Ebook: Ayaq yasagey! Calques based on Chinese homophones

Istanbul: Türk Dilleri Araştırmaları Dizisi: 49, 2010. — 455 - 464 s. — Trans-Turkic Studies, Festschrift in honour of Marcel Erdal.The borderlands of the provinces Qinghai and Gansu form a linguistically complex area where language communities of Turkic, Mongolic,Tibetan and Chinese stock interact. Bilingualism is common here, and as Mandarin Chinese is the dominant language, the vernacular lexica abound in loanwords and calques (loan translations) from Chinese. In the calques under consideration here, however, a vemacular word developed a secondary meaning not on semantic grounds, but based on the existence of a Chinese homophone or a near homophone with that other meaning. So far, most examples are identified in the Turkic language Western Yugur (Yellow Uygur), but some instances can be found in the Turkic language Salar and the Mongolic languages Monguor, Baoan, Kangjia, Dongxiang, and Eastern Yugur.