Chulym Turkic is still one of the lesser known and researched Turkic languages. Having said that, in the case of Middle Chulym several studies have been published in the last few years. Since Küärik lexical material is included in Radloff’s dictionary, the least attested is Lower Chulym: this can only be found in various works by Duĺzon, which are frequently difficult to obtain. In this discussion a short text which was originally published by Duĺzon in an article from 1952 is reproduced, after which a linguistic analysis is undertaken to determine the accuracy of Duĺzon’s translation. The text is interesting from both a linguistic and ethnographic perspective: it documents e.g. the use of the past tense in -AďigAn which is barely attested in Turkic languages. It also describes the funeral rites of Chulym Turks after their conversion to Christianity.

Although the earliest Turkisms that entered Arabic go back to the 9th century – when the Arabs began establishing regular contact with speakers of Turkic languages – a significant number of Turkish loans in both written and spoken Arabic only date from the time of the Ottoman Empire, which in the course of its expansion conquered and for centuries ruled a large part of the Arab world. This paper aims to examine the words of Turkish origin found in the dialects spoken in Egypt and parts of the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine), i.e. the Arabophone regions that have been most exposed to Turkish influence for historical and cultural reasons. It has also been endeavoured to provide information about the etymology of the Ottoman-Turkish words (interestingly, as some of these come from Arabic, the Egyptian, Syrian, etc. words borrowed actually prove to be backborrowings).

Perceptual etymology is a new term which is introduced here to refer to an anthropological rather than a purely linguistic interpretation of the origins of words. This author tries to show in what way different aspects of our understanding of etymology can be combined to create a coherent and possibly full image of a word.

‘Whore barley’ is an English translation of a Croatian syntagm adduced in Evliya Çelebi’s itinerary. This author, intrigued by the apparently senseless expression, tries to explain its meaning.