Thesis

This dissertation analyses when, how and why Turkish loanwords became incorporated into Bosnian and Bulgarian, as seen in the writings of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bosnian and Bulgarian Franciscans. I analyse Bosnian works (religious and secular) by Matija Divković, Ivan Bandulavić, Pavo Posilović Mošunjanin, Mihovil Radnić, Stjepan Margitić Markovac, Lovro Bračuljević, Filip Lastrić, Nikola Marčinkušić Lašvanin, Marko Dobretić, Bono Benić, and Grgo Ilijić-Varešanin. As a Bulgarian counterpart, I analyse three eighteenth-century Bulgarian Franciscan manuscripts and the works of Petar Bogdan Bakšić and Filip Stanislavov.

The dissertation consists of eight chapters. The first chapter gives background information on Turkish presence in Bosnia and Bulgaria, the history of the Franciscans in Bosnia and Bulgaria, short biographies of each of the writers whose works are analysed, phonology and orthography. The second chapter focuses on the complications regarding establishing earliest attestations for turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The third chapter discusses the nominal morphology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. This chapter analyses why turkisms developed the gender that they did when borrowed from a language that does not have gender as a category. Chapter four addresses the verbal morphology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. Verbal prefixes are discussed in detail, as are Turkish voiced suffixes in Bulgarian. The fifth chapter analyses adjectives and adverbs, with focus on gender and number agreement. The sixth chapter addresses the use of Turkish conjunctions. The seventh chapter looks at the motivation, semantics and setting of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The conclusion addresses how morphology, semantics, motivation and setting of turkisms relate to their chronology in Bosnian and Bulgarian and how these areas differ from language to language.