TURKISH LOANWORDS AND THEIR IMPACT IN THE ALBANIAN HOMONYMOUS LEXICAL ITEMS CORPUS

Abstract

In principle, the line separating polysemy from homonymy is clear, but in practice the criteria for identifying distinct senses can be problematic. It is not always easy to decide at which point two meanings of one polysemic word merit separate entries in the dictionary. Homonymy is often spoken of side by side with polysemy especially in traditional accounts of how meanings originate and multiply. Over and over again, words which possibly started out with one coherent meaning develop new senses; then these senses get differentiated and loose connection with one another.  The central problem we need to tackle is how homonymy is outlined in Albanian and more specifically how to analyze the entire process throughout which the homonyms appeared as a result of the historical evolution of the language system and the continuous interrelation of the Albanian and the other Indo-European languages.

Homonymy as a process represents one of the most controversial issues in modern lexicological and semantic studies because of the complexity of single lexical forms being associated with multiple distant senses. Focusing on the most crucially debated issues related to homonymy we would like to point out some basic problems such as the concept of homonymy, types of homonyms and the sources, types of homonyms and the degree of consistency, their importance and use in everyday communicative interaction. Among the most productive sources of homonymy such as disintegration (split of polysemy) and the convergent sound development we intentionally selected a very interesting way of obtaining perfectly new lexical items accidentally having the same outer form, as a result of a pure coincidence between a native word and a borrowed one. Dealing more concretely with the Albanian language homonymous corpus in term of statistic data we notice that there are about 500 homonymous pairs and lines (1050 words in total) which have been listed so far and the classification of the most important types of homonyms requires nothing but purely etymological analysis and interpretations. Based on the number of homonyms we have exploited there do namely exist three main types of direct or indirect relations, all of them lacking any possible historical and etymological trace and relation (native, native borrowed, mixed)

  Exploiting the abundant number of borrowings from Turkish we found out that the adoption and the assimilation of these loanwords has contributed in the process of enlarging the Albanian language lexicon and at the same has influenced in the enrichment of the homonymous lexical items corpus due to early contacts and as a consequence of historical, social and cultural relations between two language communities. Analyzing  Albanian and Turkish homonymous lexical items we found out many reliable means of backing up the claims we made and sustain our arguments  that  constant and frequent interactions between the given languages have contributed in sense relation and meaning development processes as well.