Multiple Relative Marking in 19th Century West Rumelian Turkish

Abstract

<p>West Rumelian Turkish (WRT) refers to the dialects of Turkish spoken in the western Balkans. It is now spoken primarily in Macedonia and Kosovo, but was previously spoken more broadly in Bosnia, Greece, Albania, and Serbia. They differ from other dialects of Turkish in that they have been heavily affected by neighboring Indo-European languages like Serbian, Albanian, Aromanian, Romani, and Greek, and have undergone many of the changes characteristic of the Balkan Sprachbund (Friedman 2003). In this paper, I present a pattern of multiply-marked relative clauses in Pulevski’s Turkish that has not been attested elsewhere in Turkic, in which relative clauses can be marked with one of six different combinations of overt participial morphology. I argue that this variation is caused by two factors: first, the fusion of the constructions {<em>ći</em> + finite verb} and {participle} into a new construction {<em>ći</em> + participle} and second, the introduction of relative marking using the interrogative ‘which’ based on models in surrounding Indo-European languages.</p>

The virtue of imperfection. Gjorgji Pulevski’s Macedonian–Albanian–Turkish dictionary (1875) as a window into historical multilingualism in the Ottoman Balkans

“…At the same time, this imperfection makes the text a valuable source concerning "the patterns of multilingualism in the Ottoman 4 The Rečnik is also one of the scarce documents for the Turkish vernacular found in the western Balkans by the end of the nineteenth century. Dombrowski (2015) provides a more detailed classification of the Turkish idiom in the Rečnik, Dombrowski (2014) focuses on of the marking of relative clauses. Both works are among the rare studies of older stages of West Rumelian Turkish.…”

“…( The Balkan Turkish pattern for relative clauses and their structural similarity to Macedonian (with the relative markers deka and što) is illustrated in (27). Note that the Turkish equivalent exhibits a mixed pattern with the relativiser ki and the non-finite form jaradtiran (see Dombrowski 2014 (Pulevski 1875: 5) Another instance of mixed strategy can be seen in ( 28). Here, the first RC 'the light which governs the day' makes use of the Turkish strategy of employing a participle (eden 'making'), the second RC has ći plus the participle eden.…”