General remarks

It is a well-known fact that language contact leads to adoption of some elements of lexicon and structure of a language into another. Since the influence of Turkish on Polish resulted in the adoption of Turkish lexical units by Polish, Polish studies concentrated on loanwords. Although the definition of the loanword is simple and does not seem to raise problems, in practice the researcher is often faced with the difficulty if a lexical unit is the loanword or not. The first problem to be solved is the border between the loanword and the foreign word. The loanword mostly designates a word taken from another language and at least partly adapted or naturalized, whereas the foreign word retains its foreignness. It is true that some authors do not distinguish these two types of borrowed words, e.g. in Crystal's dictionary (1991: 205) the loan is defined as “a linguistic unit (usually a lexical item) which has come to be used in a language or dialect other than the one where it originated” in a general way and there is no entry like the foreign word at all. Until this question is not solved, the researcher has to pick up all Turkic words from the documents which suggest that these words were used. At this point another problem arises, namely what is real use and what is just occasional record of a word. Unfortunately, from written documents it is not always clear whether a Turkic word was of common use, appeared in literature for fashion, orientalization, an author's own taste, was part of special lexicon, or just a quoted word. In my opinion it is not correct to quote foreign words from modern or 20th-century encyclopedias in a dictionary of loanwords, as Turek does in his dictionary of the Arabic loanwords in Polish, e.g. fikh ‘Muslim canonical jurisprudence’ (Turek 2001: 198). It is absolutely clear that fikh in Turek's dictionary is just a foreign encyclopedic term and not a loanword.

This problem does not only apply to modern or relatively recent documents, but also to former texts. It seems that the criterion of selection of the documents in which we can speak of loanwords is not well defined and consistently used by the researchers.