Elementi francesi nella terminologia marinaresca turca

As is well known, Turkish maritime terminology has been the subject of careful and in-depth study by H. & R. Kahane and A. Tietze, The Lingua Franca in the Levant, which retains its value nearly seventy years after its publication. However, this study refers only to Italian and Greek terms, which certainly made the largest contribution to the formation of the Turkish nautical vocabulary, while there were, in fact, a good number of borrowings from other languages that came to enrich Turkish usage. In the present article, we examine the contribution made by French, mainly on the basis of L. Gürçay’s Gemici Dili (1943), which remains one of the most important repertories of Turkish nautical terms. We have also added data provided by Türkçe Sözlük (TDK, 2005) and two comprehensive bilingual dictionaries, New Redhouse’s Turkish-English (1968) and Steuerwald’s Turkish-German (1972). Without claiming to be exhaustive, we believe that our short article contributes to the knowledge of Frenchisms in Turkish maritime terminology and addresses a topic worthy of further study.