belongs to the larger Altaic family. It is one of the most dominant strains of Turkic languages and boasts about 70 million native world wide speakers across a wide terrain spanning from Turkey, Cyprus, and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East where along with Gagauz, Azerbaijani sometimes called Azeri, Turkmen, and Khorāsān Turkic, it forms the southwestern, or Oğuz, branch of the Turkic languages. Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1998Hendrik Boeschoten, 2006 Mijwel too concurs with this dateline pointing out that “The Turkish language, of very ancient origins, can be traced back to the Ural-Altaic family, and with 71.5 million native speakers and 125 million total of Turkish speakers it is widespread in several states and areas of the world. Spoken in Turkey and by minorities from 35 other countries, it is used in states such as Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece, the northern part of Cyprus, Macedonia, Romania and Uzbekistan.” Mijwel, 2018The wide spread of Turkish can be attributed to Turkic expansion in the Early Middle Ages 500-1000 AD when the speakers of Turkish migrated across a vast region that stretched from Siberia and was bound off by Europe and the Mediterranean. Oghuz, widely accepted to be the ancestor of modern Turkish. During the Ottoman period, however, Ottoman Turkish - a different version of Arabic was spoken which borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian, and required about nearly five hundred separate Arabic characters that hampered its accessibility and outreach. The modern Turkish therefore settled on 29 characters simplifying and broadening the linguistic base, thereof.Wood, 1929, p. 194 The paper seeks to trace the transformation from Ottoman Turkish to Modern Turkish, seeking to understand the causes, and contexts in which the transformation took place, in order to expound on a comparison of Turkish and Arabic, and evolve a compendium of words which are spelled and pronounced the same in both.

Keywords : Turkish and Arabic_ Pronunciation_Ottmoman_Period

DOI :

Page Number : 68-73