Influences with and from Arabic and Persian
Kütüphaneci, the word for librarian, is my favorite word that I’ve learned so far in Turkish. It’s my favorite word not because of its meaning - although I do appreciate a good library - but rather because of its etymology. The word has three distinct morphemes: kütüp, hane, and ci each of which comes from a different language, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish historically. The first morpheme, kütüp, is a Turkicized Arabic word, originally kutub, which means books. The singular form, kitāb, is much more familiar in Turkish: kitap The second morpheme, hane, comes from xāne, a Persian word meaning house. Xāne is suffixed to other nouns turning the word into a type of location or building, e.g. āšpazxāne for kitchen (āšpaz means cook) or golxāne for greenhouse (gol means flower). These two words are combined to form kütüphane, which is the word for library. Then the last morpheme is added; ci iis a native Turkish suffix used similarly to how English might use “er” to form a word meaning someone who does something for a profession (e.g. work -> worker, sell -> seller). This forms a word which means “books-house-er”or librarian.
What I found interesting is that it seems like kütüphane was derived in Turkish from roots that were already in use and productive in Turkish rather than an individual word borrowed from Persian or Arabic, despite its two composite elements stemming from these languages. I admit, this is more speculation on my part rather than sound linguistic science. The two morphemes undergo what seem to be regular Arabic to Turkish and Persian to Turkish sound changes, namely final consonant devoicing and fronting vowel sounds to get kütüp from kutub and “softening” the velar fricative in xāne to form hane. The fact that these changes occurred in the words (especially the consonant devoicing in kütüp) makes me think that they existed as words in Ottoman Turkish before being combined rather than direct borrowing from Persian and Arabic. Furthermore, the Persian equivalent “kitābxāne” is formed from the singular Arabic (kitāb not kutup).
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