Loanwords in Ossetic according to V.I. Abaev’s Historical Etymological Dictionary: Preliminary remarks
Oleg Belyaev
Lomonosov Moscow State University / Institute of Linguistics RAS / Pushkin State Russian Language Institute
Abstract: In the article I attempt to conduct a quantitative analysis of data on loanwords contained in the Historical Etymological Dictionary of Ossetic by V.I. Abaev. Based on an automated query to the electronic database constructed on the basis of the dictionary, I extract all entries corresponding to WOLD meanings (https://wold.clld.org/) that are described as loanwords in their etymologies. The resulting dataset is analyzed by looking at the share of source families in the total number of loanwords, the shares of individual semantic fields and the distribution of source families within these fields. The results I have received generally confirm the previously known picture, but also lead to a number of distribution that have no satisfactory explanation and require study using a more detailed markup and a more careful analysis of each individual lexeme.
Keywords: etymology, loanwords, language contact, Ossetic, Iranian languages
For citation: Belyaev O. Loanwords in Ossetic according to V.I. Abaev’s Historical Etymological Dictionary: Preliminary remarks. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2023. Vol. 6, iss. 1. Pp. 13–26. (In Rus.) doi:10.37632/PI.2023.28.99.001