Greek elements in Turkish argot

Abstract

Argot is a sub-/ secret language of socially marginalized groups deviating from the standard language due to its unique – constantly renewed – vocabulary, making use mostly of conventional or metaphorical words and expressions from commonly spoken languages along with borrowings from foreign ones, in order to preserve its non-comprehensible meaning. Its main characteristic is the semantic-shifting. The Turkish argot, possibly originating in the 17th century, developed mainly in Istanbul. Apart from Turkish, it embraces words from other languages including Greek loans belonging to the older layer of its vocabulary.
The main focus of this paper is on Turkish-Greek loan-blends. Analysing the entries of three dictionaries (Aktunç 2000, Devellioğlu 1990 and Püsküllüoğlu 1996) an adequate amount of verbal expressions has been found which consists of Greek lexemes accompanied by a Turkish verb and of Greek lexemes morphologically adapted by the addition of Turkish derivative verbal suffixes. The analysis of the verbal expressions exposed to semantic changes has shown that the factors affecting the semantic shifting are simple semantic amplification, comparison in function and aetiology, comparison in form or sound, metonymy, metaphor, irony, stereotypes, and phraseology. To determine which word was borrowed from which language into argot is not always an easily solvable question. Even if the origin of a word is Greek, one often deals with the question: Is it borrowed from Greek directly into argot or from standard Turkish, or from another European language? In this paper some of the problematic cases are presented with the intention to raise relevant questions, but also to bring them forward for further research on this issue.