Cultural borrowing - Serbian jogurt between the east and the west

Abstract

The paper offers an analysis of the cultural borrowing process of the Turkish word yoğurt ‘yogurt’ in Serbian. The study begins with the analysis of the Serbian lexical material from the 19th century, when the word jogurt was marked as an exclusively foreign word. The comparison with the present status of the meaning and usage of the word jogurt in contemporary Serbian, in which the word is part of the standard language, shows two different layers of the borrowing process: the Ottoman Turkish period and the Non-Turkish one. The most recent, Post-Ottoman borrowing layer is illustrated by the usage of jogurt as an element of a proverb that is a calque from the Turk. Sutten ağzı yanan yoğurdu (veya ayranı) ufleyerek yer (veya icer) “who gets burned by milk, blows into yogurt as well”. Aiming to present a complex process of this cultural borrowing, the data from Serbian is compared to the relevant data from other Balkan and European languages. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 178007: Etimološka istraživanja srpskog jezika i izrada Etimološkog rečnika srpskog jezika i br. 178009: Lingvistička istraživanja savremenog srpskog književnog jezika i izrada Rečnika srpskohrvatskog književnog i narodnog jezika SANU]

Keywords

• jogurt
• Serbian language
• turcism
• cultural borrowing
• phraseology