The lingua Franca in the Levant. Turkish nautical terms of Italian and Greek origin.

New New English Original bdg. Dust wrapper. Large roy. 8vo. (25 x 18 cm). In English. [xiii], [3], 752 p. The lingua Franca in the Levant. Turkish nautical terms of Italian and Greek origin. The present study on the Lingua Franca in the Levant has a double purpose: the interpretation of a certain (semantically and historically well-defined) area of the Turkish vocabulary, and the demonstration, in the form of brief etymological sketches, of the linguistic-cultural unity of the Mediterranean. The study takes as its starting point the Western and Greek nautical elements in Turkish; these are illustrated as fully as possible. The end point is the Mediterranean distribution and history of each of the terms. In the gathering of the non-Turkish material the writers have paid particular attention to the Arabic, Dalmatian, and Greek cognates of the words under discussion, in order to present a more detailed picture of the Eastern (and Southern) Mediterranean than has been possible heretofore. The double orientation, at once Turkish and Mediterranean, of the study is reflected, in the composition of the group of workers and in the method followed in the elaboration of the study. Andreas Tietze, the Turkologist, collected nautical terms used in Turkish that were not, in his opinion, of Turkish origin; from these, Renée Kahane drew up a list of the terms that were, in her opinion, Italian or Greek in origin; for each term on this list Tietze gathered as abundant Turkish technical and literary records as possible; Henry Kahane and Renée Kahane outlined briefly the history of each term in the Mediterranean, trying (often in vain) to establish its ultimate origin and sketching its distribution throughout the Mediterranean, from Portugal to Greece, with Tietze adding the corresponding Arabic material.