Medical terms borrowed from Arabic to Turkish: An assessment of phonetic changes and semantic relationships

Abstract

Information transfer occurs between societies for various reasons, mostly political and social relations such as migration, war and trade. Instead of giving a name to the innovations learned during this transfer, sometimes the source language's words are borrowed in the target language. Language is one of the most critical factors influenced by Turkish-Arab relations, which have a history of nearly fourteen centuries. During this period, word translations occurred in many fields, from Turkish to Arabic and from Arabic to Turkish. One of these fields is medicine, where the Arabic language has been dominant for a long time in Islamic civilization. It is seen that many Arabic medical terms are used in Turkish, as they have been influenced by the works and practices of many medical scholars in the Arab world. In this study, medical words that passed from Arabic to Turkish were determined. These words were examined in terms of phonetic events and semantic, and the effect of Arabic on Turkish medical terminology was revealed.