Kata pinjaman Arab dalam bahasa Turki moden dan bahasa Melayu: Pengekalan dan anjakan semantik dalam bidang agama dan pentadbiran

[Arabic loanwords in modern Turkish and Malay: Semantic retention and shift in religious and administrative domains]

Abstract

Arabic loanwords constitute one of the most significant lexical strata in Turkish, arising from prolonged contact with Islamic civilisation from the Abbasid era through the height of the Ottoman Empire. The 1928 alphabet reform (Harf Devrimi) and the language reform movement (Öztürkçe) are commonly assumed to have severed this influence, yet the assumption has not been systematically tested through comparison across recipient languages. This study identifies the degree of semantic retention of Arabic loanwords in the religious and administrative domains of the modern Turkish lexicon relative to Malay, examines the underlying mechanisms of phonological and orthographic adaptation, and formulates patterns of semantic shift bearing on translation and language teaching. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive design using contrastive content analysis of 60 lexical items selected through purposive sampling from the Güncel Türkçe Sözlük maintained by the Türk Dil Kurumu and the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka database, with Al-Mu'jam al-Wasit serving as the anchor reference for source meanings and Nisanyan Sözlük as a source of etymological triangulation. The findings show that 44 of the 60 items retain their source meaning while 16 have shifted. Retention displays a clear domain-based pattern: 34 of 37 religious-domain items are retained, against only 3 of 10 administrative-domain items, with 13 cross-domain items occupying an intermediate position. Comparison with Malay indicates that Malay loan forms remain consistently closer to their Arabic source forms than the corresponding Turkish forms, consistent with several phonotactic constraints operating in Turkish that have no counterpart in Malay. Two high-risk pairs for translators are identified: Millet/Milat as true false cognates and Emanet/Amanah as genuine cognates that have diverged. This pattern aligns with Haugen (1950) and Matras (2009) in indicating that lexical items carrying a high cultural-sacral load occupy the most stable position in the borrowability hierarchy. The study contributes an Arabic-Turkis-Malay lexical mapping for these domains, together with practical guidance for translators and language teachers on potential positive transfer and semantic pitfalls in shared vocabulary.